“Right,” Red said. “And besides: we’re too independent, your mom and me. We’re the type who manage for ourselves.”
His children didn’t seem to find this so very admirable.
“Okay,” Jeannie said, “not a retirement community. But how about a condo? A garden apartment, maybe, out in Baltimore County.”
“Those places are made of cardboard,” Red said.
“Not all of them, Dad. Some are very well built.”
“And what would we do with the house, if we moved?”
“Well, sell it, I suppose.”
“Sell it! Who to? Nothing has sold in this city since the crash. It would stay on the market forever. You think I’m going to vacate my family home and let it go to rack and ruin?”
“Oh, Dad, we’d never let it—”
“Houses need humans,” Red said. “You all should know that. Oh, sure, humans cause wear and tear—scuffed floors and stopped-up toilets and such—but that’s nothing compared to what happens when a house is left on its own. It’s like the heart goes out of it. It sags, it slumps, it starts to lean toward the ground. I swear I can look at just the ridgepole of a house and tell if nobody’s living there. You think I’d do that to this place?”
“Well, sooner or later someone will buy it,” Jeannie said. “And meanwhile, I’ll stop in and check on it every single day. I’ll run the faucets. I’ll walk through the rooms. I’ll open all the windows.”
“That’s not the same,” Red said. “The house would know the difference.”
Abby said, “Maybe one of you kids would want to take it over! You could buy it from us for a dollar, or whatever way it’s done.”
This was met with silence. Her children were happily settled in their own homes, and Abby knew it.
“It’s served us so well,” she said wistfully. “Remember all our good times? I remember coming here when I was a girl. And then all those hours we spent on the porch when your father and I were courting. Remember, Red?”
He made an impatient, brushing-away gesture with one hand.
“I remember bringing Jeannie here from the hospital,” Abby said, “when she was three days old. I had her wrapped like a little burrito in the popcorn-stitch blanket Grandma Dalton had crocheted for Mandy, and I walked in the door saying, ‘This is your home, Jean Ann. This is where you’ll live, and you’re going to be so happy here!’ ”
Her eyes filled with tears. Her children looked down at their laps.
“Oh, well,” she said, and she gave a shaky laugh. “Listen to me, nattering on like this about something that can’t happen for years. Not while Clarence is alive.”
Red said, “Who?”
“Brenda. She means Brenda,” Amanda told him.
“It would be cruel to make Clarence move during his final days,” Abby said.
No one seemed to have the energy to continue the discussion.
Amanda talked Red into hiring a housekeeper who would also be willing to drive. Abby had never had a housekeeper, not even when she worked, but Amanda told her she would soon get used to it. “You’ll be a lady of leisure!” she said. “And any time you want to go someplace, Mrs. Girt will take you.”
“I’d only want to go someplace to get away from Mrs. Girt,” Abby said.
Amanda just laughed as if Abby had been joking, which she hadn’t.
Mrs. Girt was sixty-eight years old, a heavyset, cheerful woman who’d been laid off her job as a lunch lady and needed the extra income. She arrived at nine every morning, puttered around the house awhile, ineffectually tidying and dusting, and then set up the ironing board in the sunroom and watched TV while she ironed. There was not a whole lot of ironing required for two elderly people living on their own, but Amanda had instructed her just to keep herself occupied. Meanwhile, Abby stayed at the other end of the house, showing none of her usual interest in hearing every detail of a new acquaintance’s life story. Any time Abby made the slightest sound, Mrs. Girt would pop out of the sunroom and ask, “You okay? You need something? You want I should drive you somewheres?” Abby said it was intolerable. She complained to Red that she didn’t feel the house was her own anymore.
Still, she never asked why, exactly, this woman was felt to be necessary.
Two weeks into the job, Mrs. Girt forcibly removed a skillet from Abby’s hands and insisted on making her an omelet, during which time the iron she had abandoned set fire to a dish towel in the sunroom. No serious harm was done except to the dish towel, which was plain terry cloth from Target and hadn’t needed ironing in the first place, but that was the end of Mrs. Girt. Amanda said the next person they hired would have to be under forty. She suggested too that they might consider hiring a man, although she didn’t say why.
But Abby said, “No.”
“No?” Amanda said. “Oh. Okay. So, a woman.”
