Housewarming

by Jennifer Bowen

  Kara turned back to the window, listening to the crunch of Lilah’s teeth as she ate the carrots on her plate. She saw John walk away from the pool, disappearing out of view. She took in the pool again and watched the water ripple from the rhythm of the filtration system as it stirred in the powder he had just poured in.

  “I’m done!” Lilah announced a moment later.

  Kara looked over and, seeing her plate was empty, told her she had done good and that she could place her plate in the sink. When Lilah had done so and had taken off with her statue, Kara noticed Jack had moved to the backdoor and was looking out.

  Just as she was going to ask him if he was going outside, he made a face and asked, “Mom, what’s that smell?”

  “What smell?”

  “That bad smell. Don’t you smell it?”

  Kara stood next to him. “Is it you?” she asked, sniffing near him jokingly.

  He said with seriousness, “No. It’s something outside I think.”

  Kara’s smile fell and she sniffed. “I don’t smell anything. What’s it smell like?”

  “It’s nasty”

  She reached past him and opened the door. The smell hit her, strong and heavy. “Ugh! It smells like a skunk sprayed!”

  He followed her outside, him pinching his nose as she crossed the deck to the steps. She looked out over the yard, hoping not to see a skunk lying in wait to spray again. But then she wondered suddenly if it was hiding under the deck and so hurried back up the steps.

  “Looks like he’s gone,” she said, not really knowing if that was true. She noticed the cooler, still sitting near the fire pit, left out overnight after the party, and went to pick it up. “Come on, let’s go in. The smell will go away eventually.”

  She started to follow Jack inside, but the glint from the sunlight on the steel body of the fire pit caught her attention. She turned around and advanced on it, stopping when she had neared enough to see something was inside the basin. It was something round and dark.

  When she made sense of what she was looking at, she gasped, nearly dropping the cooler. An animal lay dead inside.

  Road kill. That was the smell.

  It wasn’t a skunk, but a raccoon, folded over so its furry, striped tail touched its opened paws.

  Kara cried out, backing away, the stench seemingly more potent than before, filling her insides with the sickeningly heady stuff.

  “John!” she hollered, hoping he was still outside somewhere. “John!”

  He came hurrying around from the side of the house. “What happened?”

  “There’s a dead raccoon in the fire pit!”

  “What?” He jogged up the deck steps and looked down into the fire pit. He made a disgusted sound and stepped back.

  Kara’s newly-found instinct made her look up at the sky. Were the black birds waiting to descend? She scoped out the cloudy sky and saw nothing hovered in the air. She didn’t know how long it normally took, but imagined vultures would soon catch the scent of the fresh corpse. She pictured the opossum on the front porch who hadn’t been touched, but then imagined Blacky, swinging from a tree. Had the vultures eventually gotten him?

  The image frightened her, revealing itself in her loud, high-pitched voice, “We need to get it out of here before the vultures come.”

  “Do you see any?” he asked, looking at the trees.

  “Not yet. Can you get it out of here before they come?” She remembered Marvin had said vultures dined on fresh animal carcasses.

  “Yeah, let me get a bag.” He turned away, saying as she followed him through the backdoor, “It must’ve climbed in, looking for food.”

  He yanked a trash bag out from under the sink and returned outside. She watched from inside as he squatted, inspecting the creature. He prodded it with his bag-covered hand, looking it over, then plucked it from the fire pit and dropped it into the bag. He disappeared around the side of the house.

  “It’s at the curb,” he said when he came inside. He opened his hand, revealing a nail. “I found this laying on the driveway by the garage. From what I could see, it stepped or rolled onto some loose nails. One was in its foot, in its neck and in its stomach, from what I could see.”

  She asked, horrified, “What?”

  “I think he must’ve worked his way to the backyard and just died.”

  “Does that just happen? Why are there nails…the skylight?”

