Junkyard Man

by Libby Howard

  Suzette picked up the sample I’d been working on, not quite hiding a grimace. “Here’s where you’re going wrong, Kay. On the purl stitch, where you’re bringing the needle in through the front of the loop. You need to bring it in right-to-left. Like this. Then loop the yarn and pull it through, sliding the old stitch off your left-hand needle.”

  I took my sample from Suzette and repeated her motions, thrilled to see the loopy stitch on the side facing me.

  “You were doing a garter stitch, Kay,” Suzette explained. “That’s basically knit every row, and it’s fine for stuff like washcloths where you want some bulk and you want them to lay flat without having to knit an edge. Knit one row, purl one row alternating gives you a nice flat surface. It’s what you see in sweaters and it’s the stitch you use in that baby hat pattern.”

  Suzette lived at the very end of our street, in the oldest house in the neighborhood. It wasn’t a Victorian, or Queen Anne style. Her house was a stone-and-log farmhouse that dated back to before the Revolutionary War. Sadly, George Washington had not slept there, and the farmland had been chopped up into the tiny lots and streets that had become this portion of Locust Point. The house still stood, handed down in Suzette’s family for eight generations. She’d inherited it from her grandmother two years ago, and instead of selling it and buying a condo in Milford like most single twenty-somethings would have done, Suzette had surprised us all by moving into the place. And by slowly restoring it to the solid beauty it had been when German immigrants built it by hand over two hundred and fifty years ago. She’d even begun working on the split-rail fencing that surrounded the two acres that remained of the original three.

  “Think I can try the baby hat pattern now?” I asked, eager to move past washcloths.

  Suzette nodded. “This one has a rolled edge instead of ribbed, so it’s the easiest. And instead of knitting in the round, you sew up a back seam when you’re done.” She fingered the crunchy finished end of one of the washcloths with its six knots glued together. “When you’re done, I’ll show you how to weave in the ends so you don’t have this…. this.”

  I’m sure the newborns would appreciate not having a bunch of glued knots poking them in the head. “And how about the decrease stitches?”

  Suzette hesitated. “If you want to start working on the hat, I can walk you through the decrease stitches as you come to them. Unless you have other plans.”

  I was a sixty-year-old widow. My only plans tonight included a bottle of Chardonnay on the porch with Daisy. Suzette, on the other hand, was a young woman. “It’s a typical Friday night for me, hon. Please stay and join Daisy and me for some wine. And I truly appreciate your helping me with my knitting.”

  She smiled, her round face creasing in dimples, her soft brown eyes crinkling to narrow slits. “I’d like that. Is Daisy…she’s the one with the Wiccan altar in her front yard? The one who put that giant evergreen pentacle on her front door last Christmas?”

  That would be Daisy. “Yes. You haven’t met her yet? She’s a very sweet person. She’ll do anything to help someone. One of the nicest, kindest people I know.”

  Daisy had been a regular at our backyard parties when Eli and I had first moved in. She and I had grown close, but after Eli’s accident, I realized how amazing this quirky woman was. When the casseroles and offers to help had died away, when most everyone stopped asking how Eli was, how I was, because the answer was too depressing, Daisy’s friendship had never faltered. When all I wanted was to crawl into a hole, to disappear and become nothing but a nursemaid, a caregiver with a hollowed-out dead spot inside, Daisy had dragged me into the light. She’d insisted on coming over and making me do sunrise yoga a few times each week. She’d show up with a bottle of wine or take-out Chinese, or a mushy chick-flick, or some ridiculous game like Hungry Hungry Hippos and for a brief moment, my life wasn’t so bleak.

  After ten years of helping me survive, when Eli suffered that stroke that had taken his life in a matter of minutes, Daisy had been right there. She’d spent the night so I wouldn’t have to be alone. She’d stepped up the sunrise yoga to a daily occurrence. She’d been nearby at the funeral, ready to hand me a tissue, or wrap a comforting arm around my shoulders. For all I cared, the woman could sit on her front porch buck-naked and burn crop circles in her yard. As far as I was concerned, Daisy should be on the fast-track to sainthood.

