Chapter 3 #3
“Still, keep your shoes on.” He looked at the puddle forming around my foot. It was also nowhere near the size of the one in my mom’s front yard. “I’ll try to find something your size.”
He returned with basketball shorts and a pair of slippers. “The shorts are mine and the slippers belonged to my grandpa,” he told me. “He was much shorter than I am and smaller in general, so they might fit you better.”
I went to the bathroom to change. The shorts fell off when I stepped into them, but I appreciated that they were dry and I’d never minded too much about sizes.
My sisters ranged from a little taller than me (Juliet) to a lot shorter (Nicola and Addie) and I’d never been bothered about how their clothes fit me when I took them.
The long shorts did make me consider that Theo was also a lot larger than I was, much taller than JuJu, too.
He appeared to be standing on a ladder when he was next to Regina, but her personality made her formidable.
I caught a glimpse of myself and considered that he and I were very different in terms of looks, too.
My hair was strawberry blonde, the lightest shade out of my siblings, and we all had blue eyes but mine were also very light.
In terms of my features, I thought that I looked a lot like Juliet, especially when I pulled on the corkscrew curls around my face to make them straight.
Juliet was very pretty, so that was good.
Theo was darker than I was. His skin was olive, whereas mine was more like an olive that had been soaked in bleach for several weeks until it was paper white.
He had brown hair, a dark color that was shiny and kind of floppy.
Regina had been saying that he needed a haircut, and she’d been saying that a lot. His eyes were brown and—
“Grace? Are you all right in there?”
I opened the door. “Hello.”
He seemed relieved. “I didn’t hear a thud or yell but I was afraid that you got hurt.”
“No, I’m fine.”
He looked into the sink, which was mostly orange with water stains, and into the toilet, which was a murky color and I didn’t spend time thinking about why. “This room is terrible.”
“I’ve seen worse. There are no hypodermic needles,” I said. “It must be a relief to only worry about tetanus in your house.”
“Right, that’s wonderful. Let’s eat.”
He had cleared his kitchen table, or at least, he had cleared a portion of it so that there was room for the take-out containers, two plates, and two forks. “I washed these,” he assured me. “I don’t have anything to drink, though. I’m concerned about the well where I draw my water.”
“That’s fine. If I get thirsty, I can stand under your eaves and open my mouth.”
“No, please don’t do that.” He was opening the containers and because we’d driven so far, the food wasn’t very warm anymore. But it was very good and it was good to be here, too.
I smiled at him across the table, glad about all of it. After a second of staring at me, he smiled back.
“This doesn’t bother you,” he stated, and slowly moved his hand around to encompass the room.
“I’ve seen worse. I’ve lived in worse, and so has my sister Sophie. She did it because she was so sad and lonely. Does that make sense?”
“It does,” he said, and his eyes moved over the kitchen.
It was a really big space with a tall ceiling, but there didn’t seem to be any lights up there.
There were a few table lamps on the counter and one next to my plate, but they didn’t do much to cut through the shadows.
Still, I could see how much stuff was piled around—and not just dishes and pans, but also engine parts, dead plants, a bicycle wheel, and a lot of other things that my sisters probably would have claimed did not belong in a kitchen or maybe even inside a house.
I could double-check with them to see. Everything looked fuzzy, too, even when you got very close.
That was because it was all covered with a layer of thick, grey dust.
“You appear to have a hoarding problem and it also seems that you’ve never met a rag and some cleaning spray,” I mentioned. “But even with the dirty sheets and sleeping with nine different men, I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think this is how I would choose live or that I did this to myself,” he translated, and I nodded. “No, this junk isn’t mine. Just like the mess at the office mostly belonged to my former partner, this is also something that I inherited. This cabin was my grandpa’s and he left it to me.”
“Not to your mom and dad?”
“No, he didn’t like them very much. He loved my mom, his daughter,” Theo amended. “He didn’t like that she took off to marry my dad and he didn’t like the profession they chose. He thought that it wouldn’t work and he was right, because we lived at or near abject poverty.”
“You had horses.”
“We did, and they’re expensive. Everyone who says, ‘I want a horse!’ is either six years old or doesn’t understand economics.
They’re eating machines. They get sick. If you want to show them, the fees…
anyway, if I say that I grew up riding, it sounds very snooty.
If I say, ‘I grew up riding, and my sister and I used to share the milk that we got at the food bank,’ then you get more of the picture.
She would eat her cereal first,” he explained, “and then she would pass me the bowl so that I could put mine in and not waste the milk.”
“We weren’t like that,” I said. “My dad had a good job and I heard from Sophie that our grandparents helped them a lot. Like this.” Now I gestured around.
“You grew up in a house like this?”
“No, because Nicola made us clean. I mean that they gave my parents a house like your grandpa gave this cabin to you. Why didn’t he give it to your sister, too?”
