The Old House

by Willo Davis Roberts

  Buddy had reached the door of the sewing room before she realized that she was thirsty. She had nearly reached the kitchen again for a glass of water when she heard her aunts’ voices.

  “He won’t forget Blackie,” Cassie was saying. “He remembers things from a long time ago quite well. It’s just what’s happening now that he can’t get a grasp on.”

  “So what are you saying? That we should make Max give up his kitten so Grandpa can pretend he’s Blackie? That’s hardly fair to Max, is it? Did you get Gus settled down in bed?”

  “Yes, he went right to sleep. I still think maybe we ought to get him to the hospital so they can X-ray his head.” Cassie twisted her hands together. “Just in case he does have a concussion or a fractured skull.”

  “I could feel the bone all around the cut. It’s perfectly solid. So it’s not fractured, but it might be concussed. If you want to take the car over to Kurt’s in the morning and have him put the new tires on so it’s feasible to take him into Kalispell, go ahead. I can’t go with you, though. I have to open up the library.”

  “Maybe Max would like to go with me,” Cassie suggested tentatively.

  “And maybe he wouldn’t,” Addie said. “He’s furious with Gus, you know. He hates the way Gus drinks and disgraces himself. Why should you punish Max by dragging him along? He’s got a day planned already, remember? He has work to do here at home, and Gus is going to feel rotten tomorrow, so he’ll be even nastier than usual, to whoever is present in the car. And I know Max is expecting to do something with his buddies during the afternoon. Give him a break, Cassie. And about the kitten, too. It is his kitten.”

  Buddy was holding her breath. She had stopped out of their sight because she didn’t want to get into the middle of another one of their embarrassing conversations. If she hadn’t been so thirsty, she’d have gone back to bed without a drink, but she couldn’t get to the bathroom without being seen, either.

  “But Grandpa thinks he’s Blackie,” Cassie was saying now. “He’s going to be so upset. He thinks he has Blackie again.”

  “For pete’s sake, Cassie, Grandpa is senile! He’s not logical! He can’t remember anything from one minute to the next! Does that mean we all have to give in to him every time he does or wants something unreasonable?”

  “You just want to put him in a rest home and get rid of him,” Cassie said, sounding as if she was going to cry.

  Addie was explosive. “No, I don’t! I’ll admit that some things about him drive me crazy—like punching that clock every thirty seconds! But I’ve loved him as long as you have—longer, because I’m older—and I want him to be safe. I want us to be safe. Sticking that remote control in the microwave was not a rational thing to do, and we have to recognize that he can’t help doing things that are irrational. In a rest home they’d be better equipped to watch him day and night, and he couldn’t demand to have someone else’s cat and claim it for his own. And maybe we could have a peaceful night’s sleep without worrying that he’ll burn the house down around our ears.”

  “I don’t mind sleeping light, listening for him,” Cassie said.

  Buddy shifted her weight, not wanting to listen, yet not quite able to walk away, either. She hoped Cassie wouldn’t think of asking her to ride along as company to take Gus to the hospital, because she was sure Addie was right about one thing: Gus would not be a pleasant companion with both a hangover and a head injury. She bit her lip and waited.

  Addie sighed. “Do what you like about taking Gus to Kalispell. But let Max keep his kitten. Explain—a hundred times, if necessary—that this one belongs to Max. And Cassie, don’t ask Buddy to go with you tomorrow, either.”

  Buddy’s heart fluttered.

  Although they were speaking in normal tones and she wasn’t having any trouble catching every word, she strained to hear more clearly.

  “You think I’m not fair,” Cassie challenged her sister. “But you aren’t, either, Addie.”

  Buddy wondered how much more exasperated Addie could get without the two of them coming to actual blows.

  “What are you talking about now?”

  “It’s not fair to hold . . . the way you feel EllaBelle . . . against Buddy. She can’t help what her mother did.”

  Buddy’s throat closed, and she pressed a hand against it. “What her mother did”? What did that mean?

  Addie gave a snort of anger. “I don’t hold anything against Buddy. And just because she’s the spitting image of EllaBelle at that age doesn’t mean I don’t know she’s an entirely different person. Why on earth do you think I’m being unfair to her? I got out the clothes, with a painful memory in every stitch I had put into every dress, and altered one to fit the child, didn’t I?”

