They were both shirtless and one of them was ripping away shingles with the claw of his hammer while the other was using his power saw to cut through my roof, my father’sroof, Frankie’sroof. Their pickup truck was parked in front of the house close to the driveway where last night I saw a new white Buick in the shine of my headlights as I drove up the hill, but now it was gone, and I should’ve listened to Lester Burdon and stayed away from here. But it was the only place I could think to go so late at night after driving around for over an hour, talking myself out of checking into another motel somewhere. Now the two carpenters stood together and used crowbars to pry a huge square of my roof off. They let it fall to the ground, then they stood on the floor of my attic between the rafters. The one with the saw started cutting right into one of them and I scooted behind the wheel and jerked open the door and ran across the street barefoot. I yelled up at them, but they couldn’t hear me over the saw, so I stepped around my roof and climbed up the ladder. They were both tan and one of them had a tattoo of a diner on his shoulder. The other one stopped cutting and looked from me to the one with the tattoo, then back at me again.
“What are you doing?”
The one with the tattoo dropped his hammer into his tool belt. “Excuse me?”
“Who said you could dothis? This is myfucking house!”
He peered over the roof down at his truck and my car. “And you are?”
“I ownthis house. Me.Get off my roof.”
“Are you Mrs. Behrani?”
“No.”
The other carpenter reached into his apron, shook a cigarette from its pack, and lit it. I could feel him looking at my bare arms and legs, and at my hair all ratty from sleep. It was cold last night and now my head felt stopped up and I felt so out of place and wrong.
“Mr. Behrani hired me. You’ll have to talk to him.”
I looked from the tattooed carpenter to the one smoking his cigarette. He glanced away from me and took in the view and I turned and saw the rooftops of Corona below, then the green-gray ocean stretching out from the beach to the horizon. Somehow this made me madder and I climbed back down the ladder and began stepping over the shingles and one of the carpenters yelled to watch out for nails just as I stepped on the upside-down plywood where dozens of nail points were sticking out and now four or five of them were sinking into the heel and ball of my foot. I screamed, jerking my knee up, the blood dripping. “Shit.”I hopped and sat down, then twisted my foot up, but there was so much blood I couldn’t see where the holes were. “Fuck.”
“Here.” The tattooed carpenter squatted in front of me and tied a bandanna tight around my ankle. He helped me stand and guided me to the front steps, myfront steps, and he knocked on the screen door. I had my hand on his bare shoulder, my elbow against his back. His skin was warm and damp and I could feel the muscle under it. I was thinking how I hadn’t brushed my teeth or washed my face, that I’d slept in my car last night and now was bleeding on my own doorstep waiting for a stranger to answer.
A black-haired boy came to the door. He was maybe fifteen and he wore bright orange surfer shorts and a loose T-shirt. He glanced down at my foot I wasn’t letting touch the ground. A woman came up behind him. She had short thick hair and dark eyes with hardly any makeup. She was wearing a designer sweat suit, and there was a big ring on her left hand. I wanted to say that she was in my goddamn house, that she had no fucking right to remodel it, but the carpenter spoke up first and asked her if we could use the bathroom to wash my foot, and if she had something we could use to keep the blood from getting on her rug. And it was herrug. I could see it on the wall-to-wall carpeting behind her, a huge deep red and brown Persian rug. The woman told the boy something in what sounded Arabic or Israeli, and the boy went to the kitchen and came back with a plastic trash bag he handed to the carpenter, who bent down and pulled it loosely over my foot. I felt like throwing up, my stomach contracting. The woman was looking at my hair and face, my wrinkled shirt, and her eyes seemed so full of caring I took a weak breath and didn’t say anything as she stepped back and let the carpenter and me inside.
I had one arm on the carpenter’s shoulder, the other holding the plastic trash bag onto my foot. We passed a silver coffee table with bowls of nuts and wrapped chocolates set on top of it. There was a plush sofa and expensive-looking lamps. The carpenter stopped at the kitchen and asked the woman where the bathroom was, but before she could talk I told him to go all the way down the hall. I leaned on his shoulder and hopped through a house that didn’t seem like mine anymore; the door to my bedroom was open and I caught a glimpse of a queen-size bed with brass posts. On the floor near the windows were huge potted green plants, and on the carpet around the bed were small rugs, deep purple, green, and black.
In the bathroom I sat on the edge of the tub and let cold water run over the sole of my foot as I watched the blood swirl down the drain. The carpenter stood beside me with his hands on his hips. He still had his tool belt on and his hammer handle was swaying against his leg.
“When’s the last time you had a tetanus shot?”
“Ees she yet bleeding?”
The woman reached by me, her arm brushing my face, and I smelled lavender and cotton. She knelt on the floor, adjusted the water temperature, then took a bar of soap and washed my foot under hot water. She called to her son in their language, then she sat on the edge of the tub, gently took my foot and swung it to rest in a towel in her lap. It was a white towel, thick and soft, like only five-star hotels use, and I started to pull my bleeding foot from it.
“Ees it to hurting so much?” She looked into my eyes with hers that were so dark, the lines in her face delicate-looking, like she hadn’t had them long.
“I don’t want to ruin your towel.”
She smiled but I don’t think she understood what I said. Her son came to the room with a box of cotton balls and a roll of Ace bandage. He said something to her—Arabic, I decided—then he said to me with no accent at all, “I use it for skateboarding. Don’t worry, I washed it.”
“Sorry, but I have to know what the story is before I continue the job.” The carpenter stood in the doorway and watched while the woman swabbed the bottom of my foot with a clear liquid that smelled like ginger. My face got hot, and I held my finger up to him to wait a second, though I didn’t know what I was going to say next. The woman pressed a cotton ball to each puncture in my foot and she started to wrap it tight with the Ace bandage. Every turn or so she would glance up at my face to see how I was. Her son left the bathroom and I heard a TV go on in what used to be the room Nicky practiced his bass in. I looked up at the carpenter and said quietly: “I’ll talk to her husband.”
“Fine. Sorry about your foot.”
I watched him walk down my hallway with his tool belt and shorts and no shirt. I felt abandoned.
The woman pulled the last bit of tape up around my ankle, kept it there with her thumb, then held it down with a safety pin. She smiled at me and we both looked at each other a second, which made me pull my leg from her lap and stand up, but I couldn’t put weight on my foot without a burning ache shooting up my shin. She helped me out of the bathroom and I half-leaned on her all the way to the living room, where she guided me to the sofa behind the silver coffee table. I was about to say no but she moved a pillow, slid the bowl of sweets off to the side of the table, then rested the folded towel there for my foot; all I could do was sink into the softness of the couch.
“I carry you tea and sugar. You must for rest.”
I watched her walk into my kitchen and reach into a cabinet for a clear glass cup. On the wall across from me were paintings of mountains on a waterfront, of bearded men in robes on horses. On the lamp table beside me was a family portrait of the woman smiling next to a bald man in a military uniform. Sitting in front of them was the same boy who’d answered the door, only he was younger, his face more smooth and round, and beside him was a beautiful young woman with long black hair that went past her shoulders and hung over her white blouse. She had her mother’s eyes and the gentle smile too.