A Stranger's House

by Bret Lott

  “Okay,” Grady said, and the two of them went down the stairs.

  I turned to Tom. “What’s going on?”

  “You know as much as I do,” he said, his attention on the floor, sizing things up, I imagined, trying to guess where a bubble might be. He went to the hearth, and squatted once again. He held the marble an inch or so above the floor, the linoleum battleship gray with brown flecks scattered here and there. “Except,” Tom said, still looking at the floor before him, “that when we were down in the crawl space and I mentioned his helping work on the barn next summer, Martin froze. He nearly died. He dropped his hammer as though someone had stuck a gun to his head. All he said was ‘No’ one time, nice and loud so he knew I wouldn’t ask again. And I didn’t. So it’s no surprise, really, that he doesn’t want to work up here. Or there.” He placed the marble on the floor. “He’s got his idiosyncrasies, maybe superstitions. I don’t know. It’s his choice. He can do what he likes.”

  He let it go, and for some reason I held my breath, listening to the surprising quiet in the house, the only sound the calm, sonorous roll of the marble coursing toward the wall.

  NOVEMBER

  The appointment for signing the papers was set for eleven at Mr. Blaisdell’s office, and so both Tom and I had had to take off from work. We took, in fact, the whole morning.

  It was about to happen. We were about to own the place.

  To celebrate we decided to have breakfast out Tom went down the stairs to start the engine and scrape the windows of frost while I finished putting on my makeup, and then I went to the door, and paused a moment

  I looked back at the kitchen, at what I could see of the living room through the doorway. Though the rooms were filled with our furniture, with us, suddenly things looked different, changed: the table, chairs, those gingham curtains and potholders on magnets on the refrigerator and the coffee machine seemed out of place, alien in this room from which we would soon be removing ourselves. The walls, pale yellow, seemed strangely barren, though there were pictures hung and a shelf with antique plates we’d collected and a counted cross-stitch of a lighthouse I had gotten when we’d gone down to Mystic one time. But the walls still seemed lonesome, all these furnishings, signs of life, ready to go, to move out to Chesterfield.

  I opened the door. The cold air outside broke into the room, and sent a shiver through the bottom edge of the tablecloth, minutely moved the stack of papers—bills, flyers, coupons—piled on the counter.

  Though we would be back later today, wouldn’t be moving from here until the house was nearly finished sometime early next year, we had figured, I said, “Good-bye, good-bye,” and pulled the door closed behind me.

  We went from the apartment first to the newspaper, where Tom had to stop in and look over his desk, more a symbolic gesture to his editor than any real devotion to the job. Then we went for breakfast at the Miss Florence Diner, a brick-and-oak Deco place left over from the forties or fifties, we could never decide which. Above the restaurant was a neon sign, the name spelled out in orange and set against a large green chevron of sorts.

  Inside, construction workers sat at stools along the counter, buffalo-plaid shirts and down vests and scuffed workboots on, cups of coffee in front of them. Most of the booths were full, men and women heading to work, tabletops covered with plates of food: eggs, sausage, waffles, bagels. Where each table met the wall was a miniature jukebox, above each a glass case with a knob on the side. Inside the cases were pages and pages of song titles; when you turned the knob the pages fell forward or back to reveal more songs: tunes by Elvis and Linda Ronstadt and Bob Seger and the Beatles and most anyone else.

  We walked to the left along the booths, moving toward the back where we liked to sit. At one booth sat two Smith girls, black turtlenecks on, pale faces and chopped hair, cigarettes out. At another booth sat a businessman in a three-piece charcoal gray wool suit, The Wall Street Journal in one hand, a coffee cup in the other. At one other booth sat two old men, both wearing flannel shirts, one bald, the other with a full head of white hair. Both had their hands wrapped around their cups, and were staring out the green-tinted window onto Route 9 and the cars heading into town.

  We-slid into our booth, and the waitress was there with two cups and a pot of black, black coffee.

