If These Walls Could Talk

by Bettye Griffin

  Veronica couldn’t believe that the wives of her brothers-in-law would agree to such a thing. For one, the basement was all open, so they would have no privacy. And because heat rose it tended to be a little chilly down there. But no one wanted to miss the New Year’s Eve party. In the end she’d gone along, trying to see it from Eddie and Charles’s point of view. It cost so much to go out anywhere for New Year’s, and it came just one week after all the expense of Christmas. And they were family, as much as her sister Valerie was. Valerie’s boyfriend, without the expense of a family, could probably afford a couple of nights in a hotel, even with a surcharge. Eddie and Charles really couldn’t. How could she say no? At least their children stayed with other family members who lived in the city.

  Still, she sensed a potential problem on the horizon. “Norman, I know Eddie and Charles are your brothers, but do you see a pattern forming here? With the holidays?”

  “If you mean am I worried about my brothers wanting to come out for Easter, no.”

  But I’ll bet they’ll want to come out for Memorial Day, July 4th, and Labor Day, she thought.

  Norman turned on his side and stretched his hand out across her middle. She shrugged and closed her eyes.

  If he wasn’t worried about Eddie and Charles and their wives, then she wouldn’t either.

  Chapter 22

  The Currys

  April 2003

  Camille read over the letter she’d just composed. Positive that George—as she thought of him, even though she addressed him as “Mr. Stephens”—would like it, she inserted letterhead into her printer and sent a command to print. Before George got promoted she had to share a printer with three other secretaries, and somebody was always walking off with her stuff. Now she had her own.

  She liked being on the thirty-sixth floor.

  George kept her busy, too. Camille had always thought that many executive secretaries didn’t do anything but make reservations for lunch or travel plans for their bosses, with plenty of time to file their nails or read the latest novels, but she had very little idle time. George clearly expected her to work for that 10 percent raise he’d gotten her. He used to write out his own correspondence and give it to her to type. Now he merely told her what to say and who to say it to. He hadn’t liked her early efforts, but after a while she’d learned to do it the way he wanted.

  No doubt about it, she had what it took to work on the thirty-sixth floor.

  Reuben called as she walked out of George’s empty office after laying the letter on his desk. “Hi!” she said happily. The sound of his voice always came as a welcome sound to her ears. “What’s going on?”

  “Is there any way you can get off a little early today? We have to talk about something serious, and I’d rather do it before we get on the bus with everybody.”

  “Uh . . . I don’t think it’ll be a problem. But I’ll have to clear it with George, just in case he has something he wants me to do before I leave. But what’s going on, Reuben?”

  “I’ll tell you when I see you. Let’s meet at that coffee shop across from Port Authority at 4:45.” He paused. “Trust me, it’s best this way.”

  Fortunately, George gave the green light for her to leave at 4:45. She spent the rest of the afternoon wondering what Reuben wanted to talk to her about.

  Reuben wasted no time. The moment he approached the coffee shop where they agreed to meet he took both her hands in his. “I’ve got bad news, Camille.”

  She tensed. “What is it?”

  “My store is closing.”

  She drew in her breath. “The whole chain?”

  “No, just my store. In three months.”

  She stared at him blankly. “But . . . You’ve worked for them a long time. Surely they have a job for you.” My God, without Reuben’s income we’ll sink faster than the Titanic.

  “They did offer me something, but it’s out on Long Island. I had to turn it down, Camille. It’ll take forever to get out there, and I’m already spending five hours a day going back and forth to work. Plus, it’ll cost more if I have to get a pass for the LIRR in addition to the bus from Tobyhanna, and I wouldn’t be making any more money than I am now.” He ushered her inside, where they sat at a booth in the back with Cokes he ordered.

  She sighed. He was right—Long Island wasn’t feasible for daily travel. Of course, if they still lived in the Bronx . . .

  But they didn’t, and she tried, unsuccessfully, not to let the panic she felt show. “So what are we going to do? You know that even with my promotion I don’t make enough to pay the mortgage and the rest of the bills.”

  “I’ll see what I can find. But I might not be able to get work as a manager. I might have to stock shelves or something, at least at first.”

  “Yes, for minimum wage,” she said bitterly. Thank God she’d been able to get off early. By the time she had to board the bus she wanted to be calm, not have her appearance give away the fact that her world had just collapsed. She could pretend to be asleep if she felt like she couldn’t bear to listen to Dawn Young and the others, with all their talk about their vacation plans and their home improvements. She’d simply have to be strong enough not to burst into tears at the mere thought of what the future might hold for her family.

  “Listen, at least we know we’ve got ninety days. And they’re going to give me a severance package that will last at least another two months. They’ll give that to me even if I leave sooner because I’ve found another job. At least that will get us through the summer. We can take a little vacation, like we planned. It’ll be the end of October before we really have to worry.”