  Buddy wished she’d died of thirst and stayed in her little sewing room, yet she couldn’t leave now. Why were there painful memories in the clothes Addie had made for her mother? That didn’t make any sense at all.

  “I can tell by the way you look at her,” Cassie asserted quietly. “I see you studying her when she doesn’t notice you’re looking.”

  “Oh, for the love of—!” Addie smacked a hand on the back of a chair. “She does look exactly like her mother, and I’m reminded of difficult things when I look at Buddy, but I certainly don’t dislike her or blame her for the money being gone. I’m going to bed. You’re impossible to talk to tonight. You’re even more irrational than Grandpa is,” she said as she headed directly for where Buddy was standing.

  In a panic, Buddy stumbled backward and pressed herself into the open doorway to the sewing room, nearly falling.

  She didn’t have time to close the door before Addie passed, but since there was no light in the room, she didn’t notice Buddy.

  Buddy’s heart hammered at the close call, and with dismay at the things she’d heard. What had Addie meant about not blaming her for the money being gone? What money? It sounded as if Addie had hated her mother, yet if that was the case, why had she made EllaBelle all those beautiful dresses? And what could EllaBelle possibly have done to merit such disapproval? She had been dead for more than two years, but Buddy remembered her well enough to know that she’d been a warm, funny, delightful kind of mother.

  Her eyes stung. She needed a tissue and couldn’t remember where there were any.

  In the kitchen, the light went out as Cassie, too, left the room. She walked past Buddy’s doorway in the dark, no doubt knowing every foot of the house by heart after living here all of her life. Buddy waited to venture out for her glass of water until she heard the stairs creak for the last time as her aunt went up.

  She didn’t turn on a light, either. She didn’t want to alert anyone to the fact that she’d been listening to all that. It wasn’t pitch-black. There was a yard light somewhere that penetrated the house enough to keep Buddy from running into anything, as long as she walked carefully and felt her way.

  Oh, Daddy, she thought mournfully, where are you? Why don’t you come get me? I want to go home!

  But there was no home. And something truly terrible must have happened to her father to have kept him away from her.

  Tears were running down her face as she finally reached the kitchen sink and found a glass in the cupboard overhead. The running water sounded loud—loud enough to be heard upstairs? She drank one glass quickly, and then filled it again.

  In the room behind her, Grandpa activated the clock. “The time is 11:05 p.m.,” the tinny voice recited.

  Buddy made her way back to bed and lay there with trembling lips as she repeated her prayers for her father and for Bart. And she decided that maybe Addie had exaggerated a little, that while Grandpa didn’t push the button on his clock every thirty seconds, he most assuredly did it ten or twelve times over every half hour.

  She finally fell asleep in spite of that nasty little speaking clock, and woke to the smell of bacon cooking and coffee perking, and the sound of the clock announcing the time. “8:36 A.M.,” it said, and she supposed she’d better get up and get d
ressed. While she was pulling on her jeans and sweatshirt, Buddy prayed that Cassie would take Addie’s advice and not invite her to help take Gus to get his head X-rayed.

  And she continued to feel completely bewildered about a reference to money that was gone.

  Chapter Eight

  “Ouch!” Cassie exclaimed as Buddy walked into the kitchen. “I’d forgotten how often you get burned, frying bacon on top of the stove. I suppose we won’t dare ask Gordon to replace the microwave and the remote control right away, will we?”

  Addie sipped at her coffee, obviously having otherwise finished her breakfast. “No, we won’t. Not when he’s just sent us the money for four new tires. We used to be able to get along without a microwave and a remote. We’ll just have to learn to do it again.”

  “I don’t mind getting up to change channels. But we used the microwave so much.”

  Grandpa wandered in from his room, heading past them toward the dining room. “I’m cold,” he announced. “I’m going to turn up the heat.”

  “No, Grandpa,” Addie said, standing up and blocking his way. “It’s already plenty warm enough in here for everybody else. Put on your sweater and you’ll be fine.”

  He stared at her crossly. “I don’t know where my sweater is.”

