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ostentatious tile roof above faux-granite walls like theme-park castle embattlements; and I would always think of Jerry and Rita’s dead daughter, Linda.
    Jerry said, “Pete, the boys have worked out an arrangement and there’s a potentially high-quality educational facility available at Freedom Field, with blacktop flooring and good northern exposure if you keep the door open and don’t mind the occasional flyover.”
    “Freedom Field? An airplane hangar?”
    “Pete, she’s twenty thousand square feet with forty-foot ceilings. Perfect for basketball or indoor tennis if you paint lines and string nets. Tell me, what sports do you tend to offer at the elementary level?”
    “Sports? Let’s see. Kickball, broomball, tetherball, tug-of-war. The kids like to play steal-the-bacon.”
    “Steal-the-bacon.”
    “It’s a tactical team game that rewards the skill and cunning of the individual.”
    “Team sport, is it?”
    “Right.”
    “That’s good. As I was saying, you’ve got your classroom and athletic space efficiently combined.” I could hear, from somewhere on Jerry’s end of the line, a sound like splashing water. I said, “That’s very generous, Jerry, an airplane hangar,” and he replied, “You’d be crazy to pass it up.” Followed by another splash and Jerry saying, “Pete, I’m in the process of trying to unclog a sink over here. Water’s been standing all day and I can’t get any flow at all.”
    “Have you tried a snake?”
    “No.”
    “You should try a snake.” I gazed at my own sink’s dark flecks of basin residue floating motionless on water that reached counter level. Was everybody in the neighborhood experiencing drainage difficulty? Were we all backed up? Was it a community thing?
    The night outside was silent. No wind blew the leaves of trees against window glass or wall; no birds called. I could hear floorboards creaking overhead as Meredith made her way from bathroom to bed; and I heard the sound of Jerry’s sink water, and of his breathing into the phone, as he asked me, “You wouldn’t happen to have one of those snake things, would you, Pete?”
    “Yes, I do. Would you like to borrow it?” But what was I saying? Jerry said, “That’d be great. What a lifesaver. I’ll swing by and pick it up. Won’t be a minute.”
    Now I’d done it. A man I couldn’t trust was coming to get a household tool I was going to need myself.
    Quickly I hid the plunger in the pantry, scraped the dinner dishes into the garbage, dumped the scraped-off dishes into the sink (thereby slopping oily water over the rim and onto my bare feet), squeezed in dish soap, swirled the water with my hand to make suds; and then, after concocting this absurd soaking-dish display aimed at hiding the truth of my own clogged drain from the soon-to-be-visiting Rotarian, with whom I would rather not risk a bonding experience, even of a mundane, plumbing-oriented variety (and to whom, also, I would rather not divulge the vulnerability evidenced by my own clogged drain, its revelation of material decay)—after staging this sink nonsense I went downstairs to the basement. There I paused a moment to admire my 1:32-scale, exhibition-quality balsa-and-Styrofoam cutaway reproduction of a Portuguese interrogation chamber (circa 1600), complete with rack, miniature shackles fashioned from spray-painted costume-jewelry chokers and clasps, and Q-tip puffs representing albino rats. Particularly effective were the sections of gray-painted “dungeon” wall fabricated from pieces of pressed Styrofoam swimming-pool kickboards burned with a soldering iron to give the impression of miniature mortise joints. I made a mental note to come down here and do some detail brushwork and free-form “chicken bone” accessorizing—the twin hallmarks of any successful scale model of this kind, I think—then forged deeper into the rank cellar, to the big metal closet where the tools lived. In the tool closet I discovered, to my surprise,