  She didn’t even ask, but went ahead and poured us each a cup; then pulled from her apron a handful of half-and-half containers and dropped them on the table. We’d had her before, and she always looked like this, always had the same hairpiece on, a coffee pot in hand. The only thing that ever changed about her was the addition or subtraction of her sweater, depending upon what time of year it was.

  “It’s a nice frost today,” she said, and smiled, nodding as if in agreement with her own observation.

  “Not long before snow,” Tom said, and broke open a container, dumped it into his coffee.

  She said, “But then that’s when winter really comes on, and I can wait for that. These frosts don’t do anything other than make you drape your bushes at night and scrape your car in the morning. That’s fine by me. That snow, though,” she said, and scowled, shook her head. She hadn’t yet looked at us, but held the glass coffee pot and stared at the cups as though they might move. She was waiting for us.

  I said, “111 have pancakes and sausage. Short stack.”

  “Same here,” Tom said. “And o.j.”

  “Me too.”

  She gave a short, hard nod, turned and stopped to fill three more customers’ coffee cups before she made it back to the cook station.

  He was looking at the jukebox, and reached up, started flipping back the little laminated pages of selections. I reached across the table to him and pinched his forearm.

  “Ouch,” he said, and looked at me. He said, “How about Johnny Cash? ‘I Walk the Line’?”

  I leaned back and looked at everything, took in the smell of coffee and food, looked at the people and our waitress, now filling the cups of the construction workers. “I love this place,” I said.

  Tom reached into his pocket, his shoulders going up to get at, I imagined, the change buried in the corner of his pocket “I’m glad you’re so enamored of Miss Flo’s, sweetheart,” he said, his smile more of a grimace now that he was digging in the pocket. He pulled out a quarter, relief on his face, his smile easy now. “Because,” he went on, “this is the caliber of the kinds of places we’ll be able to afford from now on. This and Friendly’s.”

  He reached over and dropped in the quarter, punched a letter and a number on the machine. Johnny Cash came booming out, his voice black gravel. Two of the construction workers looked over at us, men with flushed faces and small eyes and big hands. The businessman glanced at us over the top edge of his paper.

  “Turn it down,” I whispered loudly, and Tom laughed. He leaned back in the booth and put his hands behind his head.

  “Come on,” he said. “Enjoy this music. It’s a luxury now.”

  I turned it down myself, fiddling with the little knob on the front of the machine. I didn’t turn it down as low as I should have, and I sat back, too. Let them watch, I thought Let anybody watch. We’re buying a house today.

  By the time we’d finished breakfast, most of the frost had melted, the street outside now merely darker in spots where the moisture had not yet evaporated, lighter in spots where it had. Some of the puddles of water in the parking lot beside Miss Flo’s were covered with the thinnest, most delicate sheets of clear ice, traces of cracks patterned across them, bubbles like clear, round drops of silver trapped here and there beneath. I was careful not to step on any of them for fear of some bad luck.

  Tom held open my door for me, and before I climbed in I kissed him, putting my arms around him. He let go my door and held me, and we kissed there in the light and in the cold.

  Tom pulled up to the parking lot exit, waiting for traffic to clear up.

  He said, “You want to go this way?” and nodded to the right, toward Williamsburg, toward, of
course, Chesterfield.

  I said, “Go on ahead,” and thought nothing of it for a moment until, when we were out on Route 9 and moving past the old homes in Florence, I realized that he had asked me if we could go this way. His question had seemed only natural, my answer just the next logical thing to say, and here we were, heading down Route 9, in the car once again, and it felt filled with that expectation, that shared apprehension and excitement at the prospect of the future; and for a moment hope, that ancient seed of hope I’d kept smothered as best I could, crept back into me. I let myself hope, as we passed now the glistening frost of the fairways in Leeds; let myself hope that somehow I still might get pregnant, have a child, keep hold of it and love it and nurture it, its soft, white face there at my breast, drinking from me milk to keep it alive, to keep it growing.