  “Probably. I’ll take a look at the driveway to see if there are any more nails laying around. Just be careful when you’re out there. I thought we did a pretty good job of cleaning up.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Yeah.” He pocketed the nail.

  * * *

  As with the discovered opossum, John and Kara didn’t tell the kids about the ill-fated raccoon. Kara wondered, however, if either child wondered why she told then more than once to stay in the house that day. She hadn’t even offered an excuse. Lilah had been content to play in her room and Jack had been fine hanging out in the great room, mostly watching TV, while playing with his hand-held video game. Of course, he probably assumed it was the trail of skunk smell Kara was keeping them from. Regardless, neither child questioned her and she was glad for that. Kara refrained from looking out the window and pretended she didn’t still smell the remains of the dead raccoon.

  When she prepared for bed that night, she passed her dresser without a glance, not risking a glimpse at the memory box sitting on top, and went directly into the bathroom. As she brushed her teeth, she looked in the mirror at her worn reflection. She was only in her early thirties, but there were shadows below her eyes and her cheeks looked sunken, easily making her look fifteen years older. Her lips were pale in color and chapped, her eyes were darker than normal because her pupils were dilated, and her hair, messy, was in need of a cut. Surely, this would all be remedied by a good night of sleep or so she hoped for vanity’s sake alone. Finally, she turned away from the image and spit out toothpaste in the sink.

  She turned off the bedroom light, passed the dresser again without looking at it, and climbed under the bedcovers. She rolled over to her stomach and placed a pillow over her out-turned ear, wanting to smother out the sounds of the settling house, along with her thoughts. Finally, sensing John had entered the bedroom, she fell away from the present and sank into a black pit, the dream taking her wholly.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Mom, wake up!”

  Kara blinked her eyes open. Jack was looking down at her to where she still lay in bed.

  “Mom, I’m going to be late,” he said, backing away to the doorway.

  “Hmm…?” She stretched, a fog of the dream lifting entirely away, forgotten the instant she saw the time. She sat up. They were running late.

  She hurried, successfully getting Jack ready and out to the bus stop (admittedly, he did most of the work), and got Lilah to pre-K on time. She was able to finally slow down, her morning having started as a scattered mess. She was walking down the front steps of Grace School when she heard her name called.

  She turned toward the parking lot and saw Shannon crossing it her way. She had forgotten they had planned to meet up. She groaned inwardly, preferring to go back to bed, if only to lie there.

  Shannon waved, grinning as she approached. “It’s so weird to be in town on a Monday morning.”

  Kara smiled, her mood lightening despite herself. Shannon looked so happy. “Oh, yeah?”

  Weekends were clearly the busy days for Gracie Town. Saturdays and Sundays brought both townspeople and tourists out for afternoon strolls, bicycling, and shopping. Weekdays were when it resumed its sleepy small-town ways. That day, traffic was dwindling as the last of the working residents drove down Main Street, most probably headed to jobs in Cosgrove.

  “Let’s go this way,” Shannon suggested, steering them down the sidewalk away from the town square.

  “So how did you get today off?” Kara asked, matching Shannon’s leisurely pace.

  “If m
y boss takes a day off, he closes the office. It doesn’t happen often, though. Benefit of working for a small company.”

  “That’s awesome.”

  “I’m really glad you were able to come out with me. I get to show you all my favorites.”

  Kara’s cellphone dinged. She reached into her purse for it without slowing. Her mother had texted. She didn’t bother reading the message, though, sliding the phone back into her purse. Tracy had probably told her about the party, after all, and Margaret was upset. Kara wasn’t going to confirm that suspicion now. “Okay, so where to?” she asked Shannon. “Is the antique shop down here?”

  “No, that’s on the opposite side of town on Channing, off Main. It’s closed on Mondays. We’ll go another day. You’ll love it. They have the cutest stuff, things you wouldn’t find anywhere else. So, this—” Shannon stopped abruptly and spread out her arms. “—is a cool boutique. Everything is Ohio-made.” After twenty minutes, they walked out, Kara with a bag of candy and Shannon had a candle.

