Chapter 3 #3
“This screen was bagging halfway out of its frame! And the powder-room faucet is dripping, have you noticed?”
“Oh, dear,” Amanda said, and she prepared to follow Elise on into the house.
But Stem said, “It’s like he’s lost interest,” which stopped her in her tracks.
“Like he doesn’t care, almost,” Stem said. “I said, ‘Dad, your front screen’s loose,’ and he said, ‘I can’t keep on top of every last little thing, goddammit!’ ”
This was huge: for Red to snap at Stem. Stem had always been his favorite.
Amanda said, “Maybe this place is getting to be too much for him.”
“Not only that, but Mom left a kettle on the stove the other day, and when Nora stopped by, the kettle was whistling full-blast and Dad was writing checks at the dining-room table, totally unaware.”
“He didn’t hear the kettle?”
“Evidently not.”
“That kettle stabs my eardrums,” Amanda said. “It may have been what turned him deaf in the first place.”
“I’m beginning to think they shouldn’t be living alone,” Stem told her.
“Really. Shouldn’t they.”
And she walked past him into the house with a thoughtful look on her face.
The next evening, there was a family meeting.
Stem, Jeannie, and Amanda just happened to drop in; no spouses and no children.
Stem looked suspiciously spruced up, while Amanda was as perfectly coiffed and lipsticked as always in the tailored gray pantsuit she’d worn to the office.
Only Jeannie had made no effort; she wore her usual T-shirt and rumpled khakis, and her horsetail of long black hair was straggling out of its scrunchie.
Abby was thrilled. When she’d seated them all in the living room, she said, “Isn’t this nice?
Just like the old days! Not that I don’t love to see your families too, of course—”
Red said, “What’s up?”
“Well,” Amanda said, “we’ve been thinking about the house.”
“What about it?”
“We’re thinking it’s a lot to look after, what with you and Mom getting older.”
“I could look after this house with one hand tied behind my back,” Red said.
You could tell from the pause that followed that his children were considering whether to take issue with this. Surprisingly, it was Abby who came to their aid. “Well, of course you can, sweetie,” she said, “but don’t you think it’s time you gave yourself a rest?”
“A dress!”
His children half laughed, half groaned.
“You see what I have to put up with,” Abby told them. “He will not wear his hearing aids! And then when he tries to fake it, he makes the most unlikely guesses. He’s just … perverse! I tell him I want to go to the farmers’ market and he says, ‘You’re joining the army?’ ”
“It’s not my fault if you mumble,” Red said.
Abby gave an audible sigh.
“Let’s stick to the subject,” Amanda said briskly. “Mom, Dad: we’re thinking you might want to move.”
“Move!” Red and Abby cried together.
“What with Dad’s heart, and Mom not driving anymore … we’re thinking maybe a retirement community. Wouldn’t that be the answer?”
“Retirement community, huh,” Red said. “That’s for old people. That’s where all those snooty old ladies go when their husbands die. You think we’d be happy in a place like that? You think they’d be glad to see us?”
“Of course they’d be glad, Dad. You’ve probably remodeled all their houses for them.”
“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.