There was knotty pine paneling behind the built-in bar and netting hung behind it, lit with tiny Christmas tree lights. Don’s boxes had been stacked under the bar, which was probably how they had remained hidden from Nellie’s eagle eye. Jane dragged out the last one and turned to look at the twinkling lights. So odd that Nellie hadn’t ripped down all that netting. Even Jane could see that it was a dust catcher. And God knows, Nellie didn’t like dust catchers. Jane lifted it, just to see where the lights were plugged in. Maybe she would unplug them and dust. That would shake the Nellster up a little bit.
Lifting the net revealed something much more surprising than an electrical outlet. There was a handle and below it, a spring-loaded latch. The knotty pine paneling had a door cut out of it. It made perfect sense since this wall was actually against the stairs and Jane realized this was just a way to use the wasted space as a closet. The bar had been built and the previous owners had walled off the under-stairs area with the paneling so it wasn’t noticeable. Did Don and Nellie even know about this?
Jane tugged on the handle, squeezing down on the latch. It gave and the door opened to reveal a space about three by eight, the height correlating with the stairs that formed the closet ceiling. Jane ducked her head and stepped into the cramped cupboard. Too dark to see. She stepped out and turned on all of the basement lights. Nellie, with her almost batlike fear of bright light, had screwed fifteen-watt lightbulbs in all of the basement fixtures. Jane found one floor lamp that had a forty-watt bulb and dragged it closer to the bar. In flipping one of the light switches, Jane had turned on a radio that her father had set on a low table by the couch and another set of Christmas lights now twinkled above the bar. The music was some kind of elevator arrangement, an instrumental of something familiar. Jane could hum it, but it was so off base that she was having trouble wrapping her mind around the lyrics. “When I’m driving” … oh, no. “Satisfaction”? The Rolling Stones would turn over in their graves if they ever allowed themselves to be pronounced dead.
Jane went back to the cupboard. Stacks of boxes. Neatly packed and sealed with masking tape. What was this feeling rising up in Jane Wheel? The exhaustion and the ennui, the sadness and despair she had felt with Lula and Fuzzy felt fainter. The feelings were not completely gone. They were just medicated. Jane knew that. But it felt so good to feel the old familiar itch. She dragged out a stack of two boxes and put them next to the light. Then, greedy, she went in for two more. There were at least six left inside, but she decided to open these up to see what she was getting herself into. She couldn’t remember from whom her parents had bought the house. Senior year in high school, she had one foot out the door and had barely spent any time at all in this basement.
Around the other side of the stairs, where the washer and dryer were located, she had done some laundry, although Nellie usually took care of that. She told Jane she didn’t like the way she added the soap. Her mother also told Jane that she didn’t understand the shaking out of wet clothes. If they weren’t shaken properly, Nellie told her, they would dry with more wrinkles. Jane had half wanted to know where these laws were made, but she was seventeen and she also half wanted to get the hell out of this house.
Jane remembered having friends over once and coming down here to the basement, but Nellie kept opening the door up in the kitchen and asking if Jane had called her.
“No, Mom, I didn’t call you,” Jane would answer.
“Huh. I thought I heard you call me,” Nellie would answer back.
The third or fourth time, Jane’s friends got the message and gave up. There would be no cigarettes sneaked, no bottles sipped, no kisses stolen, not on Nellie’s watch.
“So what have we here?” Jane asked herself out loud. Whatever this hidden treasure turned out to be, someone had thought whatever was in these boxes was precious. The cartons were carefully sealed and Jane had noticed that the ones on the bottom were set on bricks inside the closet to guard against any dampness.
Jane carefully pulled off the tape and opened the first box.
The smell of mothballs rolled out like a wave. Jane lifted off a layer of tissue paper and held up a blue wool coat with a princess collar trimmed in green leather. It would fit a little girl, maybe three or four years old. It was a perfect Sunday coat from the midfifties and Jane found herself grinning and oohing and aahing over it. Who did she know who had a little girl she could dress in vintage? Or maybe she should contact a costume designer? If all these boxes contained clothes in such mint condition, they could be worth something. The next item was a matching hat that tied under the chin. Also on a knitted string, a pair of mittens and a blue fur muff. Jane kept pulling out clothes, one item more adorable than the next. When she got to the bottom of the box, she pulled out a navy blue wool jumper.
“They must have had a girl at St. Pat’s,” said Jane. “This has got to be a St. Pat’s jumper.”
“They did,” said Nellie.
“Jeez!” Jane screamed and jumped to her feet. “When did you come in?”
“I been watching you dance around and talk to yourself for about five minutes,” said Nellie. “What do you think you’re doing down here?”
“Dad said …”
“Yeah, he told me. He’s sitting at that stupid card table right now selling worn-out decks of cards for a dime.” “Did you know about this closet?”