  But she was quirky. And that probably made me love her even more.

  Suzette nodded. “Oh, good. I don’t know many people in the neighborhood. I’ve been kinda busy working on Gran’s, I mean my, house. I know you, the Sedgewicks, and the Wilsons.”

  “How about Kat Lars?” I pointed at the woman getting out of her Volvo sedan, dragging a huge briefcase that looked more like overhead-bin luggage than something a person would take to work.

  “No. Aren’t they the ones opening the bed and breakfast?”

  “Yep.” I liked Kat. I wasn’t so sure I liked her husband, Will, though.

  Kat looked up and waved. I motioned her over. She gave us a raised index finger, then took the briefcase inside, trotting over and up my front steps on four-inch navy-blue pumps that matched her smart pantsuit.

  “Kat Lars, this is Suzette Hostenfelder. She owns the old farmhouse down at the end of the road.”

  Kat’s dark eyes widened, and she smoothed her dark curly poof of hair back as if she were in the presence of royalty. “Oh my gosh! I love that house. I read the husband and wife built it by hand, using logs from the farmland they were clearing. The original house was one room and a loft, and not added onto for the next fifty years. The husband and wife who’d built it raised six kids in that tiny farmhouse. Six.”

  Suzette glowed, nodded enthusiastically. “My family bought it from their grandchildren. It’s a shame we sold all the land off. I’ve got a picture from just after the Civil War where you can still see the stables and the chicken coop.”

  “Oh, I’d love to see that.” Kat grinned, eyeing one of the chairs on my porch.

  “Sit,” I told her. “Daisy is coming over in a few and we’re all going to have some wine. And Suzette is going to keep me from making a disaster out of my very first baby hat.”

  Kat plopped down in the chair, looking over at my book with the pattern. “Knitting. I crochet. Mainly I learned so I could make all those lacy doily things for the house so it looked more authentic.” She laughed. “I used to make fun of those old-lady houses with the lacy doilies and china wash basins and damask-covered couches, and yet here I am: owner of a three-story Victorian house and suddenly dedicated to making it look like it did a hundred years ago.”

  “It should add to the appeal of a bed and breakfast,” Suzette commented. Then she leaned over my shoulder. “Instead of sliding the needle under one stitch, slide it under two. There. See? It’s a decrease, and that type of decrease is typically notated by K2TOG. Do another row and I’ll show you the K2PSSO or knit two/pass over decrease.”

  “I hope so.” Kat glanced over at her house. “Will has been so uptight since the downsizing. It’s not just the money. He needs this to be a success. He needs to not have one more failure on top of the layoff.”

  I suddenly felt bad for thinking I didn’t really like Will Lars. He was always so high-strung, so tightly wound, so…angry. Maybe he had a reason to be. Maybe he’d mellow out a bit once they started getting regular bookings. I didn’t think so.

  Daisy waltzed around the huge privet hedges that lined my side porches, the biggest bottle of white wine in her hand that I’d ever seen. It was even frosty.

  “Whoa! Glad I bought the gallon-sized,” she said, her voice cheerful as she hopped up the steps. Daisy was in blue seersucker capris with a sleeveless white shirt that showed off her tanned arms and jangling, stacked bracelets. I set down my knitting and pulled the tub of plastic wine glasses and silverware from under the table, setting up for our little happy hour party.

  “Daisy, this is Suzette Hostenfelder from the old farm dow
n the road. And you know Kat Lars.”

  The women all smiled at each other, Daisy setting down the wine and wiping her hand on her capris before reaching over the table to shake Suzette’s hand. “I knew your grandmother. When I was a kid we used to get in trouble for sneaking onto her property and swimming in the pond. The first few times, your grandfather would come out and chase us off, but eventually they just let us swim. Your grandmother would even bring us out Kool-Aid and cookies on occasion.”

