The Locals

by Jonathan Dee

  “What do you mean, of course not?”

  “You’re the picture of country health,” Rachel said. “How much longer will you boys be up on the roof? I mean how many more days?”

  “At least a week, I’m afraid,” he said.

  “The noise is hard to describe. I mean the hammering, when you’re in a house and there’s hammering on the roof it’s just like it’s inside your head. The footsteps up there are even worse. I came out here to get away from it. I can still hear it, of course, but out here at least I can tell when it’s coming from somewhere outside my skull.”

  She was pretty in a harsh way that had never done much for Mark. Very thin, very toned, lots of organized exercise, not at all a welcoming figure. Thin lips, or maybe she just kept them pressed together without realizing it.

  He needed to get back to work, but he didn’t know how to extract himself; he couldn’t just walk away from her after she’d made what was basically a complaint, but he couldn’t apologize either, not for doing what he was hired to do. His men were always as considerate as possible when the client was in the house. Mark insisted on it. Not his fault that this woman couldn’t differentiate between the house and her own head.

  “So our kids are in the same class now, I hear,” he said. “My daughter Haley is eight. She says your son has the desk behind hers. Or had. I don’t know about this year.”

  She smiled perfunctorily, the way you do when someone brings up children whom you don’t know, but she seemed to think it was an odd remark.

  “How are your kids liking it? I think Haley and your son have Mrs. Tuttle this year. Is that right? I think so. Anyway, everybody says she’s great.”

  “They are having a difficult time,” she said simply.

  “Well, sure, it’s a big adjustment,” Mark said. “I mean, I can imagine. Especially joining mid-year.”

  “That is a first-rate observation.”

  He wasn’t sure if he was being made fun of. “Probably a lot different than the school they went to in New York.”

  “You could say that,” she offered. But then, in the ensuing silence, she seemed to warm to the topic. “It’s a fine school,” she said. “I’m sure. But it is hard to see your children do without. Whatever the circumstances, for whatever good reason. You know what I mean? You must know what I mean. Every parent feels that way. You want the best for them. You want them to have everything. And you certainly do not want to give them everything and then take it back from them. And try to explain to them why. That is not a good feeling.”

  He was praying for one of the men to call for him, so he would have an immediate way out of this conversation. But all was silence except for the midday insect buzz, and the hammering.

  “Well, kids are resilient,” he said.

  She stared at him. “Wow,” she said.

  He colored. “You know,” he said, “my wife is an administrator at Mullins. If you or your kids ever needed anything, or whatever at all, she’d be happy to help out if you just say you know me, or I could mention it to her if you want. Just in case something comes up.”

  It was a lame offer, and he wasn’t even sure how valid it was—Rachel Hadi was just the sort of person Karen was likely to hate—but it did provoke a glimmer of engagement from Rachel. Maybe he’d found the language of the world such people moved in, the language of connections and favors, of access.

  “Thank you,” she said. “That’s nice of you. I may take you up on that.” She paused, as if expecting him to say something more, and when he didn’t, she laughed sheepishly, and he laughed too. “What was your name again?” she said.

  —

  Friday was a day set aside for Marty’s own, nongovernmental, moneymaking work. It was kind of an artificial boundary between his two professional lives; he split his time between heating and cooling jobs and town matters on most days, at no great cost to him either financially or in terms of stress, but he liked to go into the weekend feeling he’d made some money, improved his lot, and he liked to have that Friday evening beer or three at the Ship with the mild soreness in his forearms and back that came, at his age anyway, with physical labor.

  He did two easy estimates up near Lenox, charming some folks he’d never met who insisted on addressing him jokingly as Mr. Mayor, and then he stopped for a long lunch at a place he liked, down the street from the Red Lion Inn. The burger was good but what really got him were the Cajun waffle fries, a novelty that hadn’t caught on, for some reason, in any of the other establishments he favored. The waitress at this place knew him well enough now to give him a slyly oversized helping of the fries. He gave her a little smile of thanks and then he reflected how much better it was to have that sort of woman in your life than it was to be married to someone who would probably feel obligated to scold you for eating delicious things the doctor had described as “not a good idea.” Well, most ideas weren’t good ideas. He left a tip to be remembered by, and got back in his van.

