Chapter 16 Beckett
She called me on a Tuesday morning.
"If you were going to say a sentence in my car, say it."
Then she hung up, because she was not a person who could be on a phone for a thing like that. I stood in my grandfather's kitchen with a dish towel in my hand.
I called back and said, "I'll come there. Your building can't move. I can."
A few seconds of nothing. "There are terms," she said.
"Good."
"I'm serious. There are going to be terms and they're going to be written down."
I boxed the house on the Wednesday.
It took four hours. I've moved plenty of times and never once had it take that long. There is nothing of mine in that house. Shirts, two duffels of gear, a bed.
It was the kitchen that got me. Four coffee cans I consolidated into one in October.
I could not throw away the three empty ones, so they went in a box.
A bottle opener from a beer company that stopped existing in 1981.
A rubber band ball a man built over forty years, one at a time, off the newspaper.
And the mugs. Walt closed the diner in 2016 and brought nine of them home in a milk crate, the heavy kind that does not break. I wrapped them one at a time. I got to the seventh one and had to put my hands on the edge of the sink for a minute.
Then I opened the drawer and took out the cards.
The soup one is third from the top. Grease all the way through the paper, one corner gone. A brown ring from the bottom of a cup. At the bottom, in different ink in a hand that had gotten shakier, Beck: low and slow. If it's boiling you're mad about something.
The rest went in the box. That one went in the inside pocket of my jacket, flat against the chest. It went in with a folded exam form and a grey square of paper the size of a stamp. I zipped it and stood there a second with my hand over the outside of the pocket like a man at an airport.
Auggie came at two with his own truck and no questions, which lasted about ten minutes.
"Okay, I have to. Where are we taking it?"
"Storage on Sheridan."
"And where are you taking you?"
"Federal."
Auggie set down the box he was holding, entirely, on the porch. He looked at me.
"You're moving in with the hot vet."
"Don't call her that."
"I've called her that for four months and you have never once told me not to." He picked the box back up.
"It's a logistical arrangement."
"Beckett. My enormous friend." He went down the steps sideways.
"I've known you two years. You have lived in three cities and I've never seen you hang a picture.
Now you're loading a truck with a dead man's coffee cans to go and live in a house with a hundred animals in it.
You're saying the word logistical at me like it's a shield.
I can see straight through it and I've never been happier in my life. "
"Are you going to help or narrate?"
"I can do both."
He carried the last box out and stood in the empty front room with his hands on his hips. For a second he was not funny.
"This is a good house," he said. "My grandmother had this exact house in Champaign." He hit the doorframe once with the flat of his hand on the way out. "It smells like somebody's whole life in here. Are you selling it?"
"No," I said.
That was the first time I said that out loud, including to myself. I heard it come out and did not take it back.
I got to Federal at four with a dog, two duffels, one box and a green folder.
Tessa met me in the lot with her arms folded. Eli's truck was not there, which somebody had clearly arranged.
"Before you go in," she said. "It isn't a house that a person walks into and understands. I mean it. My mother lived in it for twenty-four years and then I've lived in it for nine. There is no system. People come in here and try to find the system and it makes them upset."
"Tessa. I've been in the clinic a hundred times."
"The clinic," she said, "is the part I clean."
She was not wrong. The way in is through the kitchen.
The first thing is the smell, antiseptic and dog and laundry underneath.
That dryer runs about nine hours a day. Then the counters.
There is not one clear foot of counter in that house.
Medication bottles three deep with masking tape on the lids.
Two crock pots. A plastic tub of syringes with the plungers out.
Then the crates, stacked three high along the wall where a normal person keeps a table. There is in fact a table. It cannot be seen, because the table is where the towels live. Then the beds. Eleven dog beds in a house with four rooms, two of them in doorways.
In the middle of the floor between the counter and the hallway there was a fourteen-year-old bird dog named Noodle. He was flat out on his side like something that fell off a shelf.
"He's alive," Tessa said.
"I didn't ask."
"You were going to. He sleeps there. He's slept there since 2019. Don't move him."
"He's in the doorway."
