[Anthology] Close to the Bones

by Martha Carr

  “Good morning Mister Fallow,” said Amy in her most professional voice, which usually meant one octave lower.

  “He means reader, reader,” said Natalie, nervously, wring her hands yet again.

  She must practically rub her skin off, thought Amy.

  “Well, let’s get to it. I assume I’m paying you by the hour and it’s already ten past,” said Mr. Fallow. “Start with the newspapers, the one on top first. Don’t bother with the sports, entertainment or comics. That’s for the addle brained,” he said, adjusting himself against the pillow.

  Natalie scurried over to his side trying to adjust the pillow further, anticipating his needs as he sharply batted her hand away, scowling at her. This only made things worse and she started to pat down the front of her dress as if something was out of place, only making the oversize dress blowout at the sides.

  “I see you like to do things for yourself. Me too, said Amy, pressing her lips together wondering if that was a smart thing to say. She raised her eyebrows and gave him a half smile.

  “We’ll see,” he said, arching one eyebrow. He tapped the nearby pile of newspapers urgently, while waving the back of his hand in Natalie’s direction, never looking up at either of them.

  Amy looked around for a chair that she could pull up closer to the bed and noticed a thin antique chair sitting by a fragile, ornate desk. They were the only two light pieces of furniture in the room.

  “Wouldn’t you know it,” said Amy, under her breath. “My weight will never hold that.” She looked back in Mr. Fallows direction. He was smiling at her as she noticed an overstuffed high-back chair to the right of his bed. Too far away to be able to see him well when she read.

  That’s not a creepy smile at all. Hell with it, she thought.

  Without a word, she went and placed her hands firmly on the arms of the chair and lifted, slightly bending her knees carrying the chair the few feet it took to get it closer to the bed as it banged against her shins. She knew it would leave a nasty bruise later but she was determined not to say anything, at least about this.

  She sat down heavily brushing the stray pieces of her hair out of her face and wiping the sweat off her upper lip with the back of her hand. She straightened out the front of her outfit and settled into the chair pulling the top newspaper off of the pile.

  Mr. Fallows was still staring at her with that same creepy half smile.

  “I’ll start with the headlines,” she said glancing down at the newspaper.

  “You’re a very sturdy girl. I like that.”

  “Look, just so we’re clear,” said Amy, “there is no touching in this job. Just reading and the occasional conversation.” She drew the edges of her skirt in closer to her side and did her best not to look as disgusted as she felt.

  She had enough money in her purse to go to the movies if she had to and no job was worth getting pawed by this half skeleton, half man who was leering at her. Besides, the job might only last a few days anyway, at best a month. She could risk just being herself, which was a little liberating and the only reason why she thought this job might be fun.

  Death would bring it to an end quickly.

  “At last, an honest person has walked into this room,” he said sharply. “There’s been a short parade of nervous nellies wandering in here, afraid to speak up. I could barely hear them read, they were so nervous,” he said, shaking his hands in the air, imitating some imagined nervous reader. “It was as if Natalie had hired every friend she has. I don’t know if you noticed but she’s the nervous type as well. Clearly got that from some other side of the family.”

  “You are a little intimidating, and along with this house it’s a little much,” said Amy. “But I’ve had it pointed out to me more than once, I’m not only opinionated but I have no filters. Usually, that doesn’t play to my advantage,” said Amy. She wasn’t used to getting complemented on just being herself.

  “Everything in here going all right so far?” Natalie stuck her head in the room, leaning around the doorframe.

  “Out!” shouted Mr. Fallow, scowling.

  Amy watched fascinated as Natalie’s head quickly disappeared around the door and she could hear her practically running back down the hall.

  “Sometimes that’s the only entertainment I have all day,” said Mr. Fallow, sneering with what could almost pass for a smile.

  “It’s funny, but it’s also a little mean,” said Amy.

  “Read,” said Mr. Fallow, resting his head back and shutting his eyes.

