Earnest

by Kristin von Kreisler

  He threw back his blanket and climbed off the sofa in his boxer shorts and tee shirt. His pajamas were in the bedroom, which Anna had clearly defined as her private domain and which last night he’d not wanted to invade. “Are you finished in the bathroom?” he asked politely. A little chivalry might help. He paused, hoping for an answer. “I take your silence as a ‘yes,’” he said.

  Jeff went into the bedroom. Their bed looked rumpled, thrashed in—Anna’s night must not have been any more restful than his. To remind her what a good guy he was, he quickly smoothed out the sheets and blanket and covered them with the linen spread they’d bought together. He took clean underwear from the dresser and Dockers and a fresh shirt from the closet, and he went into the bathroom, which, he was grateful, did not have hot-pink walls and lime-green cabinets. After showering and shaving, he was about to make an assault on Anna’s new territory, the kitchen, when the phone rang.

  “How is Earnest?” Anna asked.

  Jeff hurried to the bedroom extension.

  “Earnest’s x-rays look pretty good. There’s not much carbon on his lungs. We stopped the oxygen this morning,” Dr. Nilsen said.

  Wonderful. “Dr. Nilsen, this is Jeff,” he said to alert him that he was on the line. “Does that mean Earnest can come home?”

  “I’d like for him to stay here another day so we can watch him. We’ll keep monitoring his oxygen saturation. If he maintains it on his own for twenty-four hours, we’ll know he’s rounded the corner.”

  “Do you think he will?” Anna asked.

  “He’s giving every indication he’s okay.”

  Relief!

  “I’ll visit him at lunch,” Anna said.

  “He’ll be glad to see you,” Dr. Nilsen said.

  “I’ll be there after work,” Jeff said.

  Dr. Nilsen paused for slightly longer than a blink and then said, “Fine.” But the small delay was enough to indicate that their arriving separately again had registered with him. As it would Earnest.

  CHAPTER 9

  “Come on, sweet Edgar. Don’t die on me. This bath should make you feel better.” Anna gently washed the plant’s rubbery leaves with a sponge and soapy water, then dried them with a towel. Free of smoke, his leaves looked greener and, though drooped, were thick and tough. Anna patted them, as she might have patted Earnest’s paw. “You’ve got to fight. I need you,” she said.

  In the sink she sprayed water on Constance’s shriveled fronds and hoped there might still be life in her. From a plastic bag, Anna shook soil into a clay pot, which would be Constance’s new home. “I won’t give up on you. As you revive, I’ll be here cheering for you.” Anna set her in the soil and added more around her roots.

  Anyone but Anna would have tossed these plants into the ever-growing pile of rubbish on the lawn. But she could never give up on her dear old friends. To her, plants were like people. They had personalities and needs, and they commanded respect. She liked their quiet dignity as they witnessed life around them. They had a silent steadiness.

  One morning Jeff had watched her watering and whispering to her begonias in their condo windowsill. He’d said, “They’re growing into giants. Soon you’ll have to beat them back.”

  “I love them.”

  “They sure know it.” Jeff had smiled the smile that got Anna every time. She’d crossed the kitchen and kissed him.

  How her life had changed in just one day. Now that she’d lost all trust in Jeff, kissing him would be impossible. She branded him “thoughtless”—no, more than thoughtless. Insensitive. He had a rhino’s hide. And when she remembered Kimberly’s revelation yesterday, Anna had to admit that Jeff had flat out ambushed her. She’d never have predicted it in a thousand years. How could he have done such a thing?

  Feeling crushed, Anna pressed down Constance’s soil so she’d sit tall in her pot. Anna watered her, carried her to the corner, and set her on her pedestal. “You be brave. You need to get strong again,” Anna told the fern. Constance may have been wounded, but she was proud.

  Earnest’s now-gray lily pad reeked of smoke. If Anna washed it, the corduroy cover would be fine, but the pillow inside would fall apart. She was about to haul the bed out to the rubbish pile, but then she reconsidered.

  Throwing away Earnest’s lily pad would be like throwing him away. Such a disloyal act might indicate she’d given up on his recovery and didn’t expect him back. Jeff is the disloyal one, not me, she thought. She set the bed down. Gently. With care. For now, no matter how bad the smell, she’d keep the lily pad exactly where it was.