  That hope in me felt like some lost friend, an old and loved relative come home at last, launching into my heart a host of other images: the room I called my own in the house now turned into a nursery, that gray paneling torn down, the walls covered with pastel wallpaper of teddy bears and balloons, an oaken cradle filled with soft flannel blankets, a changing table and a crib and curtains and a wide oval braided rug, and a rocking chair for me, stuffed animals scattered across the room. The trappings of my dreams, dreams I hoped Tom hadn’t let go of quite yet; his asking me if we could go down this road, beginning again our lost ritual, seemed a sign to me, a sign he hadn’t lost it. Hope still lived in him somewhere, I knew.

  I reached over and held his hand the rest of the way out.

  We pulled into Chesterfield proper, and the cluster of homes and lawns seemed more beautiful, more our home than it had any day we had driven through it so far. The frost was thicker out here, the lawns glazed, it seemed, with shimmering ice as we drove past them.

  Tom said, “We need gas,” and pulled into the service station at the main intersection in town, though there was no signal, not even a blinking amber light.

  The gas station was an old one; gas station mini-marts hadn’t yet made it out here, and for that I was thankful. Two gas pumps stood under a high metal awning, the station itself only a one-bay garage and an office. Inside the window of the office were colorful cans of oil stacked in a pyramid; around the side of the building was a Coke machine.

  From inside the office came an attendant, a man in his mid-thirties with a thick, black beard and black hair that hung out from beneath the baseball cap he wore. He had on a blue shirt with the station’s insignia above the shirt pocket, the shirt crisp and clean. Under the shirt he had on white long underwear, the sleeves showing at his neck and wrists, the forearms of the shirt rolled up to his elbow. He had on Levi’s, black and shiny with old engine oil, I imagined, and he had on black rubber boots.

  He was handsome, but everyone I saw that morning appeared that way: I was taking in faces in a new world, remembering details, trying to take in the day as deeply as I could. We were buying a house today.

  He came around to Tom’s window, and leaned toward it as Tom rolled it down. “Fill it up, please,” Tom said, and the attendant nodded, first at Tom, then at me.

  “Tom,” I said. “This is the day. This is the day.”

  He simply smiled. He pulled his wallet out of his pocket, found the right credit card. He said, “This is the day the real stuff starts.” He was examining the credit card as though it weren’t his own, the name there someone else’s. “This is the day the real worries start up.” He paused a moment, and looked out the windshield. “Get ready for the postpartum blues,” he said, a faint smile on his face.

  It was a joke we could both let go on this day.

  The house had seemed somehow brighter, sharper, the November air thin and cold, much colder than back in town. As every time we came here, we sat in the car a few moments before getting out, just staring at the house. Things were different: the foundation mortar to the right of the porch was a new gray, and stood out stark against the near-black fieldstones, that work already done, Tom and Martin and Grady having repaired it three weeks ago now. Mr. Blaisdell had given us the okay, this down from Mr. Clark over in Maplewood, to go ahead and start working on the place.

  Tom had had two weeks of vacation coming, and so arranged with his boss, an old woman with blue hair coiffed high on her head and thick glasses that magnified her dull eyes, to let him take a series of three-day weekends to get as much of the structural repairs finished as he and Martin and Grady could.

  That first Friday Tom had borrowed a truck from one of the paper’s stringers, an old, beat-up green Dodge, and then had met Grady and Martin at the Friendly’s parking lot, and headed out for the house. He’d already had lumber—four floor joists—delivered, had rented a Sawzall and hydraulic jacks and everything else he knew he’d need. The money from the sale of my mother’s house was already going, but that was fine. This was what we’d saved it for.

  When I’d gotten off work, I picked up a bucket of chicken at Jim Dandy’s and headed straight out to Chesterfield. The drive seemed strange and long, but once I’d cleared town and had headed down into the gorge, the twilit sky before me orange and blue and violet all at once, above the deepest violet crystalline sparks of stars, I felt for the first time I was indeed heading home.

  When I pulled up, the three of them, filthy and sweaty and smiling, were on the floor in the front room, a fire going in the fireplace. The electricity hadn’t been turned on yet.

  “Two joists in just today,” Tom said to me. He was lying on the floor, propped up on an elbow. He was grinning, his face, it seemed, moving with the shadows of firelight.