  No one had told her much about Mr. Fallow other than he was a prosecuting attorney. She had no idea of his likes or dislikes or how he felt about the world. She had a pretty good guess that he didn’t have a very bright view of it but that wouldn’t tell her much about his politics, or if he had hobbies, or how he would take in the news.

  So, she decided to just start from left to right and read one article after another. She felt confident that if he didn’t like something he would pipe up and she would learn over the brief time they have together what might be best to skip.

  By the end of the first day her fingers were covered in ink from all the newspapers. She had already washed them a few times throughout the day and still some of the ink clung to her fingers. She had done her best to ignore the smudges she made on her chicken salad sandwich, biting down on those parts first. “Denial is an asset,” she said, with a full mouth, sitting alone in the kitchen. “Followed closely by shitty jobs that will be swallowed up by death, soon.”

  Natalie cleared her throat, looking embarrassed. Amy hadn’t seen her standing there and offered her a grape as a kind of peace offering.

  “You have to agree that this isn’t the best gig you’ve ever had,” said Amy, as she watched Natalie carefully pick out a grape.

  “The worst,” Natalie said, just above a whisper.

  “Staying in the will?” asked Amy. “Don’t worry. I’m here earning more than working in fast food but not by much, and I’m coming back tomorrow.”

  “It’s complicated,” said Natalie, turning to leave the room. “Your hour is just about up. He’ll notice,” she said, over her shoulder.

  “That was ominous,” said Amy, stuffing the last of her sandwich in her mouth. Reading was making her hungry.

  She walked heavily back up the stairs. “Trudging off to happy destiny,” she muttered. She walked back into the room without Mr. Fallow saying a word and settled back into her chair, picking up a book he wanted read to him about an ancient Chinese emperor. More newspapers were delivered in the afternoon, brought up by the cook who ordered them in a specific lineup in the pile.

  “These newspapers are like your bedtime stories,” said Amy. “Some tragedy, mixed with something criminal and a few global deals made between countries, with a war report thrown in.”

  Mr. Fallow tapped the pile with a bony finger without opening his eyes. Amy pulled a newspaper off the top and started reading, trying to put some inflection in her voice. She decided to have some fun with it and read them with the appropriate drama.

  “Let’s push this envelope,” she said.

  “You talk to yourself a lot,” said Mr. Fallow, opening his eyes briefly to look at her.

  “Usually I’m the only one listening,” she said, as she took up reading again.

  By the time her shift ended she held up her hands and looked at them, dismayed. More ink smeared everywhere.

  “You know you can get all these papers online. I could read them off my Kindle. Probably cost you less and be easier to see in this dark room,” she said, looking down at her ink-stained hands. “I’m guessing you don’t have an iPad or laptop,” she said, looking up and glancing around the room.

  There was a long pause and Amy wondered if she’d gone too far. Just a little praise about her rigorous honesty and her mouth ran amok. That’s always the way it was.

  Besides, she’d spent an entire day alone in a room with a man who had one foot in the grave and it was all she could do not keep u
p a running patter. The reading helped. It kept her mouth busy but at some point she had a few comments and they came spilling out of her all at once.

  “Not a judgment, just a conclusion,” she said, holding up her hand pointing out the different objects in the room. “It looks like the last time something in this house was brand-new was a couple hundred years ago, “except for of course, you.”

  She felt her face redden. She practically pointed out he was an antique.

  “Ha!” Mr. Fallow let out a loud laugh. “Ha!” He did it again and slapped the bed with his open hand. “Your parents have done something right,” he said, with excitement.

  “I’ll be sure to tell them,” said Amy, her eyes wide with surprise. “I’ll also be sure to get a picture because it would be the first time they ever heard that, and seeing as how things are looking for you, it may be the last. I’m not sure anyone else’s ever felt that way about me before.”

  “Most people are fools!” he said, vigorously. “Everyone wants vanilla, don’t make waves, just get along. A giant nation of codependent ninnies. It’s a rare thing when someone manages to get to be your age and still has an independent thought. It’s something to be preserved.”