  Suzette grinned. “He used to yell at us for swimming in it too, although by that time he wasn’t able to go past the back porch without taking the riding mower. There’s a nasty drop off, and some rocks, and the water is so darned murky that he was always afraid someone would hit their head diving in, or try to swim under a fallen log and get stuck and drown. He was a man who worried about everything, where Gran was a woman who worried about nothing.”

  Funny how opposites sometimes attracted. I paused my knitting to watch Daisy pour the wine, and thought about Eli and I. We hadn’t been opposites. Yes, he’d been a surgeon and I’d been a journalist, but we’d had similar childhoods and had been raised with nearly identical family values. When it came to politics, where to vacation, if we should have beef or chicken for dinner, we agreed more times than not. Then I smiled, thinking of the wine and cigars and movies. I remembered how I’d be wrist-deep in mulch and peat pots, planting out back and drinking some cheap wine cooler while he puffed one of those stinky cigars and drank expensive cognac. But then he’d stub out the cigar, drag me out of the flowerbeds, dirt under my fingernails and hair sticky with sweat to kiss me under the arbor. Maybe Suzette’s grandparents had a whole lot more in common than Suzette thought.

  “Here.” Daisy handed us each a glass and extended hers. “To summer. To cookouts and fireworks. To the town regatta. To family reunions and local carnivals. To playing in the sprinklers and drinking wine on the front porch. To the best neighbors a woman could ask for.”

  A car door slammed. We all murmured a response to Daisy’s inspiring toast, sipped our wine, then looked. It was a man in his forties walking away from his sports car like he was on his way to battle. At the sidewalk, he turned and began to work his way through the maze of mowers and washing machines that were Harry Peter’s front lawn.

  “Uh oh,” Kat breathed, taking a bigger drink of her wine.

  “That the nephew?” Daisy asked.

  The man had reached the front door in record time and was banging on it with a force that sent the sound clear across the street to us.

  “Yes,” Kat mumbled into her wine glass. “I think Will called him. I wish he’d just leave that man alone.”

  Wish Will would leave Mr. Peter’s nephew alone? Or leave Mr. Peter alone? Or did Kat wish that the nephew left his uncle alone? I opened my mouth to ask, but shut it because the door across the street had opened and the drama had begun.

  For a guy in his eighties, Harry Peter sure had a voice that could carry. I heard enough profanity to make me glad that Judge Beck and his kids weren’t home. I also heard the nephew yelling back that his uncle was a crazy old man who wasn’t mentally fit to be living on his own.

  The gist of the argument seemed to be that the nephew was tired of his uncle’s living conditions, that he was sick of dealing with unpaid bills, threatened meter readers and social services workers, and he was fed up with being accused of elder neglect. He followed that up by shouting that if his uncle didn’t move into some sort of assisted living with a psych ward, he was going to petition the state to have him committed.

  I winced, because I’d done enough articles on the rights of the elderly and the mentally ill over the years that I knew Mr. Peter’s nephew’s threats lacked teeth. It was near impossible to get a building condemned and someone removed from their home for anything except serious public health and safety threats. It was even more difficult to get someone declared incompetent against their will. They had to pose a clear, significant threat either against themselves or others. And from what I’d seen of Harry Peter’s house yesterday, he was just an eccentric man with a dirty house with significant deferred maintenance, a man whose collecting impulses had crossed the line into what might be considered hoarding.

  All that the nephew was doing right now was giving the neighborhood a show. And we weren’t the only ones watching, either. The Wilsons were trying to pretend they weren’t eavesdropping, dead-heading geraniums as if it were a typical activity for a couple to do on a Friday evening. And right next door, leaning over the porch rail and making no attempt to look like he wasn’t listening in, was Will Lars.

  I turned to his wife, Kat, who was gulping wine like she was a camel in the desert. I was pretty sure if she hadn’t had skin the color of mocha, it would now be beet red. Then I looked back over at Will. He was a good-looking man, tall and thin with wavy shoulder-length blond hair pulled back into a man-bun. His hands were in the pockets of his olive-green pants, his tan polo shirt unbuttoned at the neck. He stared at the arguing men dispassionately, then his face twisted into a scowl as he looked at the yard full of appliances.