Nellie stared at her. Jane looked into her mother’s blue eyes, as pale as Jane’s were dark. Nellie’s mouth twitched as if she had the greatest secret, but she just didn’t know which was sweeter, keeping it or revealing it.
Then Jane knew.
It was her coat, her hat, and mittens. Her St. Pat’s jumper. Nellie nodded. She walked over and poked her head into the closet.
“Yeah, it’s all yours except for the two boxes in the corner. That’s all Michael’s report cards and schoolwork. Some books, I think. Maybe his baseball glove.”
“You’ve had this stuff all along?”
“What’s the big deal? That coat isn’t going to fit you, is it? Nick sure as hell wasn’t going to wear it. Figured I might have a granddaughter someday. Or a great-granddaughter,” Nellie said, sniffing and tidying up the tissue paper that Jane had thrown on the floor.
“What else?”
Nellie shrugged.
Jane tore into the next box and pulled out an old friend. She had thought her bear Mortimer was gone forever. Smaller than she remembered, raggedy, and with one eye missing. But it was Mortimer.
“You told me you got rid of him.”
“Never. Never told you I threw anything away. You just thought I did. I told you I had cleaned up your room. And after a while, when you had new stuff, you stopped asking. I just wanted you to have nice things. Who knew you were going to grow up into somebody who wanted junk?” Nellie said. “God knows that isn’t my fault. I put you around nice things.”
By the time Nick and Charley got back, Jane had unpacked the treasures of the hidden closet and discovered her favorite old toys, her old school notebooks, religious statues she had won as school prizes, pictures of Tim and her playing in their old backyard. She had called her brother, Michael, in California and made him cry when she told him she was holding his baseball cards.
Nellie kept shaking her head and shrugging, circling her finger around her temple and making the cuckoo sign to Nick.
“Why’d you hide it all, Grandma?”
“Wasn’t hiding it. Just keeping it from getting all dusty.”
“But you never told anybody, Nellie,” said Charley, “you kept it all buried down here.”
“Who cared about it?” asked Nellie. “Jane figured I’d thrown it away, and she never asked me for it. I had forgotten it until I saw Jane down here messing around. Besides, people need to move on and not sit around with their memories. Jeez, where does that get you?”
Jane was leafing through an old notebook from her junior high English class. She had been exchanging notes with her best friend, Peggy Sandwell, the e
ntire year, it seemed. She wondered if they had ever written down anything from the class.
“So why did you keep it, Mom?”
“I had the closet for it. It all fit,” said Nellie, seriously trying to answer the question. She hadn’t thought about it before. “You were leaving. Michael was going to leave, too. So I thought I’d keep it for you. In case you ever came back, I guess,” Nellie said. “You really never asked about this stuff.”
Jane considered the objects scattered around the basement. She had never asked. She had assumed her mother had thrown them all away. And she had been trying to replace so much for such a long time. Looking for love in all the wrong places? When had her dad switched the radio station to Country Western?
“What about my jeans from college? What box are they in?”
“I threw them rags away,” said Nellie.
Charley stood up and started up the stairs.
“Where are you going?” asked Nellie. “Hungry? I’ll get you all some supper before you drive back.”
“No, not hungry. I just remembered a fork I have to put away.”
Jane had decided to let her mother repack all the boxes and put them back into the closet. Nellie was visibly relieved, telling Jane that they’d just get lost in the shuffle at Jane’s house. Jane had to try one more time.
“Mom, you know I collect all this kind of stuff, so why didn’t you ever think I’d want to know …? You know, that you had my childhood packed away in there?”
“Because I didn’t. It wasn’t yours. It was mine. You didn’t even remember that coat, but I know the day we went to the Fair Store and bought it. You put it on and spun around in the mirror, and we couldn’t afford it. There was no way I could spend that money on a coat you’d wear a few Sundays for one year. But you liked it and I bought it; that’s all there is to it. You didn’t even remember it was yours. That was my memory, not yours,” said Nellie. “What do you save that’s Nick’s? Because I’m telling you right now, it won’t be the right stuff. It’ll be your stuff of Nick’s childhood, not his.”
Jane thought of the carefully packed away Brio train that Nick had never played with that she wouldn’t let Claire Oh sell at the garage sale.
Nellie was right. The buried stuff Jane mourned were things that her mother couldn’t possibly have recognized as important, as vital, as precious. What was it Nellie had said before? Jane didn’t take what her mother offered; she just kept asking for things she thought her mother had. She thought about Fuzzy burying those pennies, leaving his treasures behind. Would the person who found them recognize their value?
“Sew his eye back on, okay?” Nellie said, shoving something into her arms and ducking away when Jane tried to kiss her good-bye. “Clean your house. Fix the bear.”
Jane nodded, hugging Mortimer to her. Fragile and temporary … she and Nellie had finally come to an agreement on at least one memory.
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Buried Stuff Page 26