  “You like the old fashion insults, cool. Are we on board with the Kindle idea?” she asked, hopefully, standing up and tossing the last newspaper back onto the pile. She brushed a stray brown strand back behind her ear and offhandedly scratched her nose.

  “See Natalie to make the arrangements. Think of it as a bonus. If I don’t last long you can hopefully learn something from the subscriptions,” he said.

  Amy found Natalie sitting in the kitchen waiting for her, holding a lemon.

  “Here, the lemon juice will take those things out,” said Natalie. She looked worn out.

  “What do you do all day?” asked Amy, taking the lemon from her. “You look exhausted.”

  Natalie looked at her as if she was trying to weigh out how much she could say and decided on nothing. She stared off into the distance.

  “Well, I guess I’ll be going,” said Amy. “I’m supposed to talk to you about arrangements so that we can read the newspapers on a Kindle instead of in the paper form.”

  “You have already gotten further with him then anyone I know of since I’ve been here, and that’s a few months,” said Natalie, in awe.

  “I suppose every pot has a lid and for this job I’m the lid,” said Amy. “I’m not sure what that bodes for the rest of my career but at least it’s a start. You know, he has a lot of bark but no bite. In the end, he’s pretty easy to get along with.”

  Natalie looked startled, making Amy question what she had just said. She ran them back through her mind trying to see if she had somehow managed to say something offensive. That would never come as a surprise to her. Frankly, getting along with everybody on the job her first day was really the surprise.

  She waited, wobbling a little wondering if she lost the job in the last few moments of the first day. “No, that’s not possible,” she whispered to herself, loud enough to be overheard.

  That seemed to disturb Natalie even further, as if Amy had been able to read something, some true hard fact off of Natalie’s face.

  Still, Natalie said nothing and just sat there, as still as a stone.

  “Okay, well, I guess I’ll be going. I’ll let you know the cost of the subscriptions tomorrow. I’ll load my Kindle and get it charged. It shouldn’t be much.”

  Something about Natalie’s demeanor was throwing Amy off her game and she was rattling on more than even her usual. However, she wasn’t about to ask what might be wrong. Too often, people wanted to tell her and it came out in paragraphs without a happy ending.

  Amy drove home in the early evening thinking of all the interesting things she could say at dinner to her parents, who were taking her out to celebrate the new job. She was a little insulted that they felt a job reading to an old dying man was worthy of dinner. But money was tight and she wasn’t one to turn down a free dinner.

  Despite the weird turn at the end of the day with Natalie, Amy felt a small growing hope in the middle of her chest, as if it was easier to take a deep breath.

  “What does it say about me that such a dumb job gives me so much hope,” she said, humming along to the song on the radio.

  Over the coming days Amy, Natalie and Mr. Fallow fell into a routine. The newspapers were canceled and Amy began reading to him from the online subscriptions now firmly on her Kindle. She even found herself looking through the papers late at night for other articles about fashion or the town she lived in, and occasionally the comics.

  Mr. Fallow even seemed to be rallying, his skin turning more of a combination of the oatmeal color Amy had seen on her first day mixed with a more appropriate pink. Maybe this job would last the summer.

  Natalie still ran around the halls, as nervous as ever looking to the left and the right as if she was expecting something to jump out at her. Occasionally, Amy would throw out a suggestion about what might be making her nervous to see if she got a reaction.

  “You think there might be treasure hidden here? Like gold, or family jewelry, or some old Coca-Cola stock?” she asked one day.

  “Had a lot of break-ins?” she asked on another day.

  There was never much of a reaction beyond the handwringing that by now had become part of the routine to Amy.

  Not even a glance, until the day that Amy was distracted, eating her lunch in the kitchen and casually threw out the remark, “So what do you think is buried in these walls? A few of his old cases that didn’t exactly go his way?”

