Chapter Sixteen
Sixteen
“It’s pretty nasty jewelry,” Flo said, after she’d made a dozen or so bracelets and covered her wrists in them. “Although on Etsy people are selling bracelets like this with vintage beads for five dollars, so they’re not total garbage.”
When we went into the café the next morning and Colleen saw them around Flo’s wrists, she just about melted.
“Oh lord, I had those when I was little!” She bent over Flo’s stack of plastic beads.
“My sister and I used to sit for hours popping them together. I had a set that was supposed to look like ‘genuine pearls,’ and actually they kind of did. I wore that necklace on my first day of high school and didn’t I look fine. ”
“You can have some if you want,” Flo volunteered. “We have way more than we need.” She unpopped her bracelets and offered them to Colleen. “That’s okay, isn’t it, Mom?”
“Of course.” The glow on Colleen’s face as she took the junky little plastic beads made me smile.
“Coffee is on the house today, then,” Colleen said, and when she served us those pop beads were snug on her wrists, blazingly bright against her skin.
It turned out there was a lot of valuable culch in our house—or usable culch as Flo would say.
Some things were worth money and some things weren’t, but even the stuff that didn’t have cash value had other kinds of value.
Roger had grown teary at the sight of a battered old cookie tin.
It was bright chartreuse, with brown and orange mushrooms all over it.
It was very dented, but the colors were probably as bright as they were on the day it was bought.
Roger had barely been able to speak as he put his hands on it.
“Are you okay?” Flo had asked, alarmed.
Roger nodded, but when he met my gaze, he was in tears.
He pressed his lips together and tried to find his voice.
“My mother had this canister,” he said, his voice stretched.
“It used to sit on the top of the refrigerator, where we couldn’t reach it.
When we were allowed a treat, she’d pull it down and pop the lid.
” He was losing his battle with the tears.
“Only the store-bought biscuits went in this tin.” Roger’s smile was wobbly. “For her, store-bought was the best.”
We sent him home with the tin, and he cradled it the whole way down the street. The next time I was at his house, I saw it sitting in pride of place on top of the refrigerator.
Slowly, we were making headway. We sold most of the records to Sammy from Vintage Vinyl & More in Camden, and Alan was helping me list the old furniture we didn’t want to keep online.
“You have some absolute gems here,” Alan told me as we went through it all out on the lawn. Jake had rigged up a couple of floodlights in the tent so we could sort things after work, now that it was dark early.
I photographed the “pieces,” as Alan called them, and he wrote up the descriptions and measurements.
We had a deal that he could have first bid on anything he saw that he liked.
Luckily for me, he liked a lot. He took an old church pew and a couple of bentwood rocking chairs, and a whole bunch of lamps.
The mid-century furniture sold easily online, the older stuff less so.
I got an eye-watering amount of money for an old fifties teak bed that was, as Flo would say, in mint condition.
There was a kidney-shaped rosewood writing table that Alan had high hopes for.
He turned down several generous offers, even though I almost died each time he did.
“This is antique English rosewood, Zoe,” Alan told me, looking horrified at my instinct to accept the first offer. “Ounce by ounce, this wood is worth more than gold!”
“You should be an antique dealer,” I told him when I had a wad of cash in my hand and the rosewood table was driving off in the back of a van.
“I used to be one,” Alan said, looking a touch smug. “But I’m retired now.”
“Running a bed-and-breakfast is retired?”
“Blame Roger for that one.”
To thank him for all his help, I gifted Alan with an art deco wooden clock he’d been eyeing.
He put it on their mantel in the B&B and sent me a photo of it immediately.
Divine, he captioned it. Not thanks enough, I wrote back.
I seriously didn’t know how I could have done it without him.
By late October, we’d cleared the biggest objects from the tent and the house.
As we worked, the sound of Jake’s power tools was a steady purr and whir.
He’d put his hand up to help me repair the porch, which I was paying him for.
I wouldn’t let him do it for free. He’d ripped down the corrugated iron walls of the laundry in a single day but had balked at pulling out the heavy concrete trough.
“That’s staying,” he told me, stepping back and wiping sweat from his forehead. He pushed his safety goggles up. “I mean, it could come out, but it’s not an easy job.”
I considered the old trough with its cast-iron water pump. “Does the pump still work?” I asked.