  Luis Ramon wore blue coveralls, Reeboks, and a Seattle Mariners baseball cap turned backward. When he spoke, his gold tooth flashed. He handed Anna a business card for Serve-U Restoration in Seattle. “I come from insurance company. You burn, we earn.” His whole face crinkled when he laughed.

  “What can I do for you?” Anna asked.

  “I do estimate to clean.”

  “Fantastic! We’re desperate for help.” Anna was so grateful that she felt like hugging him.

  “Estimate only. Boss says no work,” he said.

  “I thought you cleaned.”

  “We do. Not here.”

  “So you’ll just make an estimate? That’s it? We won’t see you again?”

  “Sí, señora.”

  As Luis measured walls and wrote down numbers in a spiral notebook, Anna grumbled to her disappointed self. This morning Gamble’s building inspector had declared the house a mess, but habitable if electricity were restored. Now, clearly, Mrs. Blackmore had decided not to bother cleaning up, so she surely wouldn’t bother with repairs. A tightwad like her wouldn’t put a pinched penny into a house that might be demolished in a few months. Anna should have known. She should have turned her back on hope.

  Anna called an official meeting—like those that she, Joy, and Lauren used to have around their kitchen table to count their savings for the house. But since the kitchen was gone, their meeting place was Plant Parenthood. Their agenda was the future.

  “Exhibit A for my fight against the ash avalanche.” Joy gave her broom’s dingy gray bristles a halfhearted kick. She’d walked in, leaning wearily on the handle. With a groan, she sank into a metal folding chair. Side-by-side, Anna and Lauren dangled their legs from a Chinese-red table.

  “I’m thinking the universe is telling me to forget my shop and find a regular job,” Joy said.

  “You don’t want to do that. You wouldn’t have time to finish Wild Savage Love,” Lauren said.

  “We’ve stuck with you while John and Penelope fell in love in Cornwall. Now that Murdon’s captured them, you can’t leave us hanging. We have to know what happens,” Anna said.

  “It’s all bad,” Joy said. “They’re chained up in the brig of the Evil Murdon’s slave ship. He’s got the hots for Penelope, so you know where that might lead. As he heads for the Barbary Coast, a storm blows in and everybody’s getting tossed around and sick, but John and Penelope can’t reach each other.”

  “You can’t leave those poor people in misery like that forever. They have to escape. There has to be a happy ending. You can’t give up the story,” Lauren said.

  “I’m not sure.” Devoid of her usual spunk, Joy hung her head. Ashes sprinkled out of her hair and landed on her shoulders. “I’m discouraged.”

  “We all are, but we can’t let a fire defeat us,” Lauren said.

  “I don’t see how I can reopen my shop. I don’t want to be the starving Queen of Smokeland.” Joy covered her face with her hands, perhaps the only place to hide from her bad luck. “Total bummer,” she mumbled against her palms.

  Lauren thumped her hiking boots’ heels together. For work clothes, she wore a camouflage jumpsuit with an emerald-green ascot. “We need to figure out what we’re going to do.”

  “We can’t till we find out what Mrs. Scroogemore has in mind. If she won’t let us stay here for now, that changes everything,” Anna said.

  “I’ve called her twice,” Joy
said. “The rancid scumbag. If she gave a flying flip about anybody but herself, she’d get back to us.”

  “I don’t understand why she’s avoiding us. Where do you think she is?” Lauren asked.

  “Who knows? Maybe robbing orphans’ piggy banks in Florida,” Anna said.

  “I wish an alligator would drag her into a swamp and do her in.” Joy brightened at the prospect.

  Anna flicked an ash off her blue chambray shirt. “I think we should forget about her for a minute and decide what we want.”

  “I want George Clooney to prostrate himself at my feet while Brad Pitt nibbles my earlobes.” Joy chortled.

  “I’m serious,” Anna said. “I’d like to stay here with both of you and keep going as long as we can. And I still want to buy this house.”

  “I’m in,” Lauren said.

  Two pensive lines appeared between Joy’s eyebrows. “I don’t know.”