  Natalie’s body shook violently all over and she grasped at the edge of the kitchen table trying to steady herself. Amy stopped mid-chew and slowly put down her peanut butter and jelly sandwich, peanut butter on both slices of bread, jelly in the middle to make sure there were no leak throughs, and waited for the blood to return to Natalie’s face.

  “Hey, I was only kidding. What was that about? You don’t really think there’s…”

  “We don’t ask those kinds of questions,” said Natalie sternly. “It was the first time she had taken a tone with Amy since she started the job. Amy was familiar with being talked to that way. It usually happened when somebody didn’t want Amy asking any more questions in general or poking into their business. The dead body thing was new though.

  “Well, now you’ve got my curiosity,” she said, slowly taking another bite of her sandwich. There were only fifteen minutes left in her lunch hour. “Probably should’ve kept that one inside my head,” she said quietly, looking up at Natalie who was still gripping the table.

  “I’ll thank you to keep to the singleness of purpose when you’re in this house,” said Natalie, drawing her lips into a thin straight line. Amy could see the fear in her eyes and was curious to know if she looked like that before she got to the house or somehow the house was doing that to her.

  “So, you have any old family photos?” she asked, trying to change the subject and satisfy her curiosity.

  It didn’t work. Natalie glared at her and stomped out of the kitchen, making a point of avoiding her for the rest of the day. That made Amy even more curious, and Natalie’s absence gave her time to snoop. She was an old pro at looking through things that didn’t belong to her and knew how to make it look like no one had ever been there. She waited till Mr. Fallows was doing the ruffly snoring sound that meant he was fast asleep before she started searching.

  All she discovered from pulling out the drawers and looking behind things, hoping for a secret note or an old map or a strange key, was that Mr. Fallow had a hard time throwing away anything.

  She drove home that night, wondering about the secrets the house might be holding.

  Over the weekend, Mr. Fallow took a turn for the worse and seem to sink back into a gray oblivion, closer to death.

  On Monday, when Amy arrived for work Natalie met her at the door. She had gotten used to coming in on her own without knocking and was surpr
ised to be greeted so abruptly.

  “Mr. Fallow is not doing well,” said Natalie.

  “Yes, that’s the general state of things,” said Amy putting one finger across her lips to see if she could keep any of her thoughts inside for an entire minute.

  “Well, yes, very true. He’s been put on a lot of painkillers today and may not be aware that you’re there. Go up and read to him as usual but don’t expect any coherent responses,” said Natalie. “We may be getting closer to the end of things.”

  Natalie left the foyer without waiting for a response, shaking her hands out at her sides. Amy was sure she had heard a muffled “Thank God”, from Natalie and assumed she was looking forward to getting back to her own life and away from her cousin. The house in general was fairly gloomy and Amy certainly knew how hard it was to live in someone else’s house.

  “Better than a basement,” she said, as she headed for the back of the house to take the narrow stairs up to the second floor.

  She entered Mr. Fallow’s bedroom cautiously, not sure what she would see, bracing herself for the signs of an old man in the last spurts of his life. Open wounds, liquids running where they shouldn’t be, and odd smells always unnerved her. This job gave her the possibility of all three.

  But Mr. Fallow was laid out the same as always, the oxygen hose around his face, plugging up his nose, his sheets carefully drawn tight around him. His eyes were closed and there was no sign that he had been moving lately, his arms neatly at his side.

  “Geez, I suppose this is what you’ll look like laid out in a coffin,” said Amy, taking a careful, long look at the old man.

  Suddenly, Mr. Fallow stirred, gurgling in his sleep and blowing out small bubbles. Amy looked behind her at the door and wondered if she should get Natalie. Any kind of liquid coming out of the mouth was not her domain. But then he cleared his throat, and mumbled something too faint to hear.

  “What?” asked Amy, drawing nearer. She wasn’t willing to get too close just yet, in case he was about to spew something everywhere. She had seen enough hospital dramas on TV to know that was always a possibility.