Chapter Four
Milling around the snack table with coffee, tea, and cookies were the people I had come here specifically to meet and befriend, but suddenly I had more urgent business.
I went up to my apartment to get what I needed.
The term they use for what I’d had to do before moving is “downsize,” which is a sanitized way of saying I’d had to give everything I used to own to someone else.
But these supplies were keepers, nonnegotiably.
I came back down and found Father Frank’s truck.
It wasn’t hard. In the first place, I had reason to remember it.
At least the back of it. In the second, though it’s true that Texas is lousy with pickup trucks, I wasn’t the only resident at Vista View who didn’t drive anymore.
There were more empty parking spots than full ones.
I got to work.
A voice interrupted almost immediately. “Can I help you?” This was the first thing he ever said to me.
Shit. “Oh. Sorry. Am I not allowed to be here?” I couldn’t see why the parking lot would be off-limits, but it wasn’t surprising.
Vista View seemed to be full of pointless rules, as if we were children, fast and heedless and too inexperienced to have learned any life lessons yet, rather than the opposite.
We were not allowed bird feeders on our patios (might draw mice), candles in our apartments (might start fires), guns or swords (I was alarmed they needed this rule), noise after ten p.m. (they did not need this rule), plus the ban on rugs (which I’d first assumed incorrectly was a typo for drugs).
So I should have foreseen that the parking lot would be verboten.
But the voice clarified, “I didn’t mean ‘Can I help you?’ as in ‘You’re not allowed to be here.’ I meant ‘Can I help you?’ as in ‘Do you need any assistance I might be able to provide?’”
He had a British accent and triangles of white hair straining toward the light from behind each ear. The rest of his head was naked, his face too—not just clean-shaven but kind, eager, and wide-open.
“It seems,” he continued, “as if you intend to wash this pickup.”
“I do.” Essentially, the first thing I ever said to him.
“So I thought you might like help.” He rolled up the sleeves of his button-down and grabbed the other sponge. Then he said, “Moth.”
I looked around. “Where?”
“Here.” He gestured at himself and managed to dribble soap and water from his shoulders to his knees. “Moth Holden. Pleasure.”
“Your name is Moth?”
“It’s short for Timothy.”
“Have you considered Tim?”
“Tim?” He tented the hand that wasn’t holding a sponge on his chest and made appalled eyes at me.
“Pepper Mills,” I admitted. Reluctantly.
He saluted at once. “Sergeant Pepper.”
Very few people manage, upon introduction, to refrain from making a joke about my name, but this one was less irritating than most. I was grateful for a cultural reference I wasn’t too old to get.
Or maybe it’s just hard to take offense at anything coming out of a man with hair like a clematis. At least he hadn’t made a pun.
As with so many things, this was Roger’s fault.
My name used to be Pepper Adler. My father’s name was Basil Adler.
My mother’s name was Rosemary Adler, née Adelman.
Their names weren’t why they fell in love and decided to spend their lives together, but it was why the friends who’d introduced them did so in the first place.
Spicy names had worked for them, so when their only child arrived, they named me Pepper.
Basil, Rosemary, and Pepper Adler. A family.
Maybe it was the power of suggestion or maybe just resignation to fate, but after a series of jobs that went nowhere, my father found one at the diner around the corner from our house and kept it for fifty years.
Because of our names, being a line cook felt like a calling to him, and anyway, back then it was the sort of job that meant we were never too worried about money and my mother could stay home with me, the sort of job that maybe didn’t leave a lot left over but still supported an entire family in what was at the time Brooklyn and is still Brooklyn, though no longer the one where you could live with your wife and kid on a luncheonette counter cook’s salary.
This is one example of how the world can change completely in less than a lifetime.
Another is how if I met Roger today, I wouldn’t have had to take his name, thus making a mockery of my own.
In fact, if I met Roger today, I wouldn’t have married him in the first place.
With more wisdom and experience, I would have been able to see that the ability to make you laugh is not the most important quality in a life partner and that the butterflies he occasioned in my middle were a precursor to chrysalises—or something similarly full of promise but not actual flight—rather than the other way around.
It was a different time, though. I had not yet possessed wisdom or experience.
I didn’t know anyone who didn’t change her maiden name.
