Chapter 23: Fifty Steps

The house was a yellow brick two-story on a street of oaks in Richmond, with a porch that sagged on the left.

I bought it with the check Ansel wrote at the end of the thirty days.

He had written the number himself, and he had asked me not to look at it until I was alone.

I looked at it in front of him.

"That's too much," I said.

"It's what the job was worth."

"It's three times what it was worth."

"You got me out of a bed," Ansel said. "I'm not good at arithmetic."

I cashed it anyway, and I told him so.

On the first night we had a mattress on the floor, two lamps, and no curtains.

He carried the last box up the stairs himself.

"How many?" I said, from the landing.

"Seventeen."

"Count them again on the way down."

He laughed and went down.

I stood on the second-floor landing and listened to a man walk the length of an empty house without a cane or a rail or a nurse.

He walked it twice.

At the end of the front hall he stopped.

I watched his back and did the count in my head.

"Fifty," he said, and turned. "From the door to the window. Fifty."

"I counted fifty too."

"I'm showing off."

"I know."

He came up the stairs two at a time and stopped in front of me.

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