  The Frasers were originally summer people, but ever since Joe Fraser had retired from AT&T in Albany, they’d spent more and more time in Howland, over half the year this year. They had kids, and grandkids, whom you’d see on holidays or on big anniversaries, but the nearest one lived in Philadelphia, so they weren’t around a lot. The house was for Joe and Vivian. Marty admired older folks who didn’t take the usual beaten path to Florida or Arizona. It seemed like waving the white flag, to him.

  “Smokin’ Joe!” Marty shouted as the old man came out on the porch to welcome him. “How’s life treating you?”

  “Better than this crappy secondhand water heater you sold me,” Joe said, but with a grin. Like a lot of vacation homes built out there, Joe’s hadn’t been properly winterized, so he was having to lay out some money for improvements now. Such cases were a big part of Marty’s business. The electric heater he’d installed in Joe’s basement wasn’t old at all—brand new, in fact—but according to Joe he was having to hit the reset button constantly, sometimes five times a day. It would kick off and then fail to kick on again. Marty wiped his boots outside the kitchen and said hello to Vivian, who gestured toward a chair.

  “Thank you, Viv, but no,” he said. “I’d better get down to the dungeon there, so I don’t bother you folks too long. Friday night, so I’m sure you’re headed out on the town.”

  “Have they started work on the memorial at the high school yet?” Joe called after him as he descended the steep stairs.

  “Well, that’s a long story,” Marty said without breaking stride. He liked the Frasers but he was pretty eager to declare the weekend officially under way. He had a thought about that first swallow of beer at the Ship, but then he pushed it out of his mind. Just another hour to focus between now and then. Maybe less. Besides, he had a sinking feeling that he might have installed the heater wrong. It was a new model—new to him, anyway; it was from Korea, of all places, and this was the first one he’d ever hooked up.

  It was just about the most brightly lit basement he’d ever been in. Viv did the laundry down there. Otherwise there wasn’t much to it except a wall of tools that had a suspiciously organized look to them, like they didn’t get used too much. Or maybe Joe was just a neat freak. Marty took the screwdriver out of his belt and popped off the cover over the thermal switch. He stared at it for a while, but it wasn’t as familiar to him as the Finney units he’d installed for twenty years and knew like the back of his hand. It’s not like he’d gone to the Korean model because it was any better (it wasn’t) or even any cheaper (it was, but not by much). He’d had to start pushing a new model on customers because Finney had gone out of business.

  He straightened up and felt it in his back, a spasm, or more like a deep cramp—it didn’t let go like a spasm did, but held on—that radiated along his side. He gave a little snort of pain and frustration. He didn’t usually get it that bad, but maybe it had been a long week. Rather than bend down again, he pushed the reset button with his toe; the heater kicked on again just like it should. N
othing seemed obviously wrong, which was a bad sign in terms of his prospects for fixing it quickly. If he couldn’t figure out what the issue was, then he’d have to install a new one, which would mean coming in over the weekend because of course you had to stand behind your own work. Or he could just stay down here in the Frasers’ basement, kicking the button every few hours, until they moved away or died. The Marty Solomon Guarantee. He had a manual for this model out in the van, printed in English even, but he knew they would be watching him and he didn’t want to be seen fetching the instructions for the thing like he didn’t know what he was doing. It was unprofessional.

  Why couldn’t he concentrate? Why did things have to change? Why did a great American company that made a good product, one that worked, have to fail? Why on earth had he saved this job, which he should have known would be hard, for four o’clock on a Friday afternoon?

  The pain stayed in his left side and started to make itself felt all the way into his arm, and it became a little bit harder to take a satisfying breath, and just like that Marty knew what was happening, because it had happened to him before. “Oh no,” he said. He tried to straighten up calmly, to make it to the steps, but then it hit him like the house itself falling down on top of him, and he went to the floor, just like last time. All he could think was how close, how within reach, it all still was—the basement steps, the van, the beer—and then the pain swallowed those thoughts too.

