Chapter 8 #4
The third place did have an elevator, and it was of an acceptable age, but so many dribs and drabs of belongings were crammed inside that it was hard to get any real sense of it.
“I’ll be honest,” the super said. “The previous tenant died. His kids will have his stuff moved out within the next two weeks, though, and I’m going to get it cleaned then and give it a fresh coat of paint. ”
Amanda sent Helen a dispirited glance, and Helen turned the corners of her mouth down.
A mole-colored cardigan sagged on the back of a rocker.
A mug sat on the cluttered coffee table with a teabag tag trailing out of it.
But Red seemed unfazed. He walked through the living room to the kitchen and said, “Look at this: he had everything arranged so he didn’t have to get up from the table once he’d sat down to breakfast.”
Sure enough, the rickety-looking card table held a toaster, an electric kettle, and a clock radio, all aligned against the wall, with a day-by-day pill organizer in the center where most people would have placed a vase of flowers.
In the bedroom, Red said, “There’s a TV you can watch from the bed.
” The TV was the heavy, old-fashioned kind, deeper than it was wide, and it stood on the low bureau across from the foot of the bed.
“Watch the late news and then go straight to sleep,” Red noted approvingly, although no TV had ever been seen in his bedroom on Bouton Road.
But maybe that had been Abby’s choosing.
“This seems like a real convenient place for a guy making do on his own,” Red said.
Amanda said, “Yes, but …” and she and Helen exchanged another glance.
“But picture it minus the furnishings,” Helen suggested. “The TV and such will be gone, remember.”
“I could put my set there, though,” Red said.
“Of course you could. But let’s focus on the apartment itself. Do you like the layout? Is it spacious enough? The rooms seem a little small to me. And what about the kitchen?”
“Kitchen is good. Reach across the table, grab your toast straight out of the toaster. Take your heart pills. Turn on the weather report.”
“Yes … The floor is linoleum, did you notice?”
“Hmm? Floor looks fine. I think my folks had a kitchen floor like that in our first house.”
And that settled it. As Amanda told the others later, it appeared to be a question of imagination. Red’s imagination: he had none. He just seemed glad that someone else had arranged things so he wouldn’t need to.
Well, it did make things easier for his children. And they could always do some refurbishing after he’d moved in.
Helen was going to handle the house sale as well.
She came in with them after the apartment tour to discuss the arrangements for that, with Stem and Denny joining in.
“Such a comfortable old place this is,” she said, looking around the living room.
“And of course the porch is a huge draw. It’s going to be a pleasure to show. ”
Everyone except Red looked encouraged. Red was gazing toward a nearby newspaper as if he wished he could be reading it.
“But it is still a sluggish market,” Helen said. “And what I’ve learned is, buyers in these times expect perfection. We’ll want to spruce the place up some.”
“Spruce it up?” Red said. “What more could they possibly ask for? Every downstairs room but the kitchen’s got double pocket doors.”
“Oh, yes, I love the—”
“And it’s not often you see an entrance hall like ours, two-story. Or these open transoms with the handsawed fretwork.”
“But it isn’t air-conditioned,” Helen said.
Red said, “Oh, God,” and he slumped in his seat.
“These days—” Helen said.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“It won’t be so hard,” Denny told him. “They’ve got these mini-duct systems now where you won’t need to tear up the walls.”
Red said, “Who do you think you’re talking to? I know all about those systems.”
Denny shrugged.
“Also,” Helen said. She cleared her throat. She said, “This would be your choice entirely, but you might want to consider his-and-her master bathrooms.”
Red raised his head. He said, “Consider what?”
“I wouldn’t bring it up except you do own a contracting firm, so it wouldn’t be such an expense.
That master bathroom you have now is gigantic.
You could easily divide it in two, with a shower stall in between that’s accessible from both sides.
I just saw the most dazzling shower stall, with river-pebble flooring and multiple rainmaker nozzles. ”
Red said, “When my father built this house, it had only the one bathroom off the upstairs hall.”
“Well, that was back in the—”
“Then he added the downstairs powder room after we moved in, and we thought we were something special.”
“Yes, you certainly need a—”
“The master bathroom itself he didn’t put in till my sister and I were in high school. What he’d say if he heard about his-and-hers, I can’t even begin to imagine.”
“It’s customary, though, in the finer homes these days. As I’m sure you must have learned in your business.”