That’s how I became Pepper Mills: unfortunate timing.
Over the years, I have heard every inappropriate grinding/shaking/spicing/tasting joke you’d care to come up with, and none of them are funny because puns aren’t and because really the only reasonable response to “I’m Pepper Mills.
Nice to meet you” ought to be “How do you do, Pepper. I’m” whoever you are.
But manners are yet another way the world is eroding while I go on living in it, and that one has been going on for quite some time.
A man who has named himself after a bug, however, does not get to cast aspersions. Instead, he ventured, “This pickup is not yours, I presume?”
Because I was too old to drive a truck? Too feeble to climb into one? Too addled to have a license? Never mind that that last one had been deemed the case, I prepared to be offended. “What makes you say that?”
“There’s a clerical collar looped over the rearview.”
I looked up at it. So there was. “Maybe I’m a priest,” I said.
But he shook his head. “There’s a mezuzah outside your front door.”
“Because my granddaughter made it in Hebrew school, not because—” I began, then interrupted myself. “Wait a minute. How do you know what’s outside my door?”
“I’m your next-door neighbor,” Moth said. “I was looking for an excuse to say hello, welcome you to the neighborhood—that is to say, floor seven—when I saw you emerge from your flat with buckets and cleaning supplies, and Bob’s your uncle, I had my opportunity.”
I made a face. “I don’t understand that saying.”
“No, it’s never really crossed the pond, has it? It means et voilà!”
“If you have to translate English to French for an American to understand, that’s a good hint your idioms are imprecise,” I advised. “And I know what it means. I just don’t know why. Who’s Bob?”
“Next I attend the Palace of Westminster, I shall inquire and report back. Meantime, however, might I ask why we are washing a stranger’s pickup?”
“He’s not a stranger. He’s Father Frank, an Episcopal priest from Brooklyn.”
“Yes, I see. Though a follow-up, if I may?”
“Sure.”
“Why are we washing Father Frank, an Episcopal priest from Brooklyn’s pickup?”
“It’s dirty,” I said curtly, then remembered I was trying to make friends. “And we had a run-in a few months ago, so I owe him. He’s helping out upstairs, and I thought it might brighten his day to come down later to a nice clean truck.”
“Well, he certainly deserves it,” Moth said. “Father Frank gives cracking lectures.”
I could only assume this was high praise. “Also, I find washing cars relaxing.”
He looked half skeptical, half intrigued. You might say “nonplussed” if you knew what it meant, which most people do not. (It’s not their fault, I always explained to my students—it’s a confusing word—but I didn’t make it up so it’s not my fault either.)
“You are not who one thinks of when one thinks of someone washing a car,” he said.
Awkward phrasing. What he meant by “someone” was “girls.” What he meant was that photographs (and ads and posters and films) of car washers usually picture a very attractive young woman with a preponderance of what we used to call bosom, who is barely (in both senses of the word) clad, and generally sporting high heels, too much makeup, and a complicated hairdo.
I can’t tell you why this is alluring, but I can tell you that heels, makeup, and complicated hair are not conducive to getting a car clean.
Though I suppose a clean car is hardly the point.
When it is, though, you could do worse than finding an old woman to do it.
We’ve perfected the art of cleaning after most of a lifetime spent doing it behind husbands and kids.
We’re detail oriented with no careers or small children to distract us, and we have time to dedicate to the task.
And while our admittedly slightly weakened musculature, aching joints, and diminished eyesight might make it hard to keep up with the needs of a whole house anymore, a car is small.
No sofa cushions to lift, no stairs to negotiate, no toilet to scrub.
Even the largest car is bite-sized compared to a house, so really pretty satisfying to clean.
It is also true that I’ve had a lot of practice. “I’m retired now,” I said, “but I washed a lot of cars in my day.”
He tried to wring water out onto the ground but mostly wrung it onto his shoes. “You were a professional car washer?”
“High school teacher.”
“I always confuse the two.”
“Common mistake.”
“And quite a coincidence. I was also a high school teacher.” In apparent wonder at this serendipity, he hugged his sponge, realized what he’d done, and removed it to frown at the damp patch he’d stamped into his shirt. “Thirty-nine years. The last twenty-eight of them at Herbert Hoover.”