The Handyman

He wouldn’t have come here at all if he hadn’t been invited by college fraternity brothers who, as coincidences go, were also from founding families of this little burg and who invited him up here—again just for the hell of it. He wasn’t actually all that fond of either Alden Shern or Trevor Cole. Both were pretty full of themselves and about being from wealthy families that were among the early Massachusetts settlers. Who in his Harvard fraternity wasn’t from a wealthy family—or even from early American stock somewhere? And the two who were from here were still tied to this hick town. Big fish in a small harbor, and still expecting to get away with that in Cambridge.

Well, Alden wasn’t so bad. Dark and brooding. He didn’t get snotty when he wasn’t around Trevor. It was Trevor Cole—the blond, brick-built, glad-handing, big talker football star—who irritated Eddie the most. Not the least because, despite everything he felt, Eddie felt drawn to Trevor. As a person, of course, there wasn’t anything more in it than that. But Trevor was such a self-confident macho dude and had that great build and movie star looks. Everyone bowed down before him. That irritated Eddie too. He was the one with the most successful family coming out of Shernhaven. He was the one with the worldliness. Not much he hadn’t tried, although he was running straight now. He’d be inheriting a business that swamped everything in Shernhaven in size and worth. And he was training to take that on.

As Eddie drove past the first house on the bluff, he knew why he’d taken so long to come to Shernhaven. It wasn’t just because most of the Geers had moved away. It was about the crazy old Geer woman everyone in the family talked about in hushed tones. She’d been the last real Geer here and had married twice before the Civil War, having wedded “down” both times—once to a German and, worse, later to an Irish Catholic—and had a reputation herself that the Geers twittered about behind their fans in those days.