He put his bottle down and leaned forward, fixing me with his sharp gaze. I often saw amusement in those eyes, but only seldom did I see warmth, and that night in 2004 wasn’t one of them.

“About your reading yesterday, Craig. Do you know what is meant by ‘the daughters of the uncircumcised’?”

“Not really,” I said.

“I didn’t think so, but you still got the right tone of anger and lamentation in your voice. Do you know what lamentation is, by the way?”

“Crying and stuff.”

He nodded. “But you didn’t overdo it. You didn’t ham it up. That was good. A reader is a carrier, not a creator. Does Reverend Mooney help you with your pronunciation?”

“Yes, sir, sometimes.”

Mr. Harrigan drank some more Sprite and rose, leaning on his cane. “Tell him it’s Ashkelon, not Ass-kelon. I found that unintentionally funny, but I have a very low sense of humor. Shall we have a trial run Wednesday, at three? Are you out of school by then?”

I got out of Harlow Elementary at two-thirty. “Yes, sir. Three would be fine.”

“Shall we say until four? Or is that too late?”

“That works,” Dad said. He sounded bemused by the whole thing. “We don’t eat until six. I like to watch the local news.”

“Doesn’t that play hell with your digestion?”

Dad laughed, although I don’t really think Mr. Harrigan was joking. “Sometimes it does. I’m not a fan of Mr. Bush.”

“He is a bit of a fool,” Mr. Harrigan agreed, “but at least he’s surrounded himself with men who understand business. Three on Wednesday, Craig, and don’t be late. I have no patience with tardiness.”

“Nothing risqué, either,” Dad said. “Time enough for that when he’s older.”

Mr. Harrigan also promised this, but I suppose men who understand business also understand that promises are easy to discard, being as how giving them is free. There was certainly nothing risqué in Heart of Darkness, which was the first book I read for him. When we finished, Mr. Harrigan asked me if I understood it. I don’t think he was trying to tutor me; he was just curious.

“Not a whole lot,” I said, “but that guy Kurtz was pretty crazy. I got that much.”

There was nothing risqué in the next book, either—Silas Marner was just a bore-a-thon, in my humble opinion. The third one, however, was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and that was certainly an eye-opener. It was 2006 when I was introduced to Constance Chatterley and her randy gamekeeper. I was ten. All these years later I can still remember the verses of “The Old Rugged Cross,” and just as vividly recall Mellors stroking the lady and murmuring “Tha’rt nice.” How he treated her is a good thing for boys to learn, and a good thing to remember.

“Do you understand what you just read?” Mr. Harrigan asked me after one particularly steamy passage. Again, just curious.

“No,” I said, but that wasn’t strictly true. I understood a lot more of what was going on between Ollie Mellors and Connie Chatterley in the woods than I did about what was going on between Marlow and Kurtz down there in the Belgian Congo. Sex is hard to figure out—something I learned even before I got to college—but crazy is even harder.

“Fine,” Mr. Harrigan said, “but if your father asks what we’re reading, I suggest you tell him Dombey and Son. Which we’re going to read next, anyway.”

My father never did ask—about that one, anyway—and I was relieved when we moved on to Dombey, which was the first adult novel I remember really liking. I didn’t want to lie to my dad, it would have made me feel horrible, although I’m sure Mr. Harrigan would have had no problem with it.

* * *

Mr. Harrigan liked me to read to him because his eyes tired easily. He probably didn’t need me to weed his flowers; Pete Bostwick, who mowed his acre or so of lawn, would have been happy to do that, I think. And Edna Grogan, his housekeeper, would have been happy to dust his large collection of antique snow-globes and glass paperweights, but that was my job. He mostly just liked having me around. He never told me that until shortly before he died, but I knew it. I just didn’t know why, and am not sure I do now.

Once, when we were coming back from dinner at Marcel’s in the Rock, my dad said, very abruptly: “Does Harrigan ever touch you in a way you don’t like?”

I was years from even being able to grow a shadow mustache, but I knew what he was asking; we had learned about “stranger danger” and “inappropriate touching” in the third grade, for God’s sake.

“Do you mean does he grope me? No! Jeez, Dad, he’s not gay.”

“All right. Don’t get all mad about it, Craigster. I had to ask. Because you’re up there a lot.”

“If he was groping me, he could at least send me two-dollar scratch tickets,” I said, and that made Dad laugh.

Thirty dollars a week was about what I made, and Dad insisted I put at least twenty of it in my college savings account. Which I did, although I considered it mega-stupid; when even being a teenager seems an age away, college might as well be in another lifetime. Ten bucks a week was still a fortune. I spent some of it on burgers and shakes at the Howie’s Market lunch counter, most of it on old paperbacks at Dahlie’s Used Books in Gates Falls. The ones I bought weren’t heavy going, like the ones I read to Mr. Harrigan (even Lady Chatterley was heavy when Constance and Mellors weren’t steaming the place up). I liked crime novels and westerns like Shoot-Out at Gila Bend and Hot Lead Trail. Reading to Mr. Harrigan was work. Not sweat-labor, but work. A book like One Monday We Killed Them All, by John D. MacDonald, was pure pleasure. I told myself I ought to save up the money that didn’t go into the college fund for one of the new Apple phones that went on sale in the summer of 2007, but they were expensive, like six hundred bucks, and at ten dollars a week, that would take me over a year. And when you’re just eleven going on twelve, a year is a very long time.

Besides, those old paperbacks with their colorful covers called to me.

* * *

On Christmas morning of 2007, three years after I started working for Mr. Harrigan and two years before he died, there was only one package for me under the tree, and my dad told me to save it for last, after he had duly admired the paisley vest, the slippers, and the briar pipe I’d gotten him. With that out of the way, I tore off the wrappings on my one present, and shrieked with delight when I saw he’d gotten me exactly what I’d been lusting for: an iPhone that did so many different things it made my father’s car-phone look like an antique.

Things have changed a lot since then. Now it’s the iPhone my father gave me for Christmas in 2007 that’s the antique, like the five-family party line he told me about from back when he was a kid. There’s been so many changes, so many advances, and they happened so fast. My Christmas iPhone had just sixteen apps, and they came pre-loaded. One of them was YouTube, because back then Apple and YouTube were friends (that changed). One was called SMS, which was primitive text messaging (no emojis—a word not yet invented—unless you made them yourself). There was a weather app that was usually wrong. But you could make phone calls from something small enough to carry in your hip pocket, and even better, there was Safari, which linked you to the outside world. When you grew up in a no-stoplight, dirt-road town like Harlow, the outside world was a strange and tempting place, and you longed to touch it in a way network TV couldn’t match. At least I did. All these things were at your fingertips, courtesy of AT&T and Steve Jobs.