  The door opened. “Your Honor?” Joe called down gaily. “Vivian would like to know if you’d care for something to drink.” But he couldn’t answer.

  —

  She couldn’t cook anymore, not really. She never was that great at it. But she was efficient—especially in the years when all four kids were running around, and the two boys ate like wolves—and efficiency was all he ever really asked for anyway. Asked for silently, that is, in his head, in terms of his expectations. Something filling and unsurprising and on time. He didn’t feel like that was too demanding of him. Truth be told, if it had been purely a matter of what he wanted, he wouldn’t have much minded having the same thing for dinner, or for breakfast, every damn day. He had plenty of other things to worry about, plenty of other surprises to adjust to.

  But now he’d come downstairs, even on a Sunday morning like today, and another hour would go by and no breakfast would have appeared, nor any sign of its imminent preparation. He’d go into the kitchen when he couldn’t stand it anymore and make himself a bowl of cereal with as much noise and banging as possible and sometimes that would get her attention and sometimes it wouldn’t. He knew he shouldn’t be angry with her—it was just old age coming to get them, it wasn’t her fault—but by the same token, she couldn’t simply have forgotten that there was such a thing as breakfast, so it was hard not to ascribe some mysterious hostility to it. Plus it was just a physical reaction on his part, a reaction to the hunger, and so he wasn’t to blame for his irritation either, it all couldn’t be helped.

  It was damned hard to eat a bowl of cereal in a reclining chair. But she’d disappeared upstairs somewhere, so he sullenly went about it, trying his best not to spill milk on his shirt while also hoping spitefully on some level that he would, so she could see it. On the television was a story about how some kindergarten teacher somewhere had read a book to the kids about some girl who had two mommies.

  She came downstairs, nicely dressed. “Where are you going?” he said, but he remembered the answer as soon as the question was out of his mouth.

  “Church,” she said. “I’m lector today.” She paused on the landing behind his chair, where he couldn’t turn his head to see her. “Would you like to come?”

  Oh, the hostility in that question! No one else would ever catch it, not even if they were sitting right there in the living room and heard it. That was marriage. She’d stopped going to church years earlier, when the kids were young but old enough to start refusing to go, and she had only resumed in the last few years. He figured it was a good deal for her: two hours out of the week, in order to feel morally superior to him for the other hundred and sixty-six. She called it being “worried” about him.

  He realized he’d forgotten to answer her question. He twisted around in the reclining chair to see if she was still standing there.

  “Do you have to watch that?” came her voice. “It puts you in a bad mood.”

  “It’s the only channel that covers the war,” he said. “Every place else, it’s like it isn’t even going on.”

  She sighed theatrically, or anyway he knew her well enough to know that’s what she was doing, and a few moments later he heard the garage door go up. On the television there was something about a mosque, and bin Laden, or maybe it was some other guy because they all seemed to be trying their best to look like bin Laden, and then bin Laden said to him, “Why do you even care? Nobody else cares. It’s not like it was. Nothing will ever be like it was,” and he realized he was dreaming, and when he realized it he could hear his wife making noises in the kitchen and it was already past time for the Patriots. He changed the channel. He fell asleep in that chair two or three times a day now, and then when he got into bed at night he had to take a pill. The days didn’t have any structure to them anymore.

  He should stay more active. He should get up and do something. There were things to be done to keep up the house, God knew. She didn’t like him getting up on ladders and whatnot. But the real issue, which he dared not bring up around her, was his focus. It was baffling: he just couldn’t pay attention to anything for too long a stretch, not anymore. And that’s how accidents happened. He knew that better than anyone. He’d built houses for forty years. Now his son took money from the weekenders to make sure their second homes looked properly old and run-down. It seemed more like a scam than like building something. But Mark didn’t invent that world. He just lived in it.

  Well, anyway, it was Sunday. A day of rest. He still felt that rhythm in the week even though he didn’t work anymore, even though every day was pretty much the same.