  Camille thought about last year’s heating bills. They’d been high, but the heat never seemed to completely warm the house. Everyone had worn bulky sweaters all season long, and even with that they usually curled up with throws when using the computer or watching TV. The constant chill had affected the kids in particular. Shayla had a runny nose from January all the way through March, and Mitchell’s cough got so bad that Camille had to take him to the doctor.

  She desperately wanted to work closer to home like Veronica did, but in a year no local jobs had materialized, at least nothing that paid worth a damn. She couldn’t simply give up her current salary, especially after her promotion last fall, to work locally for ridiculously low wages like four hundred dollars a week. It wouldn’t be worth it, even if it did eliminate the cost of commuting, especially now that Reuben’s employment days were numbered. Her one solace came from knowing Reuben wouldn’t be out of work tomorrow. A lot could change in five months.

  But she couldn’t stop worrying about how they’d manage after October.

  Then she thought of something else. “It won’t make sense for you to spend all that money to travel to New York to work, Reuben, if you’re just stocking shelves for six or seven dollars an hour.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t look in New York. I’d look near home, like in Stroudsburg. We can probably arrange for you to ride to the station with Bob or Jeff.”

  Camille’s jaw went taut. The thought of him getting to sleep past daylight and driving a mere half hour to work, while she continued to rise at 4:30 in the morning to get to the bus station before 5:45 made her want to weep. She’d thought she would be the one who’d work locally. It made much more sense for her, the woman of the house, to be the one with the short commute. She was the one who prepared dinner. She was the one who washed and ironed the clothes, did the grocery shopping, picked up around the house, and ran the carpet cleaner every two weeks on that high-maintenance white carpet she now regretted having chosen. Reuben would probably still expect her to make dinner the night before so they could eat as soon as they arrived home.

  Camille knew she was being unreasonable—Reuben always sought to work with her as a team—but she couldn’t help it. The way she saw it she hadn’t been hit with one bombshell, but two.

  Chapter 23

  The Youngs

  May 2003

  “Dawn, we’ve got
a problem.”

  She looked up from the inside of the refrigerator door, which she was cleaning with diluted all-purpose cleaner in a spray bottle. Milo looked so serious. “What?”

  “C’mere, and I’ll show you.”

  She put the sponge and spray bottle on the counter and followed him outside to the back of the house. A definite fault line had appeared at the rear, extending from the lake and headed straight for the house. “Ugh. This looks like it could cause a problem.”

  “Damn straight it can. A break in the soil underneath the house can probably cause our foundation to crack, and the deck wouldn’t be all that stable, either. And then we’re up a creek.”

  “What do you want to do, notify the home owners association?”

  “Not the association. The builder.” He held out his arms on either side of him, index fingers pointing. “You see how our neighbors’ lots are higher than ours in the back? That’s what’s causing this to happen. Every time it rains or snows their water runs into our yard to drain because it’s lower. We might have to put up a wooden fence to keep it from happening.”

  “I think a fence would be a good idea anyway, for privacy. It’ll be good for Stormy, too.” Dawn had hoped the Willises and their neighbors on the other side would put up fences, which would automatically give them privacy in their backyard without having to pay for it. She suspected they, in turn, hoped she and Milo would do it first.

  “We’ll see what you say when we find out how much it’ll cost. Would you rather go down to Virginia this summer or put up a fence?”

  She quickly reconsidered, not wanting to raid her thriving vacation club account to pay for home repairs. Virginia wasn’t exactly her dream vacation spot, but it beat staying home. “I guess it would be all right if we got the association to give us some dirt so that our property is at least as high as the neighbors.”

  “Screw that. I want us to be higher. Let water from our yard drain on their property.”

  To their great dismay, the builder refused to repair the problem when Milo called them. “But my house is warranted,” Dawn heard him say. Then, there was a pause, followed by, “It did? You don’t? But that doesn’t seem fair. Our house was built on a lower lot than the ones on either side. That means y’all knew this would happen after a year or so.”

  Dawn braced her shoulders through the next long pause as the builder spoke.

  “What do I know?” Milo said. “I’m a first-time home buyer from Brooklyn. You guys are the experts. It’s not fair to palm this off on me, to say I should have said something before. I didn’t notice it until now. But I’m sure your construction crew saw it. They knew what would happen down the road.”

  He made a few more grunting sounds, then closed with, “Well, we’ll see about that.”

  That last remark didn’t sound very promising, but when he hung up Dawn nevertheless asked him, “What did they say?”

  “They essentially said ‘tough tit.’ They said if we had noticed that the ground was low while the house was being built they probably could have done something, but that the warranty, which expired after one year anyway, only covered the house and the deck, not the lot.”

  “Well, that really sucks. Milo, we can’t afford to have that fixed.”

  “We can’t afford not to fix it. It’s headed toward our foundation, remember?” He muttered under his breath.

  “Why don’t you call the association next week? Maybe they can do something to help us.”

  “I doubt it, but I’ll call them, just to let them know I’m not happy.” He walked to the window and looked out at the backyard. “Shit. This is how sinkholes start. We’ll have to pay somebody to drop a load of dirt out front, and then we’ll have to spread it over the yard ourselves. We can’t afford to pay someone to do that, too.”

