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him, and Lilly is a sport about doing the Dodge Ram chauffeur thing. And though he has given her no further instructions, she knows when she finds the house.
    “Holy hell,” Lilly blurts.
    How to describe it? Ramshackle, for a start. Slanted, for another. Porches sloping off the place. Scalloped and gabled, waterlogged clapboard which was last painted back when that shade of … red, I think … was one of the four colors available down at the general store. On the two sides of the house that you can see from the long driveway approach, I count twenty-two windows. There are maybe three that are the same, standard size, with the rest being a collection of elongations, octagons, oval portholes, and stained-glass peekaboos.
    There is a crew of five already setting up, dragging out drop cloths to protect the wild mad foliage close to the house, pulling ladders and tool buckets off the oversize pickup belonging to Diz. Lilly has stopped the truck a dozen yards short of the driveway’s end, and is staring.
    “ If the ladders don’t tip the place right over, it’ll take you three months to paint this house.”
    Pauly laughs. Not angry or mocking, but excited. Myself, I’m already hoping the ladders do tip the joint over. He turns to Lilly hopefully. “Don’t you think it’s really something though, Lil? I couldn’t wait for you to see it.”
    “Now I have. Pauly, come home,” Lilly says sadly, as if the condition of the house somehow reflects badly on him. “You don’t need this.”
    Paul hops over the side of the truck like a cowboy entering the corral. Lilly looks through the window at me. We exchange facial shrugs. Why should it be that one guy’s daffy enthusiasm should be able to overwhelm another guy’s solid common sense? I don’t know either, but it keeps happening. Maybe it’s the slugger theory, that even though he’s struck out twenty times in a row he still keeps swinging so hard he’s got to hit one a country mile. He’s got to, right? I hop over the side of the truck after him.
    Paul goes up to the driver’s window. From behind I can read his whole body, stretching, lengthening, striving, as he reaches himself in that window to kiss Lil. I’m staring, I know I’m staring, at the back of his head. Staring, so badly, I know, I know.
    A guy can love Lilly just by watching her love someone else.
    “See ya, Oak,” she says, as Paul pulls away from her and hurls himself toward the task at hand. “See ya then,” she repeats when, apparently, I haven’t received it all. And she points, at the back of our boy.
    Despite my slowness, I do understand. We understand. You can’t take an eye off him at a construction site, or near a cliff or a raging river. Or at a falling-down house where nobody’s living and he has access to ladders and tools and stuff.
    So sure, I understand. It’s my shift.
    “Pauly-o,” Uncle Diz yelps as we approach.
    “Dizzy!” Paul hollers back.
    This much is true right out of the chute: The rest of the crew doesn’t care for Pauly one bit. It takes a while to get to appreciate Pauly under the best of circumstances, and nobody here appears to have the time for it. For his part, Pauly appears not to notice.
    “Yo boys,” he says to the lot of them.
    The lot of them fail to respond. They go on hoisting ladders, dropping drop cloths, dumping tool buckets.
    We are late, too. We need to catch up. “What do you want us doing, Dizzy?” I ask.
    “I want you to come and get coffee and donuts with me.”
    “Maybe we should paint a little something first,” Pauly says. “I wanna work, Unc. I wanna show you what I can do, and work my way up through the ranks, so I can take over your job. But I figure it all starts right here, with the paint and the ladders and stuff.”
    Dizzy makes a show of looking at himself. He is wearing designer jeans. Creased. And a black cashmere sweater. “Why would you want to start there ? Cheese, I know what you can do, kid. Come on with