Free The Talk-Funny Girl by Roland Merullo Page A

nose twice for every ten words, and he talked fast, sometimes looking at me and sometimes not.
    “What we’re doing to start off with here,” he said, “is getting rid of the bad stuff. Clearing the site. Okay? Once we clear the site we can start building, which is hard work but it’s also the fun part. But every job has a boring part, or some boring parts, and this is one of them. Take any small pieces of broken stone or concrete you can lift without straining, and whatever you do don’t drop them on your toes. Put them in the truck and push them back in as far as you can. We want to get ridof as much of the junk as possible before we build. Save the big ones for me. Then set the good stones—see, like this, ones we can use—set the good ones aside in piles if you can lift them and try to sort them basically according to size. Large, medium, and small. That will make it easy later, okay?”
    “I could, sure,” I said, and I started picking up pieces of rubble and putting them in the truck as Sands had been doing. He watched me for a minute and smiled; I could see it out of the side of my vision. I reminded myself that the manager at Emily’s Dough Nuts had been nice on the first day, too, and that Pastor Schect had seemed like a kind uncle when we’d first started going to the Quonset hut in West Ober.
    Work is something I’ve always had a talent for. From a young age I did most of the cleaning around the house. (My mother didn’t mind cooking, but washing toilets or sweeping the floor or dusting—those things were alien to her. It wasn’t so much that she refused to do them, as that she had the ability—I don’t know if she was born with this or developed it—not to see that they needed to be done.) I often helped my father with repair projects (which he did very poorly) and with cutting and stacking stove wood (at which, like many men in those parts, he was an expert). From my work at home and from my year and a half at Emily’s, I knew how to listen to instruction, to keep my opinions to myself, to try to please the person who paid me.
    It didn’t take long for the work to take away the afternoon chill and for me to begin to understand, without asking, which pieces of stone Sands wanted to keep and which pieces he wanted me to load into the truck. While I concentrated on the broken strips and chunks of old mortar—setting them in the bed as he showed me, so that they rested tight against one another near the cab end—he wandered around the remains of the church putting the heavier stones into piles. In an hour and a half the pickup bed was full, and I called over to tell him that.
    Set against the background of the small stone rectory—abandoned and not as badly damaged as the church—Sands looked like a strange figure. With his giant’s arms and thin body, his scraggly ponytail, hisdark skin and thick eyeglasses, the way he had of being large in the world, physically, and yet shrinking back behind a quietness, even when he spoke, it was as if he was carrying around another person inside himself. I was like that, too—carrying a real seventeen-year-old there underneath a foolish little girl—and so I could almost see that other person inside him. But I thought it would be wise not to let Sands know that I could see it.
    “Dump run!” he called out boyishly, and he started across the piles of stones with high-stepping strides that made him look like a clown.
    I had never liked the dump, even after the name was changed to “transfer station.” I hadn’t liked it, in part, because, on the few times my father let my mother drive, she would take me there in the pickup to discard those pieces of household trash she didn’t throw into the woods, and then she’d go into a small wooden house, a shack, really, where people brought old clothes and hung them on plastic hangers or left them folded on shelves. From my first memories, just about all my clothes had been transfer-station hand-me-downs,