“Sunny?” he called.
A bird whistled in the distance, the sound low and airy, like blowing across a Coke bottle.
“It’s Dr. Stusick. Anybody home?”
He circled around to the back of the house, the wet grass soaking his pant legs, and spotted a faint trail through the weeds, in the general direction of the back door. The back porch appeared rickety but intact. A new satellite dish, clean and modern, had been bolted to its roof.
Len knocked firmly—once, twice—and listened. Voices inside, a faint music. Somebody was watching television.
“Sunny, are you there?”
The doorknob turned easily in his hand.
Marcia Eickmeier was scrubbing out the percolator at her kitchen sink—white vinegar, her secret weapon against coffee stains—when Dr. Stusick drove past in his van. Later the sirens attracted her attention: first the ambulance, then the volunteer firemen. Finally the police cruiser screamed down Deer Run Road, sending gravel flying. Chief Carnicella had been listening to the scanner when the ambulance was dispatched, and was the last to arrive.
Marcia and Davis rode over together in the pickup. By then Deer Run was lined with parked cars. “I’d a loved to get a look inside that place,” she said later to anyone who’d listen: her daughters-in-law, her sisters, the ladies at the church. But by the time she’d arrived, a yellow tape cordoned off the property. The paramedics had already left.
Sunny Baker, too, was gone.
Dr. Stusick had found her on the sofa in front of the television, dressed in her plaid hunting jacket. The TV, at high volume, was tuned to the Travel Channel. The smell was indescribable. Judging by decomposition, she had been dead over a week. Had already been dead—Len learned this later—when Dick Devlin led the prison officials on their site walk, past the junkyard on Deer Run Road.
Despite the court’s best efforts, Miss Baker’s children could not be located. Her estate would spend years in probate, but Dick Devlin wasn’t about to wait. Within a week her property was cleared of the motorcycle and snowmobile and junk cars; the tractor and generator and swing set; the hippie’s starburst van. The beautician’s sink was refused by Ruth Rizzo, who had her own, thank you, she didn’t need a piece of crap that had spent ten years on somebody’s lawn. Everything else went straight into a Dumpster: the ruined furniture and rusting appliances, the warped piles of lumber, the high chair and bicycle, the busted table saw.
The haulers were paid by the Borough of Bakerton.
In the fall of 2000, Deer Run State Correctional Facility was built.
Desiderata
Albert Chura is an early riser. Joyce awakens to the buzzing of his lawn mower. The days are getting longer, and already her room is filled with sunlight. Outside, the pale spring leaves have matured into a deep summer green. Ed’s white birches—he planted them along the front edge of the yard—are in full leaf. Once again Joyce has her privacy, after a long winter of feeling exposed.
She dresses and goes downstairs to make coffee. From the front porch, she gives Albert a wave. After he finishes, he’ll come inside for a cup. He always compliments her coffee, though she knows it’s nothing special. She simply follows the directions on the can. It seems a ridiculous thing to learn at her age, but widowhood is full of such lessons. Ed, who rose before dawn, always had his first cup alone in the dark. He’d put on a fresh pot when he heard Joyce on the stairs.
She sets out milk and sugar for Albert—she takes hers black—as he raps at the back door. “Morning,” he grunts, wiping his work boots on the mat. Albert is seventy-two, the age Ed would have been, and his boots look nearly that old. He wears what he always wears, green Dickie work pants and a clean white T-shirt that seems to have shrunk in the wash. It’s not unlike the uniform he wore as the high school janitor, a job Ed gave him out of sympathy or misplaced patriotism and helped him keep for thirty years. Albert was a decorated veteran; at Anzio he’d taken a bullet in the hip. Ed was 4F and, in Joyce’s opinion, unduly impressed by such things.
“Lot of stones this year,” Albert says, hiking up his pant legs to sit. Every spring when the snow melts, Joyce’s front lawn is littered with gravel. The pebbles are spread by the township crews for traction on icy roads, and the first hard rain washes them into her yard. Some years Ed had spent half a day raking them up.
