There was a productivity to the Dowlearns that was tireless—equal parts Protestant work ethic and an AA component of keeping busy for Rick Sr.’s sake. Dan, whose mother waited on him hand and foot, realized he was lazy. Home life for the Dowlearn children was a never-ending punch list of chores—Rick had to walk the dogs, skim the pool, take out the trash, everything short of building a barn and prime-coating it. Embarrassed not to be doing anything, Dan went around the back of the house and held the ladder while Rick cleared leaves from the roof gutters.

“Sorry, almost done with all this shit.”

“No worries.”

“Son . . .”

Rick Sr. peeked around the corner from the garage.

“Last thing tonight and then you and your compadre can hightail it. The pump on the Jacuzzi is throttling.”

“In or out?”

“I think when it’s sucking in, it’s not catching a full drink.”

“Okay.” Rick dropped a giant wad of leaves below him.

“I think that valve is stuck again. Here, Dan, my lad, carry this toolbox for him.”

Rick came down off the ladder and headed around to the hot tub. Dan lugged the big Black and Decker metal chest of tools and followed him across the patio to a greenhouse that looked out over the pool. Through glass doors was a hot tub covered with a white float like a giant marshmallow on top of cocoa. Rick pulled the side panel back and studied the pump. Dan crouched behind him, pretending to understand what he was looking at. As a summertime lifeguard at Glen Cove Swim Club, he was familiar with pool equipment, but this was a different level of mechanical understanding—one the previous Malone generation, who spent their lives hectoring undermotivated supers in the Bronx and at the mercies of various scamming repairmen, had not attained. Rick Sr. had taught his son to be handy, to tinker, and Dan—who could break a dipstick checking the oil on a car—admired that.

Rick popped the intake valve back into place. “Okay, go through that door into my dad’s office, and when I tell you, throw the bottom breaker on the left.”

Dan went into the small study and found the circuit box.

“Now,” Rick yelled.

Dan hit it, and the hot tub roiled to life. Dan glanced around Rick Sr.’s office, which was a boring bunch of carpet books and paperwork. Then he turned and found the gun cabinet.

“Whoa.”

It was a SWAT team’s locker of firepower—rifles, pistols, shotguns, you name it. And a nice wooden cabinet too, like the kind his mother put all the Waterford in. On the wall adjacent there was a poster billowing with an angelic grouping of clouds.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the firepower to change the things I can, and the wisdom to bury the bodies.