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me.”
    Pauly looks at me and shrugs. He is full of mad energy and a desire to throw himself at the job, but he’s positively dying to get under his uncle’s wing. I nod, telling him it’s all right, and this sets him free. The two of them turn toward Dizzy’s Lincoln Town Car without saying anything else directly to me.
    The doors slam on the big boat Lincoln, and the wheels seem to start spinning the instant the engine cranks. They’re kicking up gravel and dust as Dizzy fishtails left then right toward Dunkin’ Donuts. I can hear the engine whine away in the distance as I stand there staring at the still-settling flume of driveway dirt.
    I don’t know a single person on the crew. I don’t know a thing about paint, or scrapers or ladders or drop cloths. I turn away from the vision of the rest of the world and focus on the proposed job at hand. I stare up and down. Attempt eye contact with each worker who crosses my line of vision, staring harder, looking dumber, craning my neck more with each very obvious snubbing of me. Nope, I won’t be making a bunch of new friends today.
    I can stare up at the house, though. Magnificent mess that it is. Sagging sloping Victorian whatsit with a madly steep-pitched roof, porches curling around everyplace, gables popping up all over like gophers from the ground. Silver maples on three sides hang close enough and touch the house in enough places that it looks like they’re doing the job of holding the joint up, rather than actually helping to bring it down.
    I am aware of staring. Not particularly concerned, but aware. I must appear to be either a potential buyer in the first browsy stages of shopping or one of those end-of-the-rope fog-eyed lunatics come back to chat up the old childhood homestead.
    The whine of the car, reverse order. Getting stronger, cornering into the driveway, kicking up more rocks as the blacktop turns to dirt. All heads turn now, mine included.
    The Lincoln stops about ten feet before me.
    Pauly emerges, walks purposefully toward me. He takes me by the hand. Second time today, he’s taking me by the hand.
    “Right,” I say quietly as he pulls me into the car. “You’re gonna close me outside the mansion gate when you get rich, but you can’t even make one trip to the coffee shop without me.”
    I am expecting a snappy retort. Instead he treats it like a real conversation.
    “I was never really gonna lock you out.” He gives the hand a squeeze.
    Dunkin’ Donuts. Dunkies, to players like us. Pauly and Dizzy are yakking up a storm, scheming, planning, concocting get-rich-quick schemes. Get richer quick I suppose it is for Dizzy. Get anything for Pauly.
    I can’t get in there with them. I like money fine, at least I like it a lot better than having none. It’s the scheming, the planning and the concocting part that I just don’t seem to be able to warm up to. That’s one of the million and five ways Pauly and me are opposite. I honestly don’t think Pauly cares at all whether he ends up with a dime when it’s over or not, but the plotting and trickster stuff? He could live there and be happy, or something like happy anyhow. We could make a perfect team, with him conniving his way to wealth, then giving it all to me.
    And the thing is, I think he would.
    Dizzy, though, apparently likes both ends of that particular stick, the having of money and the grubby acquiring of it.
    “You with me, Pauly?” Diz keeps saying. “You with me on this?”
    Pauly is with him. Nodding madly. Speechless with grubby desire.
    Diz reaches across the table and shoves a twenty into my hand. “Do us a favor, kid, get ten large coffees, black. And a dozen donuts, mix ’em up.”
    I stare at the twenty. Okay then, so I’m not invited.
    They really are a good work crew, I must say. Seems like half the house has been completely scraped down by the time we return. The dusty barn-red paint that was once clinging desperately to spongy clapboards is now coating the ground