  They visited every shop on one side of the street, a handful of businesses that took up residence in brightly-colored converted colonials and two Victorians. Neither made additional purchases, but Kara found the shops adorable and marveled at the thought of earlier generations calling the buildings home.

  “These shops are so cute,” Kara commented as Shannon steered them across the street and turned them back toward town. They walked onward until Kara stopped again, looking pointedly at the Collumber house across the street. “There’s something about this house…”

  She looked beyond the iron fence to the finely manicured lawn before resting her eyes on the wraparound porch. “This is where I would’ve lived back in the day.” She laughed, amending, “If I had been wealthy anyway.”

  Whistling, Shannon nodded. “That house is ancient, built in the 17-or-1800s. Collumber was already rich when he joined the American Revolutionary War and apparently, came out even richer. The estate used to be larger. They had a farm and stable, I think.” She tilted her head, admiring the square lines of the Federalist architecture.

  Kara’s eyes moved over the windows, finding the downstairs curtains open. She stared, unable to see inside.

  “There was some tragic story about him and his wife,” Shannon continued. “I don’t remember all the details, but she died from illness, or was killed. Something really sad. She was known for her long hair. That’s all I really remember about her. There was a poem we learned in school about her. ‘Yellow hair, gold hair, dressed in bands, met a fair man on unfound lands.’ That’s all I got. You’d think I’d remember the rest since we had to memorize that damn thing!”

  “That’s funny,” Kara murmured. Her eyes moved to the front door and then back to the yard. “So they lived there?” The romantic in her pictured a dashing colonial and his bride, stepping out of a horse carriage and crossing the front walk to the door.

  “I think so. I’m sure they have more about them in the museum. It’s been years since I’ve gone.”

  Kara’s eyes combed the brick house, taking in the porch, the long windows, the side yard…

  She flinched. Someone had appeared from around the house. The man in the suit moved toward the sidewalk, carrying something large and square. Both women watched from across the street as he up-righted the sign.

  “ ‘For sale’?” Shannon was the first to read it as he forced the sign into the ground. “Well, now’s your chance to buy it, Kara!”

  “Ha! Yeah…”

  As they walked to the Garden Café, moving away from the Collumber house, something akin to sadness or jealousy hovered around Kara. It was as if the very real opportunity of living there was there for the taking, but ultimately, not hers to take. It was a strange sensation, especially since she loved her new house, one that was very much to be pleased with, but still, the dark cloud surrounded her. They ordered brunch and, before the food came, Shannon excused herself to go to the restroom. While she was gone, Kara started to unwrap her straw when her cellphone chimed. It was a reminder ding that her mother’s text had gone unread. Sighing, she fished the phone out of her purse.

  Kara, David contacted me.

  Kara’s heart stopped for one breadth of a second as she stared at her mother’s words, texted in black Helvetica. His face—David’s—appeared as a ghost in her mind: fresh-faced, slightly muscular build, blond.

  Releasing the breath she had been holding, she tapped her mother’s name, opening the message. Margaret had texted a follow-up, Hello?

  Kara glanced around the café, seeing a handful of faces she didn’t recognize before hesitantly texting back, David Reynolds?

  Jack’s biological father, the man who abandoned them, deadbeat dad.

  Shannon returned, sitting down with a grin. Leaning forward, she said, “You have to check out the bathroom. I forgot how retro it is. They have this faded pink floral wallpaper…in the stalls! It’s got to be original to the building. I think ‘retro’ may be too cool a word for it, though…” She noticed Kara’s grim expression then. “Are you okay?”

  Kara looked up. David wasn’t a subject she normally discussed. She had all but forgotten him. Looking now at Shannon sitting across from her as the waitress dropped off their garden salads and walked away, Kara saw her genuine concern. There was something about her that just felt easy; unlike Tracy, with Shannon, there wasn’t the worry of her running to Margaret and reporting details of any conversations they had.

