Free The Things I Want Most by Richard Miniter

us after a bad divorce, and he was always neat and clean and paid on time. In the late evenings he read quietly in his room or took long walks through the orchards. Once or twice a month he and I would have a drink together in the barroom, but most of the time we never saw him. He’d come in the guest entrance, go to his room to shower and change, and then go back out for dinner. On weekends he visited a sister in Albany.
    I looked at Sue. “Mike?”
    â€œYeah,” she said, looking down and tapping one hand on her desk, “the noise.”
    â€œOkay,” I sighed, “I’ll get some ads back up, and I have some people on the waiting list.”
    Sue made a little offhand gesture with her head. “Phyllis complained, too.”
    I winced. As quiet and circumspect as Tom was, Phyllis was even less of a bother. She’d been in one of the corner rooms for almost two years. In fact, she had moved in while we were still painting and plumbing. She was working on her master’s locally and working part-time.
    Six of the inn rooms were on the upper level and opened on a large common foyer, and although the old thick plaster walls kept much noise from moving room to room up there, I knew sound carried well from floor to floor. Mike was right under Phyllis.
    What we were selling were nicely finished rooms, cooking facilities, a laundry room on the premises, the barroom lounge, offroad parking, coffee and tea in the morning, but most of all cleanliness, security, and quiet. Lots of quiet. And our guests usually stayed with us for a long time in consequence.
    â€œHas she talked about moving, too?”
    â€œShe hinted at it.”
    This time I flinched. I didn’t want to be two rooms down. It took a long time to find someone suitable.
    Then whatever patience I had left suddenly collapsed and I was very angry with the situation and at Sue for getting us into it, for involving us with Harbour, with this child. She might be willing to stay with this program, but I sure wasn’t. In fact, I had a long stream of bitter and sarcastic remarks ready and felt like kicking something, so after shifting back and forth on my feet for a minute or so, trying to calm down, I turned my back and stormed off outside.
    The hill the house stood on had been terraced—landscaped, that is—years ago with hundreds and hundreds of feet of dry-laid stone walls, each originally about five or six feet high but now tumbledown and overgrown with wild rose and sumac. One of my interminable projects was a foot-by-foot excavation of these ruins, digging the rough quarried stones out from under a yard or so of soil and knotty roots and relaying the old walls. I always had a spot going that I could work on in odd moments, and now I dragged my long-handled shears, five-foot pry bar, shovel, pick, and oak plank out of the barn, banged them down next to a wall, and mindlessly started digging.
    It was dark when I gave up, slumping against the stone, covered head to toe in sticky black soil and more resigned now than angry. Mike was loud, churlish, impossibly demanding of time, hopelessly, endlessly juvenile, and he was costing us money, but I realized that unless and until Sue herself rethought this thing on her own, there just wouldn’t be much sense in my saying one damn thing.
    Besides, that point couldn’t be all that far off. Her business was suffering, and that was very much her baby, too.

    But then Mike started school, and for a brief time Sue and I switched roles.
    Not having firm arrangements made for the school year had been, as Kathy had predicted, the last of the children’s homes objections. Sue handled it by explaining that she was self-employed and that if Mike was home with her for a couple of days that was all to the good. Meanwhile, she left it to the professionals at Harbour to work out whatever problem there was with the local school district.
    We had never had a special-needs child before,