Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

foot five months ago when he had that part-time job with Garber Contracting. The foot was close to healed. Kirk wasn’t limping all that much now except when he wanted to get out of doing something, like taking out the trash, or shoveling the driveway when there was enough snow that Keisha was probably going to get stuck.
    He hadn’t always been this way.
    Okay, she had to admit, he’d never been a genius. He wasn’t the sharpest tooth in the rotary saw. He didn’t get a lot of jokes, unless they involved boobs, and once asked how they got the bones out of boneless chicken wings. But Kirk seemed like a good guy when she met him thirteen months ago. She was coming out of Penny’s house after telling her that her aborted child, had she lived and grown to adulthood, would have ended up in a very unhappy marriage, and saw that her front right tire was flat. She’d never had a flat tire before. She’d had cars
stolen
before, but never a flat. Keisha didn’t know if there was a spare in the trunk, and even if there was, she didn’t have the first clue how to put it on. She stared at that tire the way she used to stare at formulas scribbled on the blackboard in high school chemistry class.
    She didn’t have money to call a tow truck. Well, she had Penny’s hundred, but she needed that for groceries, and the rent, which was overdue. That was probably why she started to cry.
    Across the street, a construction company was replacing a rotting porch on one of Milford’s century-old homes. One of the workers cutting some boards for the decking noticed Keisha’s plight, took his finger off the trigger of the saw, and strolled over.
    Introduced himself as Kirk Nicholson.
    Kirk looked in the trunk and found no spare. But there was a jack, which he used to get the flat off the car. He said his boss, a nice guy named Glen, would probably let him take his lunch break early. He’d take the flat over to the nearby Firestone store in his 2003 Ford F-150—how he kept it so immaculate when it was a working vehicle amazed Keisha—so she could get a new tire put on the rim. He knew a guy there, could give her a deal, wholesale price. Shouldn’t take that long. Then he’d give her a lift back and put the tire on for her.
    That’s the way it happened.
    While they were waiting at the Firestone store, Keisha learned that Kirk’s mother, who raised him on her own, had died recently of a heart attack. He had no brothers or sisters. He told her about Glen, the man he was working for, whose wife Sheila had died in a bad car accident, and how he was raising their daughter on his own. Then he talked about his truck, that he’d got a great deal on it, he’d done a number of repairs on it himself, and was saving up to buy some high-end rims for it.
    Keisha was more interested in learning whether he was seeing anyone. She asked him something really clever, like “Does your girlfriend like your truck?” At which point he said he wasn’t seeing anybody right now. He was patient, and courteous, and never put a move on her once. When he was done putting the new tire on her car and had the jack stored back in the trunk, Keisha blurted out that he was welcome to come over for dinner.
    That very night.
    He said yeah, okay.
    Kirk even seemed to like Matthew, nine at the time, who sat at the table with them while Keisha served spaghetti and meatballs. Gave the boy a ride in his truck, even let Matthew show how good he was at one of those Mario games. After the boy went to bed at ten, Keisha cracked two beers and she and Kirk sat on the couch and watched that show with Charlie Sheen, the one he was on before he went nuts and got fired.
    “He falls asleep real fast,” Keisha said. “And he’s a
sound
sleeper.”
    Kirk wasn’t so slow that he didn’t understand what she was getting at. He started sleeping over that night. Within a month, he’d let his apartment go and had moved in with Keisha and Matthew.
    It was perfect. At first. So nice to have a man around the house, reaching over and feeling someone in the bed next to you, bumping into each other in the kitchen, curling up on the couch to watch TV. Keisha kept waiting for him to hand her his share of the rent. She wasn’t even expecting half. After all, she had Matthew. She was looking for just a third.
    Finally, after he’d been there a month and a half, she worked up the nerve to ask.
    “Work’s kinda slow,” he said. “Glen only needed me two days this week. And didn’t