“He himself grew up with just a privy,” Red said. He turned to the others. “I bet you didn’t know that about your grandfather, did you?”
They did not. They knew next to nothing about their grandfather, in fact.
“Well, a privy,” Helen said with a laugh. “That would be a hard sell!”
“So we’ll forget about the his-and-hers,” Red told her. “Now, how long do you expect it will take to find a buyer?”
“Oh, once you’ve installed the air conditioning, and maybe upgraded your kitchen counters—”
“Kitchen counters!”
But then he clamped his lips tightly, as if reminding himself not to be difficult.
“It does seem the market’s started looking up,” Helen said. “There was a time there when places were languishing for a year or more, but lately I’ve been averaging, oh, just four to six months, with our more desirable properties.”
“In four to six months it will go to seed,” Red told her. “You know it’s not good for a house to sit empty. It will molder; it will get all forlorn; it will break my heart.”
Amanda said, “Oh, Dad, we would never let that happen. We’ll come and, I don’t know, throw family picnics here or something.”
Red just gazed at her miserably, his eyes so empty of light that he seemed almost sightless.
“Be honest,” Jeannie said to Amanda. “Does any little part of you feel relieved that Mom died so suddenly?”
“You mean on account of her lapses,” Amanda said.
“They would only have gotten worse; we can be pretty sure of that. Whatever they were. And Dad would be trying to look after her, and so would Nora; and Denny would have thought of some excuse to leave by then.”
“But maybe it was just, oh, a circulation problem or something, and the doctors could have fixed it.”
“That’s not very likely,” Jeannie said.
They were up in Red’s bedroom on a rainy Sunday afternoon, packing cartons while the others watched a baseball game downstairs. Both of them wore scruffy clothes, and Amanda’s chin was smudged with newspaper ink.
All week they had been packing, any free moment they could find.
Separate islands of belongings had begun rising here and there in the house as people put in their requests: Abby’s crafts supplies and her sewing machine in the upstairs hall for Nora, the good china packed in a barrel in the dining room for Amanda.
(Red would keep the everyday china, which they were leaving in the cupboard until just before moving day.) Color-coded stickers dotted the furniture—a few pieces for Red’s apartment, a few more for Stem and Jeannie and Amanda, and the vast majority for the Salvation Army.
Jeannie and Amanda dragged a filled carton between them out to the hall, where one of the boys could come get it later. Then Jeannie unfolded another carton and ran tape across the bottom flaps. “If I know Mom,” she said, “she’d have refused any surgery anyhow.”
“It’s true,” Amanda said. “Her advance directive basically asked us to put her out on an ice floe if she developed so much as a hangnail.” She was collecting framed photos from the top of Abby’s bureau. “I’m going to pack these up for Dad,” she told Jeannie.
“Will he have space for them?”
“Oh, maybe not.”
She studied the oldest photo—a snapshot of the four of them laughing on the beach, Amanda barely a teenager and the rest of them still children. “We look like we were having such a good time,” she said.
“We were having a good time.”
“Well, yes. But things could get awfully fraught, now and then.”
“At the funeral,” Jeannie said, “Marilee Hodges told me, ‘I always used to envy you and that family of yours. The bunch of you out on your porch playing Michigan poker for toothpicks, and your two brothers so tall and good-looking, and that macho red pickup your dad used to drive with the four of you kids rattling around in the rear.’ ”
“Marilee Hodges was a ninny,” Amanda said.
“Goodness, what brought that on?”
“It was hell riding in that truck bed. I doubt it was even legal. And I believe children should have their own rooms. And Mom could be so insensitive, so clueless and obtuse. Like that time she sent Denny for psychological testing and then told all of us his results.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Supposedly one of those inkblot thingies showed he’d been disappointed in his early childhood by a woman. ‘What woman could that have been?’ Mom kept asking us. ‘He didn’t know any women!’ ”
“I don’t remember a thing about it.”
“It was pretty clear she loved him best,” Amanda said, “even though he drove her crazy.”
“You’re just saying that because you’ve got only one child,” Jeannie told her. “Mothers don’t love children best; they love them—”
“—differently, is all,” Amanda finished for her. “Yes, yes, I know.” Then she held up a photo of Stem at age four or five. “Would Nora like this, do you think?”
Jeannie squinted at it. “Put it in her box,” she suggested.
“And what do I do with this one of Denny?”
“Does he have a box?”
“He says he doesn’t want anything.”