  “Well, I’m sure Buddy will be glad to help you find it.” She turned toward Buddy. “He probably dropped it in his rocker, that’s where it usually is. It’s bright blue, so he can see it more easily. He can still detect color quite well if he wants to, in his peripheral vision.”

  Buddy nodded and headed for Grandpa’s room as his clock chimed out the time again. The sweater was right where Addie had said it would be, so she brought it back with her. Grandpa looked a bit surly, but he did put it on.

  “I have to go,” Addie said, picking up her purse. She was looking quite smart in a dark suit with a white blouse and a bright printed scarf. “See you at suppertime.”

  Cassie forked bacon onto a plate covered with paper towels. “Run upstairs, would you, Buddy, and tell Max that breakfast is ready? Usually he smells bacon and comes on the double.”

  “All right,” Buddy agreed, and wondered who had done all the little errands when she wasn’t there. She returned a few minutes later with her report. “He’s not in his room.”

  Cassie hesitated with bread ready to drop into the toaster. “Was his bed made?”

  “No.”

  “He must have gotten up and left before I was up. Now why did he go and do that?”

  Because he didn’t want to see anybody, Buddy thought. Not his father, not Cassie. And maybe he doesn’t intend to do the chores Gus told him to do this morning.

  Cassie sighed. “I was counting on him to help me get Gus down to the car when we’re ready to go.”

  Another reason to disappear, Buddy thought. She held her breath, waiting for Cassie’s request for her own help. It came, but not in helping with Gus.

  “I hope you won’t mind looking after Grandpa while we’re gone. As soon as I’ve finished here I’ll hide the knobs again so he can’t use the range. You can get them down if you need to warm up some soup for him. Or he can just have a sandwich. He likes peaches. You might open a jar. The pantry’s full of canned stuff.”

  A relieved breath slid out of her as Buddy agreed. Looking after Grandpa seemed an easier task than anything to do with Gus.

  “I’ve put corned beef and cabbage in the Crock-Pot for supper,” Cassie said, loading a plate and carrying it to set before Buddy at the table. “You don’t have to do anything with that. I need to get the car over to the garage to have the tires put on. I’ll be back as soon as I can. I just have to carry this other plate up to Gus. He didn’t want to come down to breakfast.”

  Buddy didn’t know all that much about alcoholics, being lucky enough not to have known any personally. But she guessed that having been drunk enough to fall down and cut his head open last night probably meant that Gus would have a hangover headache this morning.

  “Don’t I get any breakfast?” Grandpa asked.

  “You already had some, honey,” Cassie told him. “Bacon and pancakes, remember? Would you like a doughnut and another cup of coffee?”

  So Buddy and Grandpa ate breakfast together, her first and his second. Before the meal was over, he had activated his hanging clock seven times.

  Cassie came back down with Gus’s tray as it sounded the last time. “I hope that didn’t keep you awake last night,” she said.

  “I heard it a few times,” Buddy admitted.

  “It drives Addie crazy. But since he can’t see anymore, can’t read, can’t work in the garden, it seems to be the only thing that keeps him oriented to where he is and what’s supposed to be going on. He needs to know what time it is.”

  Buddy nodded. It was disconcerting, the way everybody discussed Grandpa as if he weren’t there, even when she realized that he probably wasn’t hearing very much of it.

  Cassie had a purse ready, too, and keys in her hand. “If Max comes back, would you remind him about mowing the lawn? Gus will be annoyed if he doesn’t do it.”

  Buddy hesitated, mopping up the last of the maple syrup with a bite of pancake. “What kind of mower do you have? I used to help Bart sometimes. Maybe I could do it.”

  Cassie brightened. “Do you think so? I used to do it, before I married Gus and Max came to live here. Come along with me and I’ll show you.”

  The power mower wasn’t exactly like the one stored in the garage at the old house, but they got it up and running, and by the time Cassie had backed the car out onto the street, Buddy was cutting the first swath across the side of the lot. She rather enjoyed doing it, and was finished by the time the new tires had been put on. She was in the back hall, tying up bundles of old newspapers, when she heard Cassie and Gus leave the house, with him protesting that he didn’t want to go, and Cassie insisting.

