Chapter 8 #2
He got annoyed right back. “If you don’t want your siblings to worry, then don’t act so fucking clueless and weird!
” he told me. “Do you see yourself? You’re wearing shorts in the middle of winter and you have a rash all over your legs.
You’re going back to a house that isn’t yours, that you don’t pay rent on, that’s full of rat shit, with a man who’s… what?” he challenged. “What is he?”
“He’s my friend and I thought you were, too.”
“Fuck. I am, and I’m sorry.”
I said that he didn’t need to be, because he was only saying the same things that most of my siblings had also told me, many times over the years in one form or another.
They got exasperated and angry, and they frequently told me to grow up.
“After today, I’m not going to wear shorts again until spring,” I assured him, and he agreed that it was a good idea.
He apologized again but he really didn’t need to, because why would you say sorry for telling the truth?
“Hey,” I heard Theo call a few hours later.
“Grace? What smells so good?” I heard him walking toward the kitchen, his footsteps echoing a little now that the carpet was gone, the rugs had been tossed, the trash had been removed, and there were several more holes in the interior walls that allowed sound to pass through.
“I’m making dinner,” I said when he walked in.
“I found my dad’s old camping stove in my mom’s garage.
He used it a few times when he tried to take us into the wilderness, back in the days when he still ate greasy foods and tasty sauces.
I washed it.” That had been Nicola’s first step, one of many in the process she’d laid out for this meal.
“Wash the cooktop really well, with a sponge and soap,” she’d ordered. “How often do you clean your sponges?”
I had gotten a new one instead of answering, and then she’d walked me through the rest of the process. Now we were about to have linguini carbonara.
“Wow,” he said, looking at the wok that I’d borrowed from my mom and she wouldn’t miss for a while. He sounded amazed. “You made pasta?”
“Yes, and I have good news. You can feel free to eat it because I got the report about the water, and it’s fine. There’s no antimony in it to make us sick and give us weird symptoms. The only rash we’ll have to worry about is from poison ivy.”
“That’s wonderful news. Did I get the report, too?
How are your legs?” He sat down at the table, which we’d brought outside and scrubbed for a third time so that it really was clean, even to my biggest sister’s standards.
Then he checked his email for the water report but soon enough, he was answering patients and their loved ones instead of reading the information about toxic metals or the lack thereof.
It was definitely a lack, and I’d been glad.
In a moment, Theo said that he’d be right back and left to make a call.
I sat down to eat and I was impressed. My sister had texted at least four times to ask how the pasta had turned out and I answered her after I’d finished, saying it had tasted great and I would make it again because I could refer to all the videos she’d sent of herself also preparing it for her family, to show me how it was done.
She answered that they’d all liked it a lot too, and then she asked, “What did Theo think of his dinner?”
I looked at his plate, which was full of linguini that was no longer steaming and was looking more than a little congealed. Was I an honest person, like the interviewer at the bank had asked me? I’d said I would have to get back to her, but now I was leaning toward an answer of “no.”
“He was very impressed and thought it was great,” I wrote to Nicola.
At least the first part was true, and it made her very happy to hear it.
I cleaned up by washing the dishes with soap and a sponge, in water that was free of Cryptosporidium.
Then I went into the dining room to continue my attack.
That wallpaper was coming down no matter what, no matter if I had to burn the whole cabin along with it.
In a little while, I became aware of someone saying my name. I took off the mask and put down my sledgehammer, and I untaped the plastic I’d put up around the door to contain the plaster dust.
“You’re back at it?” Theo asked.
“I had some feelings to work out.” I hefted the hammer, which did a good job with emotions.
“That pasta was delicious. Thank you for making it.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t sit down with you,” he told me, but I shrugged and some debris fell off my shoulders.
“I made it to eat, not so we could have a conversation. That would have been nice, though,” I said.
“It would have been and I’m very sorry, because it probably seemed like I hadn’t cared what you’d done.”
Now I shook my head and more chunks of wall fell from me. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Do you want to wash off so we could hang out now?”