  I didn’t really blame him. It was an eyesore. I’d gotten used to staring at it every day, barely even noticed it anymore. But Will Lars seemed unable to look away.

  “If he’d just get rid of the junk in the front yard,” Kat murmured. “We’d mow the grass for him. We’d pay for some landscaping so it would be pretty and nice. Why does he even have all that stuff? Who needs twelve washing machines, eight dryers, six dishwashers, and twenty lawn mowers?”

  “He used to fix them,” Daisy said. “When I was a kid, I remember Harry Peter was the go-to guy if you needed something repaired. He used to have a bunch of old ones stacked in his backyard and garage to use as parts. He worked at Himmet Appliance until he retired, but even then, he’d do work on the side.”

  I hadn’t known that. I’d always assumed that the collection in Harry Peter’s front yard came from his own house, broken down appliances that he’d replaced but never got around to having hauled away. Or perhaps with the intention of eventually fixing them.

  “It’s not like he fixes them anymore,” Kat replied, her voice with a shrill edge to it.

  She loved her husband. And the neighbor’s junk-filled yard was driving Will crazy. I understood. But clearly Daisy did not.

  “He wants to believe he’ll fix them one day,” Daisy countered. “He doesn’t want to admit that he won’t ever be able to do that again, that those machines that were once useful for parts are now only junk. Having them hauled away would be like giving up. It would be like admitting that he was one step closer to death. That’s not an easy thing to do, Kat. You should know how hard people cling to what they used to do, what they used to be good at. You should know how difficult it is for people to admit that they’ll never be able to return to that thing that once defined them, that once gave them value.”

  I held my breath, knowing that Daisy was talking about Will. Even so, I still thought of Eli. Even with his cognitive injuries, it had taken years for him to admit to himself that he’d never practice surgery. And it had taken longer for him to resign himself to the fact that he’d never have an alternate career, that he’d be a mostly housebound invalid until he died. The rage and the depression had almost been more than I could bear.

  Kat gritted her teeth, then emptied her glass. “Thanks for the wine and conversation, ladies. Have a great weekend.”

  We watched her practically run down the stairs, speed-walking across the street and climbing to her porch. Once there, she hugged her husband, turning him away from the yard filled with rusted and broken appliances so she could kiss him.

  It was the kiss of a woman who desperately loved her husband. It was the kiss of someone who’d do anything to help him, to get him through the darkness he was navigating.

  “You dropped a stitch there,” Suzette said, breaking the awkward silence. “Let me show you how to pick it up and weave it back into the hat without ne
eding to tear out two rows of stitches.”

  Chapter 4

  We made short work of the wine. I was happy-buzzed heading into the house to grab dinner, but I kept thinking of the altercation across the street.

  Harry Peter. How long had it been since he’d left his house? I couldn’t remember. There were a lot of boxes that got delivered. I assumed food, and anything else he needed. The power company came once a month and if Mr. Peter didn’t chase the meter reader off, then the guy weaved his way back to the meter and came back, shaking his head. Whatever maintenance the house had needed, Mr. Peter must have done himself or just left unrepaired.

  I hesitated, looking up my winding stairs with the heavy oak handrails. Three stories, then an attic—an attic full of all sorts of junk. Not as much junk as what the guy across the street had, but plenty of things I didn’t need. And among them was a really ugly pitcher.

  Dinner could wait. I climbed the stair, gasping for breath as the heat hit me the moment I opened the attic door. I’d gone through five boxes before I found the pitcher. At least, I thought it was the pitcher. It had been a gift from Eli’s Aunt Linda. I remember there was a time when I felt the need to prominently display every gift, no matter how much I hated it. I’d come home one day to find that Eli had boxed all the hideous knickknacks up and hauled them up to the attic, telling me life that was too short to stare at ugly vases and candle holders. He was right.

  And this pitcher was hideous. It was a glossy cream with alternating bands of navy and burgundy, with gold lacy patterns. Across the center was a series of lavender and pale blue orchids. At least I thought they were orchids.