Like the time he asked me to help him out on Saturday. Just go out with him to clean up after a job. It was ten dollars. I had nothing else to do. I went, but instead of helping like he wanted, I roamed all over that house. All ten rooms. And Pops had painted the whole inside. I imagined how we’d live there, me playing ball in front of the garage, running down the quarter-mile driveway to get the mail out of a gray metal mailbox with a flag. I’d have a dog, no, two dogs. Maybe pretend to go hunting in the woods out back. And Moms would call me in around six for supper. Pops would come home from the office with the evening paper and we’d sit around the fireplace and sing Christmas carols with hot apple cider or chocolate to drink and the snow storming outside, away from us. Out there. Outside. Out of that fucking room and out of my fucking mind. Shit. What the fuck was happening to me? No snow at the window. Just gray December. Early nightfall. Streets smelling like asphalt and fresh dogshit. Gasoline fumes. Roach spray. And Pops’ angry voice telling me, “Stop dreaming, kid. Clean up. That’s what you’re here for, ain’t it?” Cleaning up. In a few hours, time to go home. My ten dollars. Throw out the empty paint cans, the scraps of dingy wallpaper. It’s time to go home. Time to go inside to the greasy hallway and a window view of bricks and soot and night as thick as nigger hair. That’s when I woke up. Pops. You hear me? We never went back there. We never even had a place close to what that was. A house. A simple, goddamn house. We never went back for tea or tennis, never for Halloween trick-or-treat or Sunday dinner, except once when we drove through White Plains and you pointed to houses on both sides of the road—it was a winding country road—saying, “I painted that pink house there,” and “See that garage? I fixed that,” and for another one “Last year. Outside job.” And I asked you, “What about the inside, Pops?” And you wouldn’t say nothing. Nothing. ’Cause we couldn’t go back there. You couldn’t get back inside to show us what you’d done. Could you? Naw. We saw only the outside of the houses, Pops. From the inside of the car you drove. But Moms was smiling, saying, “See what nice work you father does,” and she was moving closer to him and like a teenager, snuggling her head under his free arm as he drove. Patty started asking for ice cream and a ride on the swings in the park. But I was asking about the inside I’d once seen. Nobody wanted to talk about that. And we never went back after my ten-dollar clean-up job, did we? Later, I heard Pops telling Moms how they let him in through the back door like he was some nigger and not the Italian home contractor he was. Shit, that man was an artist. Look at what he built. Look how many times people called him for free estimates on a neighbor’s recommendation. But he stayed on the outside, even when he painted or built things inside. And there I was remembering how he came home tired one night in the winter after fixing gutters outside all day. Moms put him right to bed. The next morning the ambulance took him away and he never came back. The new wall and countertop he made in our apartment was left unpainted. Like a fool, I waited for him to come back. I waited for the wall and countertop to get painted, until, as Moms told me later, I got the paint myself and brushed “Fuck you” in thick black letters all over the place. Moms was scared then for the first time. And she kept on being scared. She must have known then that I was lost somewheres. But all she said was, “Christ Jesus! My boy ain’t never had a chance.”