“Nope. It’s too old. Hasn’t been maintained.”
I considered it. It wasn’t without its charms. Much like the old range, it gave off Anne of Green Gables vibes.
“You could turn the trough into a water feature or something,” Jake said. “Or fill it with dirt and make it a planter.”
I nodded. “Sure. It can be like the range in the kitchen. A big, weird feature.”
He grunted, apparently pleased.
Jake had an odd relationship with the house on Tinker Street.
He was both attracted to it and repelled by it.
At least that made more sense now that I knew the house had been in his family.
People got sentimental about things. I imagined what it must be like to be attached to a place.
The only place I’d ever been attached to was Suni and Wayne’s.
The driveway of lilacs, the perfect lawns, and the soothing eggshell blue of my room.
I’d been staring at Elton’s cheery lemon-drop yellow front door lately and thinking that it would be nice to have a colored door too.
Maybe I could paint mine eggshell blue to remind me of Suni and Wayne…
make them part of the house, the way I’d become a part of theirs.
I was missing them dreadfully. I’d always known they were important to me, but I hadn’t realized how much they were in the fabric of my days until they weren’t anymore.
Jake had designed screened frames for the porch and while he was at it, and I’d asked him to order vinyl panels to winterize it. “By the time I get this done, we’ll be looking at snow weather, so you might as well do it all at once,” he’d said approvingly.
He disappeared on weekends, as did Roger and Alan, because October was the month of what they called “leaf peepers”—tourists coming to admire the fall leaves.
I didn’t need to leave my own yard to go leaf peeping.
Our garden and the woods were ablaze. Elton pointed out the tree species to me and Flo as he helped us harvest our crabapples and we helped him harvest his McIntoshes.
Hardly any of our crabapples had survived the birds, but Elton’s trees were covered in nets, and he had a bumper crop.
“The oranges and yellows are maples,” he said, pointing to the bright pops of color in the woods that lapped at our backyards. Flo was up a tree, snapping off apples at pace, but I was paying close attention. I wanted to know the names of everything.
“Most of those there are sugar maples,” Elton told me, his finger outlining them. “The mountain maples go red as red can be, and the white ash turns purple.”
In our yard, the white oak was turning a rich dark burgundy, the moosewood was festive yellow, and the hornbeam was sunset shades of gold and pink and scarlet, each leaf seeming to glow from within.
The bushes that had scratched at us the day we arrived were mountain holly, otherwise known as catberry (which seemed apt, given all the cats we kept finding, both porcelain and real).
Hud had excised them from the path beside the house, and from the yard in front of the porch, but those that remained had turned a burnished orange-red, the red berries still hanging thickly in their boughs.
“Elton, I think we should turn some of these apples into apple pie,” Flo announced from up high.
“Do you now?”
“I do.”
“Do you have a recipe?”
“No, but the internet does.”
“Do you know what’s better than the internet? Gary Laughton’s secret recipe. Back when the bakery still made pastries and the like, the leaf peepers came from all over to buy Gary’s apple pies.”
“Can we do it in our kitchen, so I can keep an eye on the kittens? They get upset when I’m gone too long on weekends.”
“I’m sure they do, and I’m sure we can.”
Flo and Elton cajoled Gary to take an afternoon off from the store, which Doris only allowed because Flo asked the Laughtons to dinner after the pie baking.
“You can eat the pie,” she’d promised Doris.
Flo was big on asking people to dinner. On the Sunday of the pie baking, she also asked Elton, Jake, and Colleen.
“Colleen’s going to show me how to properly whip cream,” she told me. “By hand.”
Flo had become a regular visitor around town. She ran errands to the store for me and went to the library to donate books from our house and stopped by the café and the hardware store just to say hi. I was sure she was scoring snacks everywhere she went.
“I could have shown you how to whip cream,” Gary Laughton told Flo when he found out about Colleen and the cream.
He sounded a little hurt. He was wearing an apron Flo had dug out for him.
It was a 1960s floral affair in lurid colors.
It weirdly suited him. Gary was balding and rosy, with big eyebrows that made me think of bunting.
“Yeah, well, the cream is just an excuse, Gary,” Flo whispered, her voice carrying across the kitchen to where I was sorting a drawer. “Colleen gets lonely.”
Gary’s bunting eyebrows shot up. “She does? Colleen doesn’t strike me as the lonely type.”