“I need to reseed out back,” Albert adds. “Them kids tore it up pretty good this year.” Every winter Joyce’s backyard is a mecca for neighborhood children. At the first snowfall they show up in droves with toboggans and sleds. Their voices fill the air like birdsong, delighted shrieks as they careen down the hill.
He glances over Joyce’s shoulder into the living room, where she’s left a couple of large Hefty bags, old clothes she will take to Goodwill. “Spring cleaning, eh?”
Albert is handsome for a man his age; at least he still has a lot of hair. It is snow-white and worn in the style he’s favored since high school, an extravagant ducktail held in place with Brylcreem. Joyce hadn’t known him in school—he is several years older, her brother Georgie’s age. According to Georgie, Albert had been a hothead and a troublemaker. He dropped out in his final year, worked in the coal mines until the army drafted him. That he returned with a hitch in his step earned him some sympathy. When you came back wounded, people forgot for a time why they’d been glad to see you go.
It is the fact of growing old in a small town: you know everyone’s whole story, and everyone, like it or not, knows yours. Except for a brief period in her youth, Joyce has lived her entire life in Bakerton. When she looks at someone her own age—her neighbor Betty Bursky, for example—she sees the towheaded child Betty once was, the teenage siren, the young wife with too many children; the whole journey that landed Betty where she is now, widowed, morbidly obese, living with a dozen cats in a manufactured home on Locust Street, as though feeding a crowd is a habit she can’t break.
Albert stirs his coffee. There is a mermaid tattooed on his forearm, green and fuzzy like mold on bread. “I’ve been meaning to ask, Joyce. That bike of Ed’s is just setting in your garage. If you don’t have any use for it, I can take it off your hands.”
It startles her somehow to hear him use her first name. What had he called her when Ed was alive? Nothing. They simply hadn’t spoken. It was Ed who’d phoned Albert when something needed to be painted or trimmed or sanded or graded, the chores he could no longer manage. Presumably Albert had called Ed by his first name, too; when had that started? After they both retired, probably, and were no longer principal and janitor. When the school’s stiff hierarchy, like so much else, was made irrelevant by age.
“It’s a good bike. Shame for it to set there.” Albert is a keen negotiator, a wheeler-dealer, Ed used to say. When something breaks down at the house, Albert is a phone call away, but it is a call Joyce dreads. She overpays him, probably, but this is preferable to haggling. Talking about money embarrasses her.
“Well, what do you say?”
Even the teachers had called him Mr. Hauser. In the beginning Joyce herself had. He hired her as the school secretary, and later, after they began dating, she carefully avoided addressing him by name. It would have been absurd to call him Mr. Hauser when the whole faculty had seen them together at the Legion dances, the Rivoli Theater, Keener’s Diner for a bite afterward.
As the school secretary, she was simply Joyce. Like the cafeteria ladies, the custodial staff, or somebody’s pet, she was thought to need only one name. Later, after she’d put herself through school and stood at the front of her own classroom, she truly enjoyed being called Miss Novak, the small formality like an umbrella in the rain. It distresses her to learn that her daughter, a college professor, lets students call her Rebecca, but she is trying not to be critical. How times have changed, Joyce says.
Later, after Albert leaves, she sees that he forgot to trim the hedges. Her own fault: she gave him several chores when one task at a time is all he can remember. He is a good worker as long as you don’t
overload him. Ed used to joke about his forgetfulness, even gave him a nickname, Addlebert. It was a private joke, one of many between them; a complex web of shared silliness that, now that Ed is gone, means nothing to anybody.
It offends her slightly, the way the world has gone on without him. There was a television show he liked—something about military lawyers, she couldn’t make any sense of it, but Ed never missed an episode. All last summer he grumbled about the reruns. Then, the week after he died, a new season started. She could have cried at the unfairness of it, and did. You cried over the small things.
Her own memory is sharp, painfully so. She wonders when Albert’s started to go. Ed had blamed it on the drinking. Over the years Albert had been on and off the wagon. There had been times, more than a few, when he missed work or showed up soused, and Ed sent him home after a talking-to. A couple of students had seen him staggering, and the others pretended they had. The crueler boys aped his limp. Anyone else would have fired the man ten times over, but Ed could never bring himself to do it. He’s got a family, he pointed out. Albert’s all right once you get to know him. He’s not a bad guy.
