“Yes.”
“All by yourself?”
He hesitated.
“Mostly.”
I pulled back.
“What does mostly mean?”
His expression changed.
That Ethan expression.
The one that meant he was pleased he’d kept a secret.
“Mr. Warren did the saw.”
“Mr. Warren?”
Our neighbor, Samuel Warren, lived two houses down.
Seventy-six years old.
Retired furniture maker.
Missing half of his left index finger from what he described only as “an incident involving 1974 and bad judgment.”
Suddenly everything made sense.
The sawdust.
The locked garage.
Mom driving Ethan somewhere every Tuesday.
The smell of wood stain in the laundry room.
“You’ve been working with Mr. Warren?”
“Tuesday.”
“Since January?”
“And Friday.”
“Every week?”
“Not when he had gout.”
I looked at Mom.
She was laughing.
“You knew?”
“Of course I knew.”
“You told me Ethan had a project.”
“He did.”
“I thought you meant school.”
Mom shrugged.
“That sounds like an assumption you made.”
I wanted to be annoyed.