“No man, no woman. Nothing.”
“But, Mom—”
“I can’t!” Abby said. “I can’t stand it!” She started crying. “I can’t have some stranger sharing my house! I know you think I’m old, I know you think I’m feeble-minded, but this is making me miserable! I’d rather just go ahead and die!”
Jeannie said, “Mom, stop. Mom, please don’t cry. Oh, Mom, honey, we would never want you to be miserable.” She was crying too, and Red was trying to move both girls out of the way so he could get to Abby and hug her, and Stem was walking around in circles rummaging through his hair, which was what he always did when he was upset.
So: no man, no woman, nothing. Red and Abby were on their own again.
Till the tail end of June, when Abby was discovered wandering Bouton Road in her nightgown and Red hadn’t even noticed she was missing.
That was when Stem announced that he and Nora were moving in with them.
Well, certainly Amanda couldn’t have done it. She and Hugh and their teenage daughter led such busy lives that their corgi had to go to doggie day care every morning. And Jeannie’s family lived in the house Jeannie’s Hugh had grown up in, with Jeannie’s Hugh’s mother relocated to the guest room. They’d have needed to uproot Mrs. Angell and bring her along—a ludicrous notion. While Denny, needless to say, was out of the question.
Really, Stem should have been out of the question, too. Not only did he and Nora have three very active and demanding boys, but they were devoted to their little Craftsman house over on Harford Road, which they spent every spare moment lovingly restoring. It would have been cruel to ask them to leave it.
But Nora, at least, was home all day. And Stem was that kind of person, that mild, accepting kind of person who just seemed to take it for granted that life wasn’t always going to go exactly as he’d planned it. In fact, he kept thinking up new advantages to his proposal. The boys would see more of their grandparents! They could join the neighborhood swimming pool!
His sisters barely argued, once they’d absorbed the idea. “Are you sure?” they asked weakly. His parents put up more resistance. Red said, “Son, we can’t expect you to do that,” and Abby grew teary again. But you could see the wistfulness in their faces. Wouldn’t it be the perfect solution! And Stem said, firmly, “We’re coming. That’s that.” So it was settled.
They moved on a Saturday afternoon in early August. Stem and Jeannie’s Hugh, along with Miguel and Luis from work, loaded Stem’s pickup with suitcases and toy chests and a tangle of bikes and trikes and pedal cars and scooters. (Stem and Nora’s furniture was left behind for the renters, a family of Iraqi refugees sponsored by Nora’s church.) Meanwhile, Nora drove the three boys and their dog over to Red and Abby’s.
Nora was a beautiful woman who didn’t know she was beautiful. She had shoulder-length brown hair and a wide, placid, dreamy face, completely free of makeup. Generally she wore inexpensive cotton dresses that buttoned down the front, and when she walked her hem fluttered around her calves in a liquid, slow-motion way that made every man in sight stop dead in his tracks and stare. But Nora never noticed that.
She
parked her car down on the street like a guest, and she and the boys and the dog started up the steps toward the house—the boys and Heidi leaping and cavorting and falling all over themselves, Nora drifting serenely behind them. Red and Abby stood side by side waiting for them on the porch, because this was quite a moment, really. Petey shouted, “Hi, Grandma! Hi, Grandpa!” and Tommy said, “We’re going to live here now!” They’d been very excited ever since they heard the news. Nobody knew how Nora felt about it. At least outwardly, she was like Stem: she seemed to take things as they came. When she reached the porch, Red said, “Welcome!” and Abby stepped forward and hugged her. “Hello, Nora,” she said. “We’re so grateful to you for doing this.” Nora just smiled her slow, secret smile, revealing the two deep dimples in her cheeks.
The boys would sleep in the bunk-bed room. They raced up the stairs ahead of the grown-ups and threw themselves on the beds they always claimed when they stayed over. Stem and Nora would occupy Stem’s old room, diagonally across the hall. “Now, I’ve taken down all the posters and such,” Abby told Nora. “You two should feel free to hang whatever you like on the walls. And I’ve emptied the closet and the bureau. Will that give you enough storage space, do you think?”
“Oh, yes,” Nora said in her low, musical voice. It was the first time she had spoken since she’d arrived.
