“I guess I am. What would you do about this money?”
He took his time, then he said, “Get your bank to wire it back. Tell them it was a mistake, that you just didn’t notice it. That’s what I’d do.” He nodded goodbye, and then he stopped in the doorway and turned back to Hailey. “Actually, I probably wouldn’t. I’d probably just keep it and hope no one ever came looking for it... But that’s just me.”
* * *
The concrete guy was late. He hadn’t called, and Hailey had left work early to be home for him, having spent the rest of the morning researching Bank Nacional and also “walls cracking new houses.” Now she was down in the playroom studying those cracks up close. Mabel’s purple My Little Pony was drinking from a magic stream that flowed two inches wide and a lot deeper than it had last week. The cracks were spreading fast. If she sat here long enough, Hailey might actually be able to see the floor fall apart in front of her.
“No!” Mabel’s shout tore through Hailey’s tender nerve endings. “You know you aren’t allowed to have those!”
Gigi had emerged from the walk-in toy cupboard with a plastic box almost as big as she was. It contained Hailey’s old collection of Polly Pockets.
Hailey sighed. “Gig, you know the pieces are too small. We have to save those until you are a little bigger. Even Mabel doesn’t play with those.”
Gigi studied the tantalizing pastel toys through the clear plastic. “Please, Mommy, can we just see them? Just to look? You’re here now, and you’reneverhere.”
Gigi knew just the right button, and Hailey caved immediately. “Just until the concrete guy comes, okay? Then we put the Pollys away.”
By the time she’d finished her sentence, Gigi had torn the dusty lid from the box and was opening a blue heart-shaped plastic case to reveal the tiny dollhouse inside—the perfect size for the redheaded Polly, no bigger than a toddler’s thumb, that Mabel held up to inspect. The redhead had always been Hailey’s favorite Polly doll.
Mabel and Gigi took turns opening each of the small cases: a princess castle, a park with a merry-go-round and a slide, a pet store, a café that still had its tiny milkshakes. The sets had been carefully preserved as new by Pammy Byers and passed to Hailey when Mabel was born.
“Look, the kitchen floor in this one is just like our old floor!” cried Mabel. “ ’Member, we used to do hopscotch on there?”
Gigi stared down at the inch-long checkerboard sticker. “I don’t remember that at all,” she said, and Hailey was struck for the thousandth time how odd it was that she sounded so much older than her big sister. But they’d lived in Bratenahl for more than a sixth of Gigi’s life; no wonder she had no memory of the Lakewood house.
They had started lining up the open cases on the carpet to make a city when the concrete guy finally arrived. He was not at all what Hailey had pictured—he was young and wiry and drove a Lexus SUV instead of a mixer truck. He was unfazed by Gulliver’s barking and bent down to scratch the dog’s ears.
“I took a quick look outside,” he said to Hailey. “But Simeon said the worst damage is in the basement?”
“I guess so.” That worddamagedidn’t sit well. “It seems to be spreading.”
“Okay, let’s take a look-see. Do you want shoes off?” He was dressed in crisp khakis and a bomber jacket, but he did have huge work boots with splashes of paint and crusty concrete on them. Still, she didn’t feel up to explaining to him why he’d have to leave them outside the door in the cold (Gulliver was already sniffing around them hungrily), and besides, the floor was already permanently trashed, so what did it matter?
“It’s fine.”
“Cool place you got here,” he said as they made their way to the basement. “I like the high ceilings.”
He bid a friendly hello to the girls, but his eyes were already on the cracks in the drywall when Gigi asked him, “Are you the concrete guy?”
“Most people call me Ben,” he said. “But yeah, I pretty much am. Mind if I pull up the carpet?”
They watched as he took photos of the floor and the walls with his phone, and then the girls went back to the Pollys while he worked his way around to the furnace room. The crack along the drain had grown even deeper, and the ones in the walls had splintered and fanned out in new directions.
The guy gestured toward the raw wood door in the corner. “Can I go in there?”
“Sure. It’s my husband’s office. He’s not home right now,” she added, when the guy went to knock. Then as he opened the door, she had a panicked moment: What if Mack had left the Sunshine Enterprise photographs of himself out on his desk?
But when they stepped inside, apart from all the weird things Mack collected—mugs and shot glasses and bobbleheads, dozens of Dr Pepper cans and Starbucks cups, a few wilted plants—there was nothing of interest, not even any cracks. At least not that Hailey could see. But then Ben the Concrete Guy moved aside the box of Mack’s mother’s papers and a stack of old comic books to reveal another sizable crack in the floor.
“They’re justeverywhere,” said Hailey. “There’s one in the kitchen wall too. I forgot. I’ll show you on the way back up.”
“The drywall cracks are nothing to worry about.” Something in his manner reminded Hailey of the girls’ pediatrician, capable and reassuring, but this only lasted for a second or two. “These cracks in the concrete itself though, they’re pretty unusual,” he continued. “We’d expect to see this if the ground under the house was unstable—like if it was silt or sand—but that’s not the case. This is hard clay around here, solid. But look—” He measured the width of the crack in Mack’s concrete floor with his thumb and forefinger and held up the inch of empty space for Hailey to see. “This here tells me the house is moving. The steel foundation beams are shifting in the ground, for some reason.”
Hailey stared at him. “What reason?”
He chuckled. “Like an earthquake would do it,” he said, and Hailey did not think this was at all funny. “Although it’s obviouslynotan earthquake.”
“Could it be erosion? From the lake?”
