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Richardson’s business manager and to cross him was to cross Luke. But behind all the oil and the devotion were the smirks: there’s soft old Adam Goldsmith, the sexless eternal bachelor, Luke Richardson’s court eunuch, Flora Goldsmith’s boy, the boy who spoke in tongues when he was young and then, before disappearing to university, became a shy reedy teenager who walked with hishead down and took to riding his bicycle around the country roads because his mother never thought to buy him a car and his father got killed in the war.
    That reedy teenager had shot up to well over six feet, had developed a respectable bulge around the belly and was, as Adam Goldsmith kept telling himself, sixty-three years old. Old enough to have been part-owner and manager of the New & Used long enough to drive whatever he wanted. On the day Carl came back to West Gull, Adam was wearing the pale yellow cotton suit that was his summer uniform. With his jacket slung over his shoulder, his collar unbuttoned and his tie yanked loose, Adam Goldsmith looked like what he was: an aging member of the small and aging West Gull business community; the tall dreamy son of his own scarcely imaginable tall dreamy father; the bookish mainstay of the West Gull Memorial Library; a man as familiar to the West Gull streets as an old pair of shoes.
    Now that they had run out of conversation, Carl was remembering that he used to take Adam for granted—until it struck him that Adam Goldsmith must be a homosexual, no doubt with a secret life down in the Kingston bars. What Carl couldn’t understand was why Adam stayed in West Gull. “I suppose Luke put his balls somewhere for safekeeping,” McKelvey had once said, and Carl had seen his mother throw his father one of those looks she gave him when he got drunk and nasty, then walk out of the room. She hadn’t minded Adam. He’d often been to the school for meetings of the library committee, and Carl would come in from after-school hockey to find them cataloguing books and drinking tea and chattering away like two old ladies. After Elizabeth died, it turned out she’d made Adam her executor and left her school insurancemoney in trust for Carl to receive when he turned twenty-five—a little twist on the safekeeping theme McKelvey didn’t appreciate. All of that money was put away for Lizzie now.
    “Do you have somewhere to stay?” Adam asked. Carl had forgotten the way Adam talked to you, as though looking at an imaginary bird perched on your shoulder. Carl was free to look at Adam’s eyes which weren’t looking at his: they were light blue, a blue that in this intense July light was almost transparent, with pupils so narrow and densely black you had to wonder if they were the real Adam Goldsmith, tiny irreducible bits of flint usually covered by his pale bland exterior. And then before Carl could answer: “We’ll go over to the real-estate office. Get Doreen to fix you up.”
    Carl knew he had to be back in West Gull by the way Doreen Whittier’s sallow face turned to brittle porcelain as he came in the office door, as though despite the fact that he was a grown man, he must be looking for something to steal or break. She had been ahead of him in high school but he remembered seeing her hanging around the rink. Now she was wearing Ben Whittier’s wedding band and was the kind of woman he used to call ma’am until Chrissy told him he sounded like a hillbilly.
    As soon as Adam followed and explained what Carl was looking for, in the voice he would have used if he needed it for himself, her face snapped into a different shape. Adam had transformed him from a worthless McKelvey to visiting royalty.
    “Would you be wanting it starting next month?”
    “Any time,” Carl said. “Tonight would be fine.” She gave him a surprised look but Adam was looming over her, smiling.
    “Come back after lunch and I’ll have something.” She turned to her papers as though he had already gone.
    On the street Carl