Ed did all the hiring and firing at Bakerton High, though the truculent school board had the last word. As in many small towns, the system stank of nepotism, which got worse over the years as the mines failed and jobs became more and more scarce. There were twelve board members, most with several adult children. (Bakerton was a Catholic town.) Add in the nieces and nephews and cousins, and you had a school system with too many employees and fewer and fewer pupils as the young families moved away. It isn’t her imagination: Bakerton is aging before her eyes, the whole town subsisting on Social Security or, like Joyce, widows’ pensions. Her own daughter went away to college and stayed away; she comes back only at Christmas, and Joyce doesn’t blame her a bit. Rebecca would be miserable in Bakerton, though she was a happy child here, sunny and sociable, involved in school activities, a leader of teams. It was in high school that she became a deliberate misfit, proud of all the ways she didn’t belong. Ed blamed himself: it wasn’t easy being the principal’s daughter. It was true that teachers’ children were noticed and commented upon, their slightest misstep dissected in the faculty lounge. Poor kid, Ed would tell Joyce, shaking his head. At least she only has one parent in the system. Good thing you got out when you did.
Was it a good thing? Looking back, Joyce isn’t sure, though at the time the choice was nearly automatic. Ed made a good living; they didn’t really need her paycheck. She had two small children, one sickly and furiously attached to his mother. Teddy had been a babysitter’s nightmare. Each morning he’d wept bitterly, sometimes for hours, when Joyce left him with her sister. Dorothy kept track of his medications, his twice-daily breathing treatments, but she was a high-strung spinster undone by tantrums. After a few months with Teddy, she was a nervous wreck.
So when the school year ended, Joyce surrendered her classroom—the place where she’d been happiest, the job she’d worked so long and diligently to get. She was no longer Mrs. Hauser. Gone was the companionship of the faculty lounge, the cheery sound of the morning bell ringing the start of a new day. Gone were the shy, studious girls, her favorite pupils; the obstreperous boys who made her laugh; The Great Gatsby and Lord Jim and The Scarlet Letter, books she has always loved.
For many years her small family occupied her completely. She was cook and laundress, chauffeur and nurse. She has never admitted to anyone—why would she?—that books have brought her as much joy as her children have, and considerably less pain.
In the afternoon her daughter calls. It is six hours later in France, nine P.M. on a Saturday night, and Rebecca is lonely. Joyce can hear it in her voice, or maybe it’s just a bad connection, hollow-sounding, as though they’re shouting across a frozen lake. Additionally, there is a delay on the line, a few seconds’ pause after each of them speaks, so they’re always interrupting each other. She listens as Rebecca complains about a difficult student, her officious landlady, a transit strike that makes her commute to the university nearly impossible. (The French, it seems, are always on strike.) Joyce worries, but doesn’t ask, about Rebecca’s phone bill.
It isn’t until the very end of the conversation that Joyce mentions Albert Chura.
“The janitor? We used to call him Prince Albert. I don’t remember why.” Rebecca pauses. “Why would he want Dad’s bike?”
Joyce starts to answer, but Rebecca interrupts. “Well, it’s not like you’re going to use it,” she says breezily, as if she doesn’t know (perhaps she doesn’t) that the words will sting. That Joyce never learned to ride a bike remains, even at her age, a point of embarrassment. Her parents had been poor and hadn’t owned such things, and by the time Joyce could afford to buy one herself, she had little desire to learn. Now, apparently, she is the only adult alive who’s never mastered this skill. (Her sister Dorothy, dead now, doesn’t count.) Ed loved bicycles and offered many times to teach her. I’ll walk behind you, keep you steady. Just like we did with the kids. For a while he badgered her, which made her even more determined not to learn. They had fought about it more than once, quite vehemently. It all seems stupid now.
“Prince Albert,” said Rebecca. “He and Dad were friends, right?”
