Free Redhanded by Michael Cadnum Page A

in a friendly, Miss Manners voice, Dad holding open the door.
    Dad cuts spaghetti with his knife and fork and doesn’t roll it up on the tines, which I have always thought is one of the major joys of spaghetti eating. He’s careful about little details, holding an extra napkin in one hand, dabbing at his lips after every other bite. He’s even fussy about the bills he can’t pay, keeping the credit card slips in tidy order in his wallet.
    I couldn’t come into a restaurant these days without realizing what it would be like to wash the dishes, and I eyed the orders of cannelloni being bused past, thinking—I bet that cheese sticks to the plate. The china was Homer Laughlin Seville, dishes that looked more expensive than they were.
    â€œDaddy didn’t come right out and say he needed me to help with the inventory,” Mom was saying. “But I got the hint. Mom wants to help, but her cataracts are getting too bad. Years of desert UV radiation, I guess.” The three of us used to go to Stinson Beach for picnics, and Mom would get excited if she saw a lesser scaup or a surf scoter or any other slightly uncommon bird. She was pleased once when I started keeping a life list of birds I had seen, trying to be just like her.
    â€œWhat’s there to inventory?” I asked. I had a dish of spaghetti and meatballs, Donofrio’s a restaurant right out of a gangster movie. Coach Loquesto advised that pasta was an important food group, “a plate now and then,” but that sugar was death. When I thought about my fight the next day my appetite withered.
    â€œWhat’s there to inventory,” she echoed, a system she had patented, mocking you by repeating your words. “He sells blue-rock river gravel for forty years and you wonder what he has to count up before he can sell the business.”
    Dad took a long moment, tearing off a piece of the world’s toughest garlic bread, but then he chimed in, “I thought your dad was organized.”
    My grandfather owns four skip loaders, a thirty-five-year old John Deere tractor, fire clay, Portland cement, gravel, river sand, bathroom grouting, forty pounds of wallpaper paste—which no one uses anymore—shelves of latex and high-gloss paint, and not only does it have to be counted up, you can’t just throw stuff away and write it off as a loss on your taxes anymore.
    At least, this is the story Mom told. “You have to have environmental protection experts,” she concluded. “They come out all dressed up like astronauts and take away the gallons of paint thinner in a special truck.”
    â€œSo he’s retiring,” said Dad, plunging ahead to the human element.
    Her eyes were alight, and she leaned on her elbows, excited about counting ninepenny nails. Dad was already starting to look a little tired—she wears him out.
    My grandfather was one more reason I felt compelled to learn how to throw a left hook. I had grown up hearing stories about how he played on the practice squad for the Chicago Bears: Tommy Carroway, wide receiver, too small to be able to take professional weight tackles, but a man who could chop wood twelve hours a day, swim the Russian River in full flood, and who had gone to Vero Beach to try out for the Dodgers four years in a row, as a third baseman, never quite making the team.
    In recent years Grandpa had once surprised a burglar in the deluxe extra-wide trailer he and Grandma lived in at the edge of the desert. He hit the criminal with a straight right to the throat, and the man nearly died. Grandpa would tell the story when asked, whenever he visited, which wasn’t that often—he was a busy man.
    But you could see the tough-guy glint in his eye when he talked about landing the blow, and the glow of affectionate approval in Mom’s, just as you could hear Dad’s bland “Gosh what a story,” and realize that this response did not measure up.
    Dad had