"He's beside the doorway."
"Tessa, his back end is in the doorway."
"Then step over the back end," she said, "like everybody else."
She showed me the house in six minutes.
"Where does the gear go?"
"What gear?"
"Two bags. Pads, chest protector, glove, skates, sticks. That's the smallest I can make it. It's about the size of a couch."
She looked around a kitchen with no clear foot of counter in it.
"Garage," she said.
"Fine."
"There's no heat in the garage."
"It doesn't care."
"Which cupboard do you want?"
"Whichever one nobody's using."
"Beckett, they're all being used."
"Then whichever one is being used least."
She opened one over the microwave that had four boxes of expired dewormer in it. She looked at it, and then at me. Then something happened in her face that she got away from fast.
"Take that one," she said. "Don't take anything else."
"Understood."
"And this bed." She pointed at a flat brown one by the radiator that looked like it had been run over.
"That is Stevie's. Stevie is eighteen and blind.
She has slept in that exact spot for six years and she navigates the entire house from it.
If you move that bed she will not be able to find water. Do not move that bed."
"Which ones can move?"
"The three by the window and the one under the table."
"So the load-bearing ones are the radiator and the two in the doorways."
Tessa stopped.
"The what?"
"You've got eleven beds and four of them are structural," I said. "I'm asking which four."
She looked at me for a second.
"The radiator, the hall, the one at the foot of my bed. Noodle isn't in a bed, Noodle is a location."
"Copy."
"Don't say copy."
Then the bathroom, which is the only good one. It is at the end of a hallway thirty-one inches wide, with a dog asleep in the middle of it.
"How do I get down there at night?"
"Carefully. You go along the wall with your back to it," she said.
"You take the corner wide because there's a crate on the left.
Do not turn the hall light on. It wakes the whole house and then you'll be up until three.
There's a lamp in the bathroom on a timer. It's not a timer, it's just always on."
"Then it's a lamp."
"It's a system," Tessa said, "and I would like some credit for it."
Margaret was on top of the refrigerator. Nobody had told me that Margaret comes to the house. She was up there with her paws together like a magistrate, watching me carry a duffel bag through her kitchen. She did not blink one time.
"Does she stay here?"
"She goes where she wants. She's nineteen. She's been here since 2011 and my mother's the only person she ever let touch her." Tessa did not look up from the crate she was latching. "She'll come around."
"She landed on my head four times."
"Then she's already come around," Tessa said. "She bites people she doesn't have plans for."
I had a game Thursday. Baranov stood next to me at the boards for a drill and a half on the Wednesday and said nothing, which is his method.
Then, at the end, "You are somewhere new. There is a form. Address change, it goes to the office." He watched the drill. "It is on Federal Boulevard."
"Yeah."
"Federal Boulevard is not where a man with your contract lives."
"No."
Baranov nodded at the drill a while.
"Good," he said, and skated off. I stood there with my glove under my arm.
The guest room is nine feet by eight and smells like kittens and antiseptic. There is a narrow bed against the wall under the window. I made it up at eleven at night with sheets she left folded on the end of it.
I hung my shirts in a closet with a box of Christmas lights in the bottom of it and got them to the same width. Then I stood there and looked at them a while.
Bear did three slow laps of that room and went down on the floor beside the bed with a noise like a bag of gravel.
"I know," I said.
Down the hall a crate door rattled. In the kitchen the refrigerator hummed. On top of the refrigerator something shifted its weight and settled. It did not stop watching the hallway.
I've lived in eight places since I was eighteen. Every one of them was quiet and I chose them for that. I've said out loud to more than one person that I do not like noise in a house.
That house is never quiet. Something is always breathing somewhere.
And I lay there in the dark and could not get past the thing I did not want to look at directly. It was the first room I'd slept in since I was twenty-one where I did not feel like the only living thing in the building.
On the way to bed I had gone through for water. The light over the stove was on. On the door of that refrigerator there is a dry-erase board with two avocado magnets and nothing written on it at all.
I looked at it a second. Then I went to bed and left it blank, because it was not mine to write on.