  “You can’t bail out on us. We’ll help with your shop,” Anna said.

  “Mrs. Scroogemore could boot us out tomorrow,” Joy pointed out.

  “What if she boots us out in a few months, after she gets a permit? Would we fight?” Lauren asked.

  That paved the way for more what-ifs and more hard questions.

  What if Mrs. Blackmore did not get a permit? If Anna, Joy, and Lauren had spent their savings getting their shops up and running, how would they scrape together money for an offer on the house? How could they afford repairs?

  What if Mrs. Blackmore let them stay for now but did nothing for the house? How could they get electricity? How could they fix the burned wall of Joy’s shop? How could they clean all the walls so customers wouldn’t gag at the smoke?

  When Anna pondered these repairs, Jeff rudely pushed his way into her mind, a camel’s nose under her tent. Every summer in college he’d worked for a contractor. Jeff could fix anything. He knew about wiring, painting, and plumbing. Putting up Joy’s new wall would take him just an afternoon. Anna squeezed her eyes closed to banish him from her thoughts. No matter his skills, she would never ask him for help. Not after what he’d done.

  “We can’t tell what’s ahead. We have too many unknowns,” Joy said.

  “We know we want to save the house and buy it if we can. That should be the goal,” Anna said.

  “Hear, hear,” Lauren said.

  “It seems impossible,” Joy said.

  “Even so, we can’t just lie down and die,” Anna said.

  Joy rolled the broom’s handle between her palms. “I hope you’re not lying down and dying about Jeff, Anna.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Letting him get away with being such a despicable pissant,” Joy answered.

  “He’s definitely hurt me,” Anna admitted.

  “Hurt you? He’s clobbered you. A betrayal like that deserves a whap to his kisser,” Joy said.

  “You’re probably right,” Anna said.

  “I’m more than right. Don’t you think so, Lauren?”

  Lauren swung her feet and seemed thoughtful for a moment. “Anna, you do have a right to be mad.”

  “She has a right to be outraged. He betrayed her big-time. I’d kill him,” Joy said.

  Anna glanced at the floor. Though she’d mopped it twice, tracked-in ashes were everywhere. She felt like one of those ashes herself. Trampled. Pulverized, really, if she were honest with herself. Joy was right—Jeff had betrayed her, and she was more than hurt. When she looked at his betrayal square in the eyes, she realized how resentful she was.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Anna smoldered, but she did not welcome her resentment. It felt like a burglar who’d crawled through her window and was rifling her home. However, there the feeling was in all its spiked and prickly glory, and she had no way to ignore it. A healer might say that her spirit was enflamed and she had a fever of the soul.

  Seeking calm, Anna climbed up to the turret, which as a child had been her secret thinking spot. As a renter for the last few years, she’d sought refuge here with Earnest. She found comfort in the quiet, and she liked looking down on Gamble’s roofs from the perspective of the floor-to-ceiling windows.

  Now smoke had left a gloomy gray film on them, and the rest of the turret was equally dreary. But she told herself that the white wicker rocking chair could be repainted, and the brass floor lamp’s lotus-shaped base could be polished to a shine again. Earnest’s faux oriental rug could be cleaned. A little mopping, scrubbing, and window washing could revive the room in a weekend.

  Opposite the windows, Anna sank, cross-legged, to the floor and leaned against the wall. She counted her breaths for a while and then unscrewed the rusty lid of the Mason jar that held the time capsule, which Ted Carcionni had saved. A thick layer of dust clouded the glass and kept her from seeing the objects inside. But the capsule inspired awe because it linked her tangibly to the house’s past.As she shook out the jar’s contents, she felt that whoever had built the house was reaching out to her through the mists of time.

  In a letter, James Williams, an attorney, explained that he’d come from Minnesota and built the house in 1880 for his wife and their seven children. A photo showed the children standing in front of a one-room clapboard schoolhouse; on the back he’d listed their names. He’d enclosed a dollhouse’s ladder-back chair, a bullet, a clamshell, and a lock of hair. He’d also put in a page from the Gamble Crier. Al’s Grocery advertised eggs for thirty cents a dozen; milk, eight cents a quart; and ham, thirteen cents a pound. James Garfield had been elected U.S. president, and a new steamship was traveling from Gamble to Seattle.