“I’m sorry the bed’s not here yet,” Abby said. “They can’t deliver it till Tuesday, so I’m afraid you’re going to have to make do with the twin beds until then.”
Nora just smiled again and wandered over to the bureau, where she set down her pocketbook. “For supper I’m fixing fried chicken,” she said.
Red said, “What?” and Abby told him, “Fried chicken!” At a lower volume, she said, “We love fried chicken, but you really don’t have to cook for us.”
“I enjoy cooking,” Nora said.
“Would you like Red to go to the grocery store for you?”
“Douglas is bringing groceries in the truck.”
Douglas was what she called Stem. It was his real name, which nobody in the family had used since he was two. They always looked blank for a moment when they heard it, but they could see why Nora might want a more grown-up name for her husband.
When she and Stem had announced that they were getting married, Abby had said, “Excuse me for asking, but will you be expecting … Douglas to join your church?” Just about all they knew about Nora was that she belonged to a fundamentalist church that was evidently a big part of her life. But Nora had said, “Oh, no. I don’t believe in dative evangelizing.” Abby had repeated this later to the girls: “She doesn’t believe in ‘dative evangelizing.’ ” As a result, they had assumed for a long time that Nora must not be very bright. Although she did hold a responsible job—medical assistant in a doctor’s office—before her children were born. And on occasion she came up with unsettlingly perceptive observations. Or were those accidental? She mystified them, really. Maybe now that she was living with them, they could finally figure her out.
Red and Abby left her upstairs to deal with the boys, who were walloping each other with pillows while Heidi, a flibbertigibbet collie, danced around them, barking hysterically. They went down and sat in the living room. Neither of them had any chores to do. They just sat looking at each other with their hands folded in their laps. Abby said, “Do you think this is how it will be all the rest of our lives?”
Red said, “What?”
Abby said, “Nothing.”
Stem and Jeannie’s Hugh arrived at the back door with the truck, and everybody went to unload—even the little boys, even Abby—except for Nora. Nora took delivery of the first item Stem brought in, an ice chest full of groceries, and she drew from it an apron folded on the very top. It was the kind that Red and Abby’s mothers wore in the 1940s, flowered cotton with a bib that buttoned at the back of the neck. She put it on and started cooking.
Over supper, there was a great deal of talk about accommodations. Abby kept wondering if one of the boys shouldn’t be moved to her study. “Maybe Petey, because he’s the oldest?” she asked. “Or Sammy, because he’s the youngest?”
“Or me, because I’m in the middle!” Tommy shouted.
“That’s okay,” Stem told Abby. “They were sharing one room at home, after all. They’re used to it.”
“I don’t know why it is,” Abby said, “but these last few years the house has just always seemed the wrong size. When your father and I are alone it’s too big, and when you all come to visit it’s too small.”
“We’ll be fine,” Stem said.
“Are you two talking about the dog?” Red asked.
“Dog?”
“Because I just don’t see how two dogs can occupy the same territory.”
“Oh, Red, of course they can,” Abby said. “Clarence is a pussycat; you know that.”
“Come again?”
“Clarence is on my bed right this minute!” Petey said. “And Heidi is on Sammy’s bed.”
Red overrode Petey’s last sentence, perhaps not realizing Petey was speaking. “My father was opposed to letting a dog in the house,” he said. “Dogs are hard on houses. Bad for the woodwork. He’d have made both those animals stay out in the backyard, and he’d have wondered why we owned them anyways unless they had some job to do.”
The grown-ups had heard this too many times to bother commenting, but Petey said, “Heidi’s got a job! Her job is making us happy.”
“She’d be better off herding sheep,” Red said.
“Can we get some sheep, then, Grandpa? Can we?”
“This chicken is delicious,” Abby told Nora.
“Thank you.”
“Red, isn’t the chicken delicious?”
“I’ll say! I’ve had two pieces and I’m thinking about a third.”
“You can’t have a third! It’s full of cholesterol!”
The telephone rang in the kitchen.
“Now, who on earth can that be?” Abby asked.
“Only one way to find out,” Red told her.
“Well, I’m just not going to answer. Everyone who’s anyone knows it’s the supper hour,” Abby said. But at the same time, she was pushing back her chair and standing up. She had never lost the conviction that someone might be needing her. She made her way to the kitchen, forcing two of the little boys to scoot their chairs in as she passed behind them.