  There was an old wagon in the garage. She loaded the newspapers into it and hoped Max would come back in time to tell her where to take them for recycling. Now it was time, she figured, to check on Grandpa.

  He had obviously turned up the heat, for the house was sweltering. She went into the dining room and adjusted the temperature downward, noting that someone had put duct tape and a small wooden guard on the thermostat so that it couldn’t be pushed above eighty degrees.

  It wasn’t hard to find him; all she had to do was follow the speaking clock. He was in the kitchen, punching futilely at the numbers on the microwave. “It won’t work,” he announced as she entered.

  “No,” Buddy agreed. “Can I heat something for you on the stove?”

  “There’s no way to turn it on. All the knobs are missing.”

  “How about a sandwich? And Aunt Cassie said I could open some peaches, from the pantry.”

  He was easily diverted. “A sandwich and peaches. That sounds good.” He tilted his head, presumably so he was looking at her through the part of his eye where there was still vision. “Do I know you, Sister?”

  “I’m Buddy. EllaBelle’s daughter.”

  “Oh, yes. I thought you seemed familiar. Your voice . . . I remember your voice.”

  Buddy stepped over beside him and opened the ruined microwave with its blackened interior walls. There was a cup of coffee in it, and she took it out. If she’d caught his movements accurately, he had tried to set the timer for thirty minutes, long enough to have boiled the coffee over and possibly damaged the oven again if it had been functioning.

  “How about a glass of milk instead of this? Okay?”

  “Okay,” Grandpa agreed. “Where’s Sister?”

  “Aunt Cassie’s gone to Kalispell. Aunt Addie’s at the library.” She opened the bread box and started getting out fixings for the sandwich. Tuna fish with mayonnaise, she decided, since that was what she spotted in the refrigerator.

  “Umm. I used to go to the library at least once a week,” he told her, moving toward the table, poking ahead with his cane. “I can’t read anymore. N
ot even the Good Book. I memorized a lot of that, though, and it’s still stuck in my head. But I can’t read novels. Mysteries, or Westerns. I don’t like those science fiction things about all those spaceships and aliens, do you?”

  “Yes, I like those. Do you want chopped pickles?”

  “Yes, pickles are good. What about the peaches?”

  Buddy found them in the pantry, row after row of home-canned fruits and vegetables. She made a nice lunch for the two of them, and they ate in a companionable silence, for the most part, though occasionally Grandpa would make an intriguing remark. “Sister writes novels, I think. I don’t believe I’ve read any of them.”

  And that reminded Buddy that she and Grandpa were the only ones in the house, and that Addie’s rooms upstairs held not only a manuscript that had been returned, but a photograph album that had old family pictures she hadn’t seen.

  After Grandpa had had two dishes of peaches, he wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and pushed back his chair. “I think I’ll take a nap now,” he said. “I wish Blackie would come and sleep by my feet. Do you know where he is?”

  “Not exactly,” Buddy replied, hoping he wouldn’t press any further. It must be terrible not to remember that you’d been told that your pet had died, so that you felt the sorrow all over again each time.

  She heard the talking clock several times while she was clearing the table and wiping off the counter, and then there was only silence. The big house seemed to be waiting for her to do something.

  She knew it wasn’t right to pry into anyone else’s belongings. Yet there was a picture of her father in that photo album on Addie’s dresser. A picture she had never seen before yesterday, one that demanded an explanation, though it was unlikely anyone would provide it.

  She walked quietly up the stairway—hearing the squeak of that one loose step—and stood in the doorway of Addie’s bedroom.

  The door was open, and across the room she could see the photograph album, in plain sight.

  What harm would it do to look at old pictures, taken years before?

  It wasn’t only that snapshot, of course. There were the things she’d overheard her aunts and her great-grandfather say. “It’s not fair to hold . . . the way you feel about EllaBelle . . . against Buddy. She can’t help what her mother did.” And, “I got out the clothes, with a painful memory in every stitch I had put into every dress. . . . I’m reminded of difficult things when I look at Buddy, . . .” Addie had said. Because Buddy looked like her mother, was the implication. And, “I don’t blame her for the money being gone.” How could she find out what all that meant?