Still though, it was worth it. Satisfying to pause and measure their progress by the growing load in the truck bed. As much as his limbs and back burned, it was good to be reminded of the intricate machinery of tissue and tendons concealed by his skin. On each trip from back to front, and then front to back again, the huge Tudor house’s shade was a cool, numbing balm. Clomping back to the shorefront with an empty barrow, he paused at the side of the guesthouse, twisted the garden hose spigot. The water was icy down his throat, magical over his scalp and shoulders. He took off and soaked his T-shirt, then hooked the cold, sopping rag around his neck. Before spitting into his palms and regripping the barrow handles, he grazed the outline of the cash in his front pocket. In one day he’d made more than two weeks’ worth of after-school shifts at the supermarket. Al had even managed to wring out an extra Benny on top of the advertised five hundred dollars. The Lexus, a hybrid, parked in the three-car garage had given him an idea. He’d told the homeowners that, for a small disposal fee, they could have the buckthorn debris processed at an all-green landfill for sustainable composting. The homeowners had fallen for it, and now the pile was bound for the first abandoned lot he and Henry came across on their forty-minute drive back west.

One hundred dollars for an eased conscience. Even if Henry was ever making the sort of money that would enable him to cough up a hundred bucks without a moment’s thought, no way would he piss it away on garbage. Such casual extravagance was beyond him, as unfathomable as what lay inside this mansion beside him. The structure was more fortress than home, daunting in both size and design. Something unsettling about the asymmetrical arrangement of steep, pitched gable roofs and the lone conical spire stabbing into the sky, which he imagined provided vistas ideal for brooding over world domination while petting a wrinkly, hairless cat. Pressed into the khaki stucco was a pattern of exposed timbers forming X’s, as if warding off outsiders, peasants. This house, along with all the others down the shoreline street, stood in audacious contrast to the dwellings just one town back west, never mind the relative huts in Henry’s hometown. What on earth could these people have done to afford houses like these?