  Martin, who sat Indian-style before the fire, smiled up at me. “Shimmed in ship-shape, also,” he said. Grady and Tom both laughed, Martin still looking at me.

  I said, “C rations for the troops,” and held up the bucket of chicken.

  So that now, this new mortar meant more to me than just a new color, more than just the fact the floors had been leveled out over the past month, more than the fact the fieldstones had been mortared in, scraped and chinked clean of that old, dusty mortar and replaced, all of which we’d done over the second long weekend. As we sat before the house, the new mortar meant more than I had let myself imagine about buying this house: it let me begin to swell with hope, with the act of repairing and revising and restoring. That hope had multiplied in me. This was the day.

  We sat there, and sat, still no words. Finally Tom popped open his door. I knew what his mind was on, what he was thinking about Though his crack about postpartum blues was meant to be a joke, he was not kidding. Each time he looked at the house now he saw all that still needed to be done, what portion of the house would be repaired next, what timber and supplies we would need, which tools to ready for the next weekend. Even now, as he climbed out of the car, his eyes were on the house, focused on the next tack he would take, the next place he and Martin and Grady would tear apart only to put back together again.

  “The roof,” he said, almost shouting, as though to the house itself, some sort of fair warning to the structure of what would happen next, or some sort of soothing words to let it know which ailment, which wound, would be taken care of next.

  He went to the front of the car, and leaned against the hood, his arms crossed.

  I got out and went to him. I looked up at the roof.

  “We’ll get up there on Friday morning, if it’s not raining. We’ve been blessed with good weather this far. I just hope it’ll hold out.” Again, though I was his audience, the only one listening, I knew that if I hadn’t been here, if he’d been standing here alone, his words would have been the same, spoken with the same inflection.

  I could not blame him. Already he had worked three long weekends, fourteen- and sixteen-hour days; Monday mornings it took me an extra half hour just to get him out of bed.

  He pointed at the roof, and drew an imaginary line across the length of it. “It bows there at that one point, then next to the chimney. And it looks like there’s a few depr
essions off to the left.” He paused, brought his arm back to his chest. “We’ll have to rent the ladder again.”

  Slowly I started toward the house, and then I stepped up onto the porch.

  “This porch,” he said, this time to me, I could tell, his voice different, softer. He pushed off the hood and started toward me. “That porch we can take off this weekend, too. You and Grady, if you feel like it. I think you can do it.”

  Until now the only jobs I’d been given were, on that first weekend, inventorying precisely what sort of interior nonstructural repairs needed to be made: the paneling taken out everywhere, the kitchen cupboards and that leak beneath the sink, the bathroom and the cracked sink and the broken tile. The second weekend I’d spent cleaning those fieldstones, which had been a community affair, all four of us camped out next to the foundation, the pile of fieldstones before us, each of us with a different tool in hand: me with a small hammer, Tom with a heavy screwdriver, Grady with a chisel, Martin with a mallet.

  Martin worked like an automaton, his hands quick and steady as he held a fieldstone in one hand, the mallet in the other. He would hit the stone with the mallet just hard enough to free up the mortar, give the stone a quick flip and catch it, then hammer that side and any edges where the mortar remained. He put the stone on the pile next to him, his growing more rapidly than anyone else’s, those stones cleaner, too.

  Each Sunday afternoon Tom paid them both. He paid them flat fees, each getting seventy-five apiece, and when Martin had that money in his hand, he fell back from the automaton, that robot, into the slow old man I’d first seen here, the grin with those teeth, his hair messed up. He held the money in his hand as if it were a bar of gold, just looking at it, his shoulders going up and down in excitement. Then Grady would gently take the money from him, fold it over and tuck it into his left front pocket. He took his own money and put it in his right front, and we would leave, the four of us talking about nothing the entire ride back, Martin as always simply reiterating whatever it was Grady said, whether about the progress on the foundation or floor joists, or the prices at Friendly’s going up again, or the coming cold and how both their heating bills would take giant jumps next month. And then we were at Friendly’s, and they were wheeling their bikes out from behind the dumpster, Grady waving us off as they mounted them.