Scully drew back a chair at the table and seated himself to watch Jamie work. Scully in his rusted black trousers and white shirt and black jacket, his derby hat off his head on the table, one ankle over the other knee, his elbows out from his sides as his hands fiddled together on the tabletop. Bringing to mind a great awkward bird. With his hat off his thin hair invisible across the dome of his head, his skin stretched tight, a color like the crust on butter left too long in the air. From the folds of his coat he drew out a pint bottle without a label, stoppered with a cork and set it on the table. Lighted a cigarette. Drew hard upon it and coughed and drew again. Jamie thought There’s me, thirty—forty years I don’t watch it.

“Once you get it neatened you got yourself a problem. You can either scamper around trying to keep it all just as it was or you can watch it slowly pile up and fall over itself again. Either way, it’s not a pretty thing.”

“It’s summertime,” Jamie said. “A house needs a good cleaning once a year.”

“Spring cleaning is what you’re talking about.”

“I guess the spring got away from me then.” Jamie sat back on his haunches, let go of the brush and leaned against the cupboards. His hands were swollen and sore from the lye soap. “How long’d you know she was leaving?”

Scully shook his head. Uncorked the whiskey but didn’t lift it. “She never even said goodbye to me. Other than that, I thought it was only a flirtation. The way she can look at a man and size his bankroll and all the time have him thinking it’s his peter on her mind. You know that about her.”

“I always thought it was shuffle-and-dodge. I never thought she’d run off. It irks me though. You had to have seen what was going on. I thought we were friends, Scully.”

Scully took up the whiskey. “Friends, Jamie? I don’t believe I know what that even means. Seems to me friends are people useful to a body. I’m losing what use I ever had and I know that for a fact. But say I had thought this time was different? And had remarked on it to you. What would you have done? That would have changed her mind?”

“I know it.”

“I told you to marry her.”

Jamie stood then, pushing off the cupboards and feeling his knees crack as he rose. Took up the cigarettes and the matches. “Say I had. Even a year ago, before this Rhode Island sportsman came along. You think that still would’ve stopped her?”

Scully nodded. “She’s a peculiar strong girl.”

“She’s a whore, what she is.”