“Hello?” they heard. “Hi, Denny!”
Stem and Red glanced toward the kitchen. Nora placed a dollop of spinach on Sammy’s plate, although he squirmed in protest.
“Well, nobody thought … What? Oh, don’t be silly. Nobody thought—”
“What’s for dessert?” Tommy asked his mother.
Stem said, “Ssh. Grandma’s on the phone.”
“Blueberry pie,” Nora said.
“Goody!”
“Yes, of course we would have,” Abby said. A pause. “Now, that is not true, Denny! That is simply not … Hello?”
After a moment, they heard the latching sound of the receiver settling back into its wall mount. Abby reappeared in the kitchen doorway.
“Well, that was Denny,” she told them. “He’s coming in tonight on the twelve-thirty-eight train, but he says just to leave the door unlocked and he’ll catch a cab from the station.”
“Huh! He’d damn well better,” Red said, “because I won’t be up that late.”
“Well, maybe you should meet him, Red.”
“Why’s that?”
“I’ll go,” Stem told her.
“Oh, I think maybe your father, dear.”
There was a silence.
“What was his problem?” Red asked finally.
“Problem?” Abby said. “Well, not a problem, exactly. He just doesn’t understand why we didn’t ask him to come stay.”
Even Nora looked surprised.
“Ask Denny!” Red said. “Would he have done it?”
“He says he would have. He says he’s coming now, regardless
.”
Abby had been standing in the doorway all this time, but now she made her way back to her chair and fell into it heavily, as if the trip had exhausted her. “He found out from Jeannie that you were moving in,” she told Stem. “He thinks he should have been consulted. He says the house doesn’t have enough bedrooms for you all; it should have been him instead.”
Nora started reaching for people’s plates and stacking them, not making a sound.
“What wasn’t true?” Red asked Abby.
“Excuse me?”
“You said, ‘That’s not true, Denny.’ ”
“See how he does?” Abby asked Stem. “Half the time he’s deaf as a post and then it turns out he’s heard something all the way off in the kitchen.”
“What wasn’t true, Abby?” Red asked.
“Oh,” Abby said airily, “you know. Just the usual.” She placed her silverware neatly across her plate and passed the plate to Nora. “He says he doesn’t know why we had Stem come when … you know. He says Stem is not a Whitshank.”
There was another silence, during which Nora rose in one fluid motion, still without a sound, and bore the stack of plates out to the kitchen.
Actually, it was true that Stem was not a Whitshank. But only in the most literal sense.
People tended to forget the fact, but Stem was the son of a tile layer known as Lonesome O’Brian. Lawrence O’Brian, really; but like most tilers he was sort of standoffish, fond of working by himself and keeping his own counsel, and so Lonesome was the name everybody called him. Red always said Lonesome was the best tile man going, although certainly not the fastest.
The fact that Lonesome had a son seemed incongruous. People tended to look at the man—tall and cadaverously thin, that translucent kind of blond where you can see the plates of his skull—and picture him living like a hermit: no wife, no kids, no friends. Well, they were right about the wife and perhaps even the friends, but he did have this toddler named Douglas. Several times when his sitting arrangements fell through, he brought Douglas in to work with him. This was against the rules, but since the two of them never had any cause to be in a hard-hat area, Red let it pass. Lonesome would head straight to whatever kitchen or bathroom he was working on, and Douglas would scurry after him on his short little legs. Not once did Lonesome look back to see if Douglas was keeping up; nor did Douglas complain or ask him to slow down. They would settle in their chosen room, door tightly closed, not a peep from them all morning. At lunchtime they would emerge, Douglas scurrying behind as before, and eat their sandwiches with the other men, but somewhat to the side. Douglas was so young that he still drank from a spouted cup. He was a waifish, homely child, lacking the dimpled cuteness that you would expect in someone that age. His hair was almost white, cut short and prickly all over his head, and his eyes were a very light blue, pinkish around the rims. All his clothes were too big for him. They seemed to be wearing him; he was only an afterthought. His trousers were folded up at the bottoms several times over. The shoulders of his red jacket jutted out from his spindly frame, the elastic cuffs hiding all but his miniature fingertips, which were slightly powdered-looking like his father’s—an occupational side effect.