Well, no: not friends, exactly. Albert had a way of lecturing Ed on mechanical things—once, the proper use of a pressure washer—that sounded slightly belligerent, as though he wanted it known, again and always, that he was the more competent man. Joyce didn’t appreciate this, but Ed had tolerated it with his usual good humor. He had an easygoing disposition and was not easily riled. Though occasionally, after Albert left, he’d seemed irritated. That guy will talk your ear off, he’d say, shaking his head.
“They knew each other a long time,” Joyce says.
“Well, maybe Dad would want him to have it. He loved that bike,” Rebecca adds, as though Joyce might not know this.
“Yes, he did,” Joyce says.
He found the bike the year he retired, in the pages of a catalog. It was a replica of one he’d ridden as a boy, red, with coaster brakes. At the time he owned a ten-speed with hand brakes, which squeaked no matter how often he replaced the pads. For many years, a bike with coaster brakes had been impossible to find.
He rode the new bike to daily Mass, where he served as a lector. (In one of the many ironies of their married life, Ed, the convert, turned out to be the better Catholic.) From the kitchen window, Joyce watched him pedal down the street. He returned exhilarated but winded from the effort. “It’s good for the old geezer,” he joked, huffing mightily. “Give the lungs a workout.”
He had quit smoking for the second time, and each morning he woke with a rousing cough. Listening, Joyce thought only of Teddy. It was almost more than she could bear to hear Ed straining for breath.
That evening Joyce sits through Mass—it’s quicker than the Sunday service—and eats dinner with her friend Eleanor Rouse at a new restaurant with an old name, the Commercial Hotel. The original Commercial went under when Joyce was a girl, and the second was destroyed in a fire some years ago. This new Commercial occupies the old Sons of Italy building, and Joyce hopes Dick Devlin can make a go of it. Bakerton, at the moment, has only three other restaurants: a pizza joint, a diner with bad coffee, and a Chinese takeout with a few tables in the rear. Every so often an unemployed miner would scrape together the money to open a new one. Within a few months, a year at the outside, the place would close.
“How are you making out with your cleaning?” Eleanor asks. She’s been after Joyce for months to go through Ed’s closets, his camera equipment, the basement workshop where he kept his tools. You need closure, she likes to say. Her own husband died ten years ago, and she considers herself an authority.
“I dropped off three bags this morning,” Joyce says. That the clothes were mostly hers and Rebecca’s is not, strictly speaking, Eleanor’s business. “Tomorrow I’ll tackle those boxes in the basement. And Albert Chura is interested
in Ed’s bike.”
“Oh, Albert.” Eleanor rolls her eyes. At one time she’d been the school nurse; she remembers a younger Albert, in his drinking days. “He’s always been a hoarder. A cheapskate, too. Let me guess: he didn’t offer you a dime.”
Joyce blinked. Until that moment money hadn’t crossed her mind.
“Rebecca called,” she says, changing the subject. “She wants to come visit in July or August for a couple of weeks.” It is apparently the time to get out of France, which every summer is overrun with tourists. Americans, Rebecca said with disdain. She has spoken this way since high school. It seemed absurd then—except for a class trip to Niagara Falls, she’d never taken a breath in another country—but to Joyce, who as a child collected cans for the war effort, whose brother marched in V-J parades, it was also perplexing and sad. Her own parents had come over from Italy and Poland, a fact she’s never advertised. As a teenager she was ashamed of their accents, and as an adult is ashamed of her shame.
It’s no mystery where Rebecca learned to disparage Americans. Her junior year at Bakerton High, Ed hired a new language teacher, a woman named Marianne Blinn. And more than either of her parents, it was Marianne Blinn who shaped the course of Rebecca’s life.
She was a doctor’s wife, and in a town with only two of them, that was enough to make her a celebrity. All of Bakerton knew the story of the Blinns’ courtship. They had married in Germany, where David Blinn was stationed, and after his residency came back to his hometown to live. It was considered a romantic story, in part because Bakerton was not generally a town people came back to. You were born in Bakerton and either escaped, as Joyce’s brothers had, or failed to. Ed Hauser was a rarity: he’d grown up halfway across the state and was hired for the principal’s job, over some objections, when no local candidate could be found.
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