Chapter 2

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Tool isn’t the guy next door’s birth name. His real name happens to be Michael James Danning. But Marcus and I love to call him Tool because this is how he acts, and what he looks like: big, handsome, sometimes dumb sounding. I know very little about him: recently moved from Phoenix to Pittsburgh to take care of his Uncle Craig Danning, who lives in the house next door and has always kept to himself. Uncle Craig suffers from open-angle glaucoma and he’s slowly going blind. Craig uses Tool as a…tool, of course. Tool’s the same age as me: thirty-four; a year younger than Marcus.