5. Friday
CHAPTER 5
FRIDAY
M aggie was gleefully setting up the chart of accounts in Blue Harbor’s brand-new online accounting system when she heard a knock on the front door. If her brain had begun to generate audio hallucinations, maybe she really should try to cut back on the coffee. No one actually came to Aunt Peg’s cottage. For one thing, it didn’t have a street address. And when her staff needed her, they texted her on the shiny new reception-having phone that she had picked up in Asheville. Gen Z.
Still, Maggie was trying to remember to stretch more, so she took the opportunity to stand and attempt to roll the stiffness from her shoulders. Parton, who had been asleep flat on his side under the desk, opened his visible eye and glared up at her when her foot jostled his back paw.
“My sincere apologies.”
He huffed and re-closed his eye.
Maggie had almost immediately given in to the apparently irresistible impulse to address the dog like he was a burnout roommate who was very late on rent instead of, you know, a dog. Since she had enough to worry about, she had also decided not to think too deeply about what that said re: her current mental state.
Maggie grabbed her phone to pull up the “10 Min. Beginner Morning Stretch for Flexibility Yoga Back Hip Arms Anxiety Premature Aging” SEO-optimized YouTube video she’d taken to attempting as often as she remembered when a text from Teddy popped on the screen.
Your doorbell is broken.
Her doorbell?
Then she hallucinated the knocking sound again.
Except this time, Parton barked, sprang up, and almost knocked her over in his zealous sprint toward the living room. He made a noise that sounded like a howling wolf if it had a sore throat and then reverted to barking quite pointedly at the front door.
Maggie, who could take a hint, went after him.
Actually opening the door turned out to be a bit trickier than she was used to what with the fierce guard dog preparing to take down the intruders who had politely alerted him to their presence. Maggie cracked it open and poked her head out.
“Hey,” her brother said as though he was just returning from a convenience store run and not arriving unannounced from several hours away. “Surprise!”
“Well, Parton seems to be doing alright.”
Teddy was balancing precariously on the back legs of his chair, leaning away from the kitchen table, and reaching back to scratch the dog behind the ears. Parton was too busy methodically deconstructing his brand new plush Get Well Soon dinosaur to react to the glut of attention.
“Yeah, no lasting damage.” Maggie took a swig of one of the tallboys Teddy had brought from Charlotte. “You can still take him home with you, you know.”
“I most certainly cannot.”
“Where’s The Incredible Hulk?”
“She’s bunking with the roommates.” To Maggie’s relief, Teddy returned all four chair legs squarely to the floor before picking up his beer.
“So. You just came to check up on Parton?”
“That and I figured you might need a drink.” His tone was so neutral she couldn’t tell if he was joking.
“Did you consider calling ahead?”
“No.” Teddy smiled at her angelically. “I know how you hate surprises.”
Maggie sighed the deep sigh of sibling exasperation. It was a little rusty in her throat, given how little time they’d spent in each other’s company over the past decade. “You look good, Teddy Bear. Though, I’m not sure about the beard.”
“Mom hates it,” he said in a way that indicated this was more a feature than a bug.
“Of course she does. You’re hiding your beautiful face.”
“Aw shucks.”
“I, on the other hand, don’t share that objection. I remain on the fence.”
“Well, let me know when you come to a decision.”
“Of course.”
Teddy tipped his head back to finish off his beer, set it down on the table with great finality, and pushed back from the table. “It’s good to see you, M&M.”
“It’s good to see you t—” before she could finish, Teddy swept her up into a bear hug. Maggie tensed instinctively, but he held tight, and she relaxed into the embrace. Teddy did always give the best hugs. So she let him hold her there for a minute, her not-so-little brother.
“Hey, so…” Teddy began, his chin resting on Maggie’s head. “Have you been sleeping on the couch?”
“What?”
“It looks like someone’s been sleeping on the couch.”
He was looking past Maggie into the living room, where two full-sized pillows were stacked on the couch next to a neatly folded quilt.