  The time capsule drew Anna close to James Williams and his family. She could almost hear their laughter and their weeping, and feel their spats and disappointments, which lingered in the house. Perhaps members of their family had been born and had died here. Maybe they’d danced to photograph records in the living room and made apple pies in the kitchen. Certainly, the family’s love for each other still hung in the air, just as Anna and Grammy’s did.

  Whenever Anna came to the turret, she felt Grammy’s love as she had when sitting on her lap and leaning back against her chest. “I love you more than the sun and sky and all the flowers on the earth,” Grammy would say as she folded Anna in her arms. “If my love were an ice cream cone, it would be big enough to hold the whole world.”

  Dear house, I can’t let people raze you to the ground. But I’m not sure what to do, Anna thought.

  A little confusion never hurt anybody, the house replied in Anna’s heart—the exact words Grammy would have said.

  What if we try to save you, house, but it all comes to a dead end? Anna asked.

  You have to risk for what you want. You don’t live on an island named Gamble for nothing.

  Anna nodded. That was true.

  As so often happened in the turret, a memory came to Anna as if carried on the wind. One cold fall day she and Grammy had been driving back from a Huskies game. Grammy was cranky because they’d lost, and she kept muttering, “Blast! Drat! Crumb!”

  A mist rolled in, and the windshield wipers squeaked across the glass. As the Chevy traveled along Alaskan Way, wisps of fog swirled before the headlights, slid like ghosts across the hood, and billowed behind the car.

  No matter how hard Anna squinted or how many times she wiped the windshield with her fist, she could see only a few fearsome yards ahead. Grammy must have sensed her apprehension, because she patted her knee. “Don’t worry. If we’re careful, we’ll be all right.”

  “I hope,” Anna said.

  To distract her, Grammy launched a philosophical discussion, as she did from time to time. “A drive through fog is like life, you know.”

  “How come?”

  “We’re bumbling along in the car, and we literally can’t see behind or ahead. It’s the same when we go through life. As we muddle day to day, we can’t see the past or future; they exist only in our memory or imagination. All we have to live is the present moment—in life and in this car. Und
erstand?”

  “I think,” Anna said.

  “I can ponder today’s wretched Huskies score till the cows come home. Same with wondering about next week’s game. What matters is right here, now, with you. The fog forces us to focus on it.”

  Grammy turned up the defroster so the fan whirred behind the dashboard. Anna felt the wipers’ rhythm, steady as a pulse.

  “One thing’s for sure. Surprises are waiting for us out there in the fog of life,” Grammy added. “We must hope for the best and expect even more.”

  That had been Grammy’s mantra. Anna had heard her say it dozens of times. The words echoed in her mind when she got up and cleaned a circle of the turret’s window with her fist, just as she’d cleaned Grammy’s windshield to see out on that long-ago afternoon. For now, when Anna’s future was uncertain, the present seemed a safer place to be. Predicting what lay ahead for herself or the house was as pointless as worrying about it. She’d try to muddle along in the present, a step at a time, and hope for the best. As for expecting even more, she wasn’t sure.

  CHAPTER 10

  Jeff raised a disapproving eyebrow as he looked around the apartment’s living room. What an awful place. But beggars can’t be choosers.

  He tried not to recoil from the walls—hot pink, shocking pink, tickle-me pink. Whatever you wanted to call it, the color prevailed like an infectious rash that had spread from the hot-pink bathroom. At least Mr. Ripley, the landlord and a retired Marine, had painted the baseboards and window trim a civilized white. In order to stay on Gamble near Anna, Jeff could make do here if he had to.

  He could clean the last tenant’s toothpaste off the bathroom mirror easily enough, and a little bleach could send packing the kitchen sink’s mold. Though tattered, the red-and-brown plaid sofa was serviceable. Jeff didn’t really want to look at the mattress—he could always set his sleeping bag on top of Mr. Ripley’s ruffled pink taffeta bedspread. And there was a balcony for Earnest to loll around on. He wouldn’t mind looking down on a gas station.