He finished chewing the bite of spring roll in his mouth. “My sister passed away about thirteen years ago. No, fourteen.” He shook his head. “Time goes by so quickly.”
I nodded in understanding because suddenly, before I even knew what was happening, I had turned twenty-three.
I wasn’t a math whiz like Sophie but I knew how to work numbers, because I kept careful track of my secret stash of money.
I mentally moved some digits around and figured out a fact about his history.
“You moved into the apartment with the nine guys when your sister died?”
“That was when I left home,” he agreed. “There was no reason for me to stay any longer.” He poked around in the container of lo mein. “Did you get enough to eat?”
I had. “Can I see the rest of your house?”
“Are you interested in early nineteenth century architecture or just in havoc?” he asked, smiling.
“Neither.” I was interested in him, though. I wanted to see the place where he lived and learn more about him. “Will you show me?”
First we cleaned up, which meant putting our leftovers into the yellow refrigerator and throwing the empty containers into a bag of garbage that he was trying to collect.
Then he did show me around. “I’m afraid to go upstairs, because I’m not sure how secure the floor is up there,” he said.
“My grandpa declined a lot during his final years and he wouldn’t let anyone into the cabin to clean or to help him, not even me. ”
It did seem as if it would have taken several years to reach the level of disarray and filth that I saw in this place—well, a big crowd might have done the trick, too.
I bet that the other renters in my current home could have destroyed it in no time at all, since there were so many of them and their personal habits were generally bad.
The best room in the cabin was where Theo slept. It was the cleanest by a mile, and also the neatest. Not actually neat, not by the standards that Nicola lived by, but a lot better than the rest.
“I’m trying to start here and work outwards,” he explained, and then took out his phone and checked the screen. “Sorry. I need to take this call.”
He’d done that several times during our dinner, too, and it was all stuff about patients. He walked through the bedroom door and then continued to walk away so that he could speak to this person privately, away from my ears.
The old walls here were good and thick, because I could hardly hear him at all.
Or maybe, I thought, the trash and dust muffled the sound?
It might have had something to do with physics.
I amused myself by considering that and looking around more.
A row of hooks next to his dresser displayed the shirts that I saw on the days when he was working in the office and the top drawer of his dresser held a straight row of carefully balled socks, next to a small pile of folded underwear.
They were also neat, but unlike his shirts, they were old and pretty worn.
I checked and saw that I had put mine on today, and they were in the same condition as Theo’s.
So, he had new shirts, old underwear and socks, and one extra pair of shoes on the floor under the hangers with his pants.
He must have done ok as a doctor…I could check, but I was pretty sure about that.
His grandpa had paid for his education, he’d said, so he didn’t have those debts.
Were there lots of taxes on so much land?
I wasn’t sure about that, either. I had seen inside his refrigerator and it hadn’t been full of fancy jars of olives or the cuts of meat that had made my dad whistle at the price per pound.
Now I looked in the adjoining bathroom and found that the cabinet held a lot of spiders and dirt, but no bottles of expensive cologne.
His car in the driveway was old, and Regina had already told me that he never took vacations.
What did he spend his salary on? Was he saving it all? I wondered how he invested.
I wandered back into the bedroom. Sure, he had cleaned and his stuff was here, but it still seemed as if this space belonged to someone else.
There were pictures in frames like my grandparents had in their cottage and I picked one up.
The man sternly eying the photographer looked a lot like Theo, the same handsome face that was handsome because it wasn’t perfect.
The woman with him, and in several other pictures, was pretty in a way that reminded me of my sister Addie.
It wasn’t only because of her features, but also because she looked nice and fun.
They must have been his grandparents, but I didn’t see any pictures of their daughter, Theo’s mom.
I guess they had been angry at her, as he had said.
I hadn’t slept much the night before, after falling into the puddle (the big puddle).
There had been some kind of hullabaloo in my house and the police had been there for a while.
Every time I had been about to doze off, another siren had started wailing in the street underneath my window.
That all explained why furniture was broken in the common room and the fact that the refrigerator was on its side this morning, and it had also made for a long night.
I had spent those extra hours thinking, mostly about what I would do when my temp job was over and I returned to my previous work.
I’d already gotten a text about coming back.
Anyway, I was tired. I kicked off his grandpa’s slippers and lay down on the bed, which was large and surprised me with how comfortable it was. Maybe after sharing with nine other men, now Theo liked clean sheets because these appeared to be. It was nicer this way.
The ceiling high above me was so dark that it felt like looking up into the night sky.
I thought more about my old job and my new one, and I listened to the quiet murmur of his voice.
This cabin was dirty and it was also cluttered.
The land was isolated and it had a lot of puddles that were hard to see.
I liked his house a lot. I closed my eyes and felt very content.