Maggie took a step back and looked over her shoulder. “Maybe I already have a house guest. That’s why you should always call head.”
“Do you already have a house guest?” He held her out at arm’s length in front of him, hands on her upper arms, and forced her to meet his eyes. His expression was a combination of skeptical and disapproving that she found disconcerting in the extreme coming from her dumbass of a younger brother.
“…No.”
“So you’ve been sleeping on the couch.”
“…Yes.”
“For, like, two weeks?”
“Didn’t you sleep on your buddy Rob’s couch for, like, a year?” Maggie asked, grasping at a distant straw.
“Are you implying that at twenty-three I was the kind of responsible adult you aspire to someday become?”
To her dismay, Maggie discovered that all of her straws were now well out of reach.
“That’s what I thought,” Teddy said when she didn’t respond. And then he let the sentence hang, his most diabolical little brother trick.
“It just…sleeping in Aunt Peg’s room feels weird.”
“Well, it’s a good thing Mom sent me, then.”
“I knew it!” Maggie poked at his chest with somewhat more force than she’d intended.
“Ouch.” Teddy rubbed at his sternum. “She just…suggested that it might be nice if I helped you go through Aunt Peg’s things.”
“Mmmhmm.”
“Because Aunt Peg was kind of a mess.” He raised a brow and eyed the living room. Every flat surface other than the floor was covered in knickknacks, and the floor was covered in overlapping woven rugs.
“So Mom sent you .”
“Wow. Poked and then stabbed in the heart.” Teddy clutched at his chest and mimed pulling a knife out and tossing it aside. “I don’t advertise this because I don’t want to undermine all the work I put into growing this devil-may-care man bun, but I will have you know that Rob got me into home organizing Instagram last year. I’m here to share my expertise.”
“We’ll see,” Maggie said. She turned away, picking up the empty cans from the table and moving to rinse them out in the sink. “But, I’ve decided,” she said over the sound of running water, “Hurricane Kathleen was right about the beard. It’s a no from me.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” he said, in a tone that strongly suggested he would not.
Teddy was a man on a mission. A man singularly dedicated to his task.
“Does this spark joy?” he asked, holding up an olive-colored cargo vest he’d pulled out of a dresser in Aunt Peg’s bedroom.
“No.”
“Bag,” Teddy ordered. Maggie held out the half-filled black trash bag, and Teddy tossed in the melancholy outwear.
“Nothing sparks joy, Teddy.”
“Well, that’s a little melodramatic.”
Maggie rolled her eyes. “None of Aunt Peg’s clothes spark joy.”
“Great, we’ll get rid of everything,” he said, pulling out an entire stack of fleece jackets.
“We can’t get rid of everything!”
“Why?”
Maggie groaned, dropped the trash bag, and fell backwards onto the bed.
“Oh right. Of course.”
“We can’t just get rid of everything.” Maggie directed her argument to the ceiling.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Ok then I’m just going to keep bagging old sweaters. Stop me if anything sparks joy.”
Maggie didn’t stop him. She lay there, watching Teddy ruthlessly fill bag after bag with Aunt Peg’s clothes until there was nothing left but a single Blue Harbor branded navy puffer vest hanging in the closet.
“Up,” he ordered.
“What?” She just wanted to stay put. Possibly for a year.
“Get up.”
Maggie got up. As soon as she did, Teddy grabbed the comforter by the corner and pulled it off the bed.
“Bag,” he directed.
“Teddy!” Maggie protested, more for the sake of it than for any specific reason. Miss Lucille had gone through the cottage before Maggie arrived and reportedly taken everything she’d wanted with her in a single re-usable grocery tote.
“Bag. It has to go.”
“It’s fine!”
“It’s falling apart, but even if it weren’t, we’re redecorating. You live here now.”
“Temporarily.”
“Yes, you live here now, temporarily. We will go into town and get you some bedding that is not old enough to see R rated movies.”
Maggie rolled her eyes and held open an empty trash bag.