I nodded, then retaped the plastic barrier to stop the dust from spreading as I removed most of my clothes.
When he saw what I was doing, he removed himself.
That plastic was dirty but still very see-through, after all, and he didn’t want to see.
Then I had to shower before I joined him, too, and there were all kinds of unfortunate things in my hair despite the kerchief I’d tied over it.
My family had removed most of the furniture due to its inability to be cleaned, so what was left were the wooden pieces that we’d scrubbed.
We also had beds, which were new because Theo had bought different mattresses and had them delivered after three of my sisters expressed a lot of horror over what we were sleeping on.
What that meant was that now, there were few places to sit. I found him in his room on his new mattress, reclined and looking tired. “The pasta was delicious,” he said.
“Are you going to sleep?”
“I shouldn’t have lain down,” he admitted. “Regina supervised another gym visit and it killed me.”
After overindulging on Thanksgiving, she was taking it out on everyone else and enforcing regular exercise for the three of them. Pinar had also texted several complaints and Regina had invited me to come along too, which I was considering.
He patted the bed and I joined him there, thinking of when I’d slept in it before. This was a new mattress but it felt just as comfortable.
“I can see your face,” he said, and reached to touch my wet curls. “You looked like you’d been dipped in flour before.”
“I’m going to make you a promise,” I told him. “No matter where I live and however bad the stains are on the walls, I will never put up wallpaper.”
“Regina asked me about that today.”
“How does she know how I feel about wallpaper? That woman is a sorceress!”
“No, she was asking about where we’re going to live during the renovation,” he explained.
I tried to think how she might have talked to Dion, since he’d said almost the same thing to me. “What did you tell her?” I asked.
“Having met Regina, you know that I couldn’t tell her very much.
Her husband handles relocations for people moving to Detroit so she had a lot of suggestions.
Strong suggestions,” he said, and smiled a little.
“She thought that I could rent one of the apartments that her husband manages or maybe I should get corporate housing instead. A place that could be furnished and could have a shorter lease term,” he explained.
“I would want to get back in here as soon as possible.”
I nodded because that made sense. It was his house, after all.
“What about you?”
“I was thinking about that today,” I answered, and there was a silence.
“And?” he prompted. “What did you decide? Could you move back to your mom’s house? Could you stay with one of your sisters? Doesn’t Juliet live in a mansion?”
She did, which Theo would see for himself when we went to celebrate Christmas there.
My sister had convinced our mom that we would all fit much, much better into the house with a dining room that could seat at least fifty rather than eating off rickety tables that were squeezed into a room meant for ten.
“Her house is like a museum,” I agreed. “It has been in Beckett’s family for a long time, and they were good about keeping it up.”
He nodded a little glumly. “I wish that my family…no, let’s get back to where you’re going,” he said.
“As I mentioned, I’ve been thinking about it. It’s nowhere good,” I replied.
“You mean—are you talking about returning to that flophouse with the hypodermic needles in the sink?”
“What? No, I don’t want to be there again,” I answered. “That isn’t even possible anymore, since it was condemned. That’s happened a few times to places I’ve lived.”
Theo inhaled and held it for a moment, before expelling the air from his lungs. “Could you please explain what you meant about going nowhere good?”
“I meant that I don’t seem to be making much progress.
I always used to think of things like a line,” I said, and held up my forearm and hand at an angle of about twenty-seven degrees.
“Like this. I thought that first, you were born, and then things went up. I’ve found that it’s not true, because it’s more like this for a lot of people.
” Now I undulated my wrist, making waves with my hand.
“That seems right. If you’re talking about happiness or progress, then I’ve also found that they’re usually not linear.” He mimicked my movement. “Up and down, but going forward.”
“No, I haven’t been waving, either. I’ve been doing this.” I folded my arm to my chest. “Do you see what I mean? I want to go up, or I want a wave. But I’m not going anywhere at all.”
“Ok. Ok,” he repeated, and started nodding. “You mean that your life isn’t moving the way you want it to.”
“It makes me scared to think that I’ll be old and alone in a place with bears.”
“Bears? No, that won’t happen.”