  “What about the grass?”

  “We’ll have to put down new grass. I doubt the old stuff will grow through the dirt. It might happen eventually, but in the meantime every time it rains we’ll have a muddy mess in the yard.”

  “Damn. This is starting to sound more and more expensive.” Dawn hoped they would eventually be able to invest in home improvements, like one of those new retractable awnings for the deck. She hadn’t planned on spending good money to correct something that should have been done properly in the first place. It wasn’t fair.

  Who was she kidding? No way could she and Milo afford any home-improvement projects, not with all the money they had to shell out every month for basic expenses. She estimated that the mortgage, their utilities, parking at the bus station, and those damn bus passes ate up more than half their net income. Dawn never claimed to be a financial expert, but she did know home ownership wasn’t supposed to work like that.

  She sighed. She also knew that home ownership couldn’t be all goodness and watching sunrises over the lake. Now she knew how the owners of their old apartment house must have felt whenever she called and said the bathtub had a clogged drain or the front of the kitchen drawer had broken off from the sides. Repairs cost money and cut into their profits.

  But they’d deal with it. They had no other option.

  In the end they spent $175 to get a dump truck full of dirt placed on their front lawn so they could raise the height of their lot. They drove over to the Home Depot in Stroudsburg, bought a wheelbarrow, and learned it would cost about two hundred dollars for enough square feet of sod to cover their entire backyard. “Forget it,” Milo said. Instead he bought two bags of grass seed, paying for that and the wheelbarrow with a credit card.

  “Uh . . . Are you sure you want to do that?” Dawn asked in a low tone at the checkout counter.

  Milo swiped the plastic card. “Do you have any other ideas?”

  All she could do was shake her head. They’d just paid another high electric bill and, as had been the case all winter, there hadn’t been a whole lot left over. She looked forward to the coming warm weather. How did other people manage to pay all these utilities? Out here they even had to pay for the water they used. Dawn quickly became aware of her wasteful water habits, like washing dishes under a constantly running stream of hot water. She learned to turn off the tap while she brushed her teeth, and she instructed Zach to do the same.

  Dawn and Milo began working with the dirt right away and worked all weekend, but they only had one wheelbarrow, and even with Zach helping, a ton of dirt would take some time for two adults and a preadolescent boy to move.

  Monday evening they came home from work to find a note from the home owners association reprimanding them for the unattractive mountain of dirt on their front lawn. Milo went into a rage, cursing the builder and association alike. Dawn felt like she’d been slapped in the face. After Milo’s angry phone call last week they knew the situation. They could have at least given them another week to move the dirt.

  “We won’t be able to do anything with it during the week,” she pointed out. How could they? They left the house before light, and by the time they got home it was dark again.

  “I’ll call and leave them a message that this dirt will sit right here at least through this weekend, and probably next weekend, too,” Milo said, shouting in agitation.

  Dawn wanted to give him something pleasant to think about, but she wasn’t sure if this was the right time. Her usually even-tempered husband had become a miserable sourpuss. “Milo, when we’re done moving the dirt we really should think about inviting the Currys and the Lees over,” she said. “We can have some fun, and we still haven’t been able to return the hospitality they showed us.”

  “That’s not our fault. We’ve invited them.”

  “I know.” She and Milo had been secretly pleased when Veronica declined their invitation rather than bring along their houseguests, one of Norman’s brothers and his wife. “It’s hard for them to be social because their families come to see them a lot, especially Veronica and Norman. Between you and me, Veronica’s not too happy about it.” She giggled. “Maybe there are advantages to having yo
ur family feel you live too far to go and see.”

  “That’s what they get for having their extra bedrooms set up as bedrooms. If we didn’t have exercise equipment in ours, we might be overrun with weekend guests ourselves.”

  Dawn didn’t reply. She didn’t believe that was it at all. She believed that not visiting was their families’ way of punishing them for getting ahead.

  But if given a choice, she supposed she’d rather be banished than be inundated every weekend with visitors.

  Chapter 24

  The Lees

  May 2003

  “Veronica, my sister wants to have a fortieth birthday party.”

  She’d been scrubbing a stubborn stain on the kitchen floor with a brush and some cleanser, but at hearing this she immediately perked up. Her posture relaxed a little, a dreamy smile on her face. “That sounds nice. I guess we’ll plan on spending the night at a hotel in the city, huh? I know hotels in midtown are expensive, but I’m sure if we use the Internet we can find something affordable. Maybe we can get Camille Curry to keep the girls overnight. They enjoy playing with her Shayla.”

  The idea of a weekend in the city excited her. They hadn’t been to New York since Christmas Day, and then they only stayed for the day and drove back that night. It seemed that everyone wanted to come and see them, and unfortunately for longer than an afternoon. She remembered joking to Norman about it when they first started looking at houses eighteen months ago, but the situation had become very unfunny. Veronica was tired of Norman’s brothers and her own sister acting like they were running a bed-and-breakfast.