  Dinner was some frozen chicken marsala thing from Sam’s. The problem with Sam’s wasn’t that it didn’t taste good; the problem was that whenever you ate it for the first time, you knew you were going to eat it four or five more times because it was just the two of them and everything from Sam’s only came in bulk. Part of the problem was that she ate almost nothing. He couldn’t understand how she got by eating as little as she did.

  “How was church?” he asked her.

  She took a while to answer. “Very nice,” she said. “By the way, they need some help with the plumbing in the rectory. No water pressure, Father says. I told them maybe you could help them out, if you were willing.”

  “I could look at it,” he said. She cleared the table and they went back to the living room to watch some of the TV she liked—Murder, She Wrote, or Law & Order. He didn’t mind so much. It put you in the mood to go to bed, at least.

  “I’m going to make a cup of tea to bring up,” she said. “Would you like anything?”

  “No, that’s all right.”

  “Okay. By the way, they need some help with the plumbing in the rectory. I told them maybe you could help them out.”

  He started to get irritated, but he caught himself. This kind of thing was happening lately. Especially at night.

  “I’ll give them a call,” he said.

  In the middle of the night, he sat up suddenly. Nothing woke him. But he had a feeling of unease. He went downstairs, slowly, listening, waiting for his eyes to adjust. As soon as he reached the landing he could see an orange glow coming from the kitchen.

  She’d left the burner on. He switched it off and stood there in the heat from it, in the air that darkened as the burner cooled. It was such a battle, within him, not to get angry. He knew he shouldn’t. If he could just tell someone, that might help with the anger thing, but who was there he could tell? It would be a terrible betrayal of her. He couldn’t say anything to the kids. Candace, that worrywart, would lose
her mind. He couldn’t even talk to his wife about it—no reason to shame her, it’s not like she did it on purpose. He’d just bear it himself. What else was new? Nobody had the least sense of all he’d borne for their sake, to keep things going. Forty years.

  She’d left every single drawer pulled out, too. He hated that.

  The town of Howland was incorporated in 1748, and in accordance with its charter, the longer-serving of Marty Solomon’s two fellow selectmen—a retired high school teacher named Maeve Brennan—succeeded him as First Selectman until the end of his term, which ran another fourteen months. There was no provision in the charter for anyone to replace Maeve herself on the three-person board: no authorization for a special election, nor any other, junior branch of town government from which someone might be promoted into her spot. Which meant Howland would technically be governed, for those fourteen months, by a voting body of two—Maeve and John Waltz, a former electrician who first ran for office three years ago after he broke his back on the job and went on permanent disability. The two of them had always gotten along well enough, but in the wake of Marty’s death they became excessively polite to each other, almost formal, holding doors and offering to refill each other’s coffee at meetings, so afraid were they of any voting issue coming before them that might produce a 1–1 tie.

  Marty was unambiguously dead, the EMTs said, by the time they arrived to carry him up the narrow stairs of the Frasers’ basement. It took a while, surprisingly, to figure out whom to contact: everybody remembered Marty’s ex-wife but no one was in touch with her anymore. They’d had no children, and Marty’s parents were deceased, his father of a heart attack at the same age at which Marty had died, fifty-four. His big metal desk at Solomon Heating & Cooling held only work-related records. Trooper Constable assumed the awkward duty of breaking into Marty’s home; with his eyes cast fastidiously downward he checked desk drawers, file cabinets, and the like until he found an address book on a bedside table. There wasn’t a Solomon in it, but there was, in the S’s, a woman identified only as Bridget; Constable took a chance and called her, and she turned out to be Marty’s sister, who lived in Rhode Island. Her last name was now O’Keefe. No one could recall Marty ever mentioning her, and by the time the funeral was over and she and her husband went back home, they had an idea why. Despite seeming not to know the first thing about her brother—not even that he had been voted by his neighbors into his hometown’s highest office—she cried theatrically and almost nonstop. Whenever Maeve or the funeral director or some other dignitary sat down to try to console her, she would ask them, as indirectly as she could manage, about Marty’s money. There couldn’t have been much, but he did leave a typed will (in the drawer of the same bedside table where the address book was found) that left everything to her. He had no other family.