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been trying to reinforce; even more unfortunately, what lay beneath it was a whole civilization of spiders, silverfish, and a particularly nasty species of centipede: big, smart ones.
    I swear they had roads, aqueducts, even little schools going on down there in the darkness, and if I hadn’t fallen in on them they probably would’ve developed nuclear weapons. In the end, the only thing that got reinforced that day was my dread of anything having so many more legs than I do.
    But as my old New York friend and mentor Jemmy Wechsler said when he discovered the Mob had a contract out on him just because he stole several million of their favorite dollars: Live and learn.
    Not that I went right out and found out how to fix old floors; that came later when the centipedes decided that life
under
the floorboards might not be all that they had wished for, and I woke up one night to tiny eyes gleaming balefully at me from the foot of my bed. Instead what I got from that unhappy episode was the ability to delegate the really big jobs, born of my resolve that the next time somebody fell into a squirming mass of insects, it wouldn’t be me.
    So when the ell needed a new roof I hired a local mother-and-daughter team who called themselves the Shingle Belles. Fast, fearless, and efficient, those two didn’t fall into masses of insects or anywhere else as they scrambled over the roof tossing tools to one another, cursing cheerfully.
    Likewise, discovering that the foundation of my old house was crumbling, I balanced the cost of hired help against the cost of the back surgery I would need after hauling the big old stones out of the cellar myself. Then I engaged another expert.
    And when Ellie and I got home from Harry Markle’s that day, the expert was standing in the side yard gazing pensively at my ladder. From the way it was lying on the lawn you could figure out what had happened, especially if you factored in the little drops of blood sprinkled artfully across the sidewalk. Wade was absent, drawn downtown, I guessed, by the lure of the explosion.
    “Hello, Mr. Ash,” I said, making my way across the lawn to the helper I’d hired. “Don’t worry about that ladder, I’ll put it away.”
    He straightened, his pale-blue eyes softening as he saw that I wasn’t badly injured. But he frowned at the mess of my face.
    “Ice on the lip,” he suggested gravely, putting out a bony finger. Somehow his touch didn’t make me flinch the way Victor’s had. “Beefsteak on the eye,” he added.
    His work-roughened hand sketched the suggestion of a caress in the air alongside my head, drew back chastely. “Yeah,” I said, “but you should see the other guy.”
    At that he chuckled, a lean man in his late fifties, wearing blue coveralls, a faded red flannel shirt, and old leather boots. For a guy who worked on basements and crawl spaces he was very clean, smelling sweetly of concrete dust and something else I couldn’t identify, sharp as an old penny.
    “Going to put some crampons into these ladder feet for you,” he said, watching me climb the porch steps.
    Notched clamps, he meant, so the ladder wouldn’t slide. To hire Mr. Ash I’d put a note up on the bulletin board at the IGA, looking for a stonemason. And the very next morning Lian Ash’s ancient pickup truck was out in the driveway as if he’d been just waiting around for me to need something from him.
    “I guess you’ll be climbing this ladder again, will you?” he inquired mildly. “Not put off heights any worse’n you were?”
    I hate heights but I hate waiting even more for other people to brave them for me. “Yes, Mr. Ash.” His benevolent figure seemed to turn the tide on what had been, so far, a dreadful day. “I’ll go back up there again.”
    His face remained impassive but a small, protective smile twinkled in his eyes, under a shock of hair as fine and white as milkweed silk.
    “Well, then. Guess we’d better fix it.” He turned away.
    “Mr. Ash,” I