  “Did something happen?” Shannon asked.

  Kara glanced down at her cellphone; there was no reply yet. She clicked it off, but kept it face-up on the table beside her plate. “Do you remember David, Jack’s dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “He contacted my mom.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. She just texted me that he reached out to her.”

  “Wow. What do you think he wants?”

  “I don’t know. I texted her back, but she hasn’t said anything else. My mom’s not the most forthcoming person.”

  “You haven’t seen him since Jack was born?”

  “No, I haven’t seen him since before Jack was born.”

  “Are you worried?”

  Kara shrugged. Should she be worried? She mulled it over. It wasn’t like he had ever hurt her, not physically anyway. “David is just someone I don’t ever want to see again. He’s the past, he’s been the past for ten years.” She spilled it, telling Shannon about him, her relationship with a preppy guy that started and ended in college; he had been attractive and funny, someone everyone liked to be around. But something happened to him a few months into their relationship.

  She noticed the change soon after a simple pink stick confirmed the hard nose of reality. Barely in her twenties, in a relationship she was still breaking-in, Kara found herself pregnant. Scared, she tried to make an unstable relationship mature. But she failed. As her belly swelled, David started staying out later than usual at night, hanging out with friends—his friends, people he had never introduced her to. He stopped attending classes and had no desire to find a job.

  Margaret’s sage advice was for Kara not to come across as too needy. “The last thing you need is for David to leave you when you’re four months pregnant.”

  So even when he started pulling money out of Kara’s savings account (how he got her PIN, she never knew), she didn’t make any fuss. She only asked that he let her know when he needed cash instead of taking it out himself. He acquiesced, but that turned into him asking for money all the time. She finally told him she wasn’t giving him another penny unless he proved he was earnestly trying to get a job. But he never proved that and, as her pregnancy advanced, he took to staying out all night, sometimes not even seeing her for a couple days at a time. Eventually, he just stopped returning.

  She came home one day after class and found a scrawled note on the coffee table beside a glass, dirtied with a milk ring. David wasn’t coming back.

  “I barely knew him,” Kara s
aid, moving the lettuce leaves around on her plate. She had never truly thought that and saying it now, she wasn’t so sure that was entirely the truth. She tried to forget the twenty-year-old who had approached her in psychology class a decade ago. She had tried not to dwell on the moment she had literally felt her heart beat faster and the blood rush to her face when she looked up to see the dirty blond with the tanned skin. He had smiled at her, revealing an orphaned dimple in one cheek, asking if the seat beside her was taken. She pushed away the image now, taking another bite of salad.

  “Try not to worry too much about it yet. I know that probably sounds like crap advice from an outsider, but just wait and see what else your mom says.”

  Kara sipped her iced tea and nodded. “No, you’re right. I’m not going to worry about it. That’s really funny coming from me. I worry about everything. But I know what you mean.”

  “Have you had a chance to tell Tracy?”

  Kara chuckled mirthlessly. “Funny.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to stay away from her on this topic, I think. She didn’t know David anyway. But then again, my mom would probably tell her what’s up with him before she’d tell me. Unfortunately going to her is like going directly to my mom. Tracy’s known to report on me to my mom.”

  “Really? That’s not cool.”

  “Yeah. Tracy and I were good until she moved into the same building as my mom. It’s just an awkward situation. She feels obligated to both of us on a friendship level. It’s weird.” Kara chewed, her eyes on the black cellphone screen.

  “The distance of being out here might help you guys then.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe David just wanted to say hi. It might not be bad.”

  Kara slid her cellphone into her purse, realizing her mother was done texting for the moment. There was nothing she could glean from the text anyway, so there was no point in worrying. Margaret could’ve just seen him somewhere, or who even knew if it was David Reynolds she meant? She thought for a moment, thinking of how many different Davids she knew. Nobody else came to mind, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a different David her mother knew.