Dinnertime came and went, and still Teddy forced Maggie to unpack her own suitcases into the bedroom’s closet and dresser, and then go through Aunt Peg’s bathroom cabinets, decorative art and trinkets, books, photo albums, impressive collection of Garden & Gun magazine, even the non-perishables in the pantry. He left her sorting through half-empty packages of coffee grounds, so he could run over to the nurse’s cabin for extra trash bags while everyone was at dinner. He came back with most of a box of Heftys and a dumbstruck look on his face. Nurse April must not have been eating in the Dining Hall tonight after all.
By 7 p.m., they had twenty-two trash bags divided into three piles, organized by Teddy in descending order of size: Donate, Trash, and For Mom. They’d texted their mother whenever they’d come across something that might be considered an heirloom, joy-sparking or not. It was mostly old porcelain figurines that had originally belonged to Maggie’s grandmother. As a child, Maggie had always thought their eyes tracked her around the room in a way that suggested they just might come alive at night, but it was possible that they were now worth something. She was, however, not shocked when her mother said to throw them away. (Teddy had actually put them in the Donate pile, so they would soon be on their way to haunt another loving home.)
Teddy called Miss Lucille twice to check in, but she staunchly maintained that she didn’t “want any of Peggy’s junk. God love her but that woman never met a knickknack she didn’t think ‘might just come in handy someday.’ There is a reason we did not cohabitate.”
Maggie had, in the end, found a few things that sparked joy. There was a shelf’s worth of annotated novels and a second stuffed with board games, her aunt’s books about local flora and fauna, and the framed camp photos that Aunt Peg had deposited around the house like friendly ghosts of summers past. Maggie’s favorite was a photograph they’d found pushed to the back of a bookshelf — a young Aunt Peg, lanky in a one-piece swimsuit and shorts, hand shading her face, whistle around her neck, lifeguard rescue buoy under her arm. She’d moved that one on to the desk in Aunt Peg’s office. Or, the office as Teddy insisted when she refused to call it her office. It wasn’t her office. But, she supposed, it wasn’t Aunt Peg’s anymore either.
When everything was sorted, the two of them lay on the floor of the living room, dusty and tired.
“You okay?” Teddy asked, staring up at the ceiling.
“Yeah, fine,” Maggie answered automatically. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her brother turn to look at her, but he didn’t say anything more. He just waited. “It feels so empty in here now. Her entire life is just…in trash bags.”
“Her things are in trash bags. Her unimportant things. Like the creepy little statues.” He paused. “Unless they make a break for it after sundown.” Maggie turned onto her side to face him so that he had a clear view when she rolled her eyes. “But her life is Blue Harbor. And Miss Lucille and Doggy Parton and?—”
“And Parton almost died!” Maggie interrupted.
“It was an accident. And you saved him,” Teddy said gently. “Stop fishing for compliments. The point is, her entire life isn’t in trash bags. It’s everything she did. It’s everyone she loved.”
“Did you know she wrote me letters? Like, on paper. I just sent her postcards back. I found them all in her office the other day. In a stack in one of the desk drawers.”
“Did you keep the letters?”
“Yeah.” Maggie rolled onto her back again. “I really liked getting those letters.”
Teddy turned his face away to stare at the ceiling again like he was giving her privacy. “I’m going to miss her, too.”
“This sucks.”
“It really sucks.”
They lay there for a while, five minutes maybe, or fifteen, until Teddy’s stomach growled. He pulled himself onto his knees and then slapped his hands to his thighs. The sharp smack seemed to pierce the heavy mood. “Want to go pick up a pepperoni pizza and a six-pack and lose at Yahtzee?”
Maggie sat up, crossing her legs into a pretzel. “I want to go pick up a veggie pizza and a six-pack and win at Yahtzee.”
“I can make two of those things happen.” Teddy smirked, and Maggie went to shower off some of the accumulated dust while he Yelped the highest rated pizza place in Hendersonville. When she’d dried off, she called in an order for two pies, a six pack, and, in a nod to nutrition, an aspirational side salad.