by Maria Flook
She must have seen the car parked in front, the silvery zigzag on the windshield. He listened to her arrange canned goods in the lazy Susan; he knew the way she liked the soup stacked, consommé in front. He was drifting in and out of sleep, listening to the sea roll and flatten down the slope of the dune. Again, he was alert. For Willis, the first stretch of sleep was always bracketed by fears. Was it rest after work, or the difficult work of finding rest? The preparatory stillness before unforeseeable events. The calm before or the calm after?
He fumbled through the top drawer of his night table and found the card of drugs. He removed the foil and plowed it in. Willis felt one moment of regret. His regret made him angry, but he didn’t blame Rennie for sharing her morphine. She gave him the little boxes with the belief that it was a legitimate prescription from an authorized chemist. They might have been sweet orange tablets of St. Joseph’s baby aspirin. Maybe she was shutting her eyes to it because she was dying and wanted his company in her scary routines. Rennie didn’t seem to know that he was in over his head. She had enough to contend with directing her own decline.
He listened to the house noises, the heating pipes knocking, room to room. He felt suddenly at ease, the way people feel immediately better when placed in oxygen tents and they don’t have to concentrate on the pull of their lungs. Then he smelled yeast rolls, the first wave of scent from the preheated oven, a flood of cinnamon rising through the warped floorboards.
In his altered sleep the birds awakened. Their beaded eyes tightened and expanded in an intelligent perusal. They flapped their bright magenta wings, fanned their crests. They perched on the piebald doors of the car and flew inside the windows, lined up along the dash like bowling trophies. The birds stared at Willis. Screeched. The sound they emitted was both wild and familiar, a fiery squawk without accusation or insult, like the sound of someone stepping on a house cat. Just an announcement. A presence. Here I am.
Chapter Eight
It was afternoon when Willis came downstairs. Rennie was sitting in the old captain’s chair; its arms were polished by her sweater sleeves. The chair’s uncomfortable spindles looked like fossilized bones Willis had seen in a National Geographic. The hard chair had always been Rennie’s spot. Willis had replaced the Fresnel lens in its usual place on the narrow sill beneath the fanlight. The sun burst through the glass throwing distorted shamrocks across the walls. Willis stooped and gave Rennie a kiss, holding his cast against his waist to keep it from bumping her.
“How much longer do you need that?” Rennie said.
“Four weeks.”
“It’s filthy, maybe we can use some kitchen wax on it. Simonize it. I have a bottle in the cupboard.”
He took a homemade sweet roll from the Spode plate, letting its heavenly weight register in his hand. The pastry was laden with egg and ripped apart in long feathers of yellow cake. It was something he could eat without sitting down at the table. She often offered him these portable servings, letting him stand at the window, or pace around, ruffling through papers and magazines, as if he was looking for his own belongings and couldn’t find anything familiar.
She gave him a mug of tea and dropped a spoon in it to pull the heat off. Willis looked down at a bowl of kidneys soaking in milk. The deep umber knots glistened like fart opals in the white broth. She told him she was making a stew, the milk absorbs any uric acid left in the meat.
Rennie knew that Willis felt uncomfortable when she planned the meals ahead of time. Stew required a commitment from him to show up. He was telling her, “I might not make it.”
“Your way with words,” Rennie said, “it’s always refreshing. Let’s not cringe at routine pleasantries—”
“Shit. Didn’t I say good morning? I swear I said it.”
“I’m not keeping track. How’s the car? How is it running for you?”
“You saw it? The crack in the windshield?”
“Can’t miss it.”
“I got behind a gravel truck spilling asphalt mix. I’ll get it fixed next week. Maybe you’ve got the insurance for something like that, a gravel truck—”
“Windshields are tricky when you live by the seaside. We say it’s a gravel truck, but they say that since we park it on the water, it’s sand blowing on a daily basis, making little pocks and ruining the glass. They’ll fight it.”
“This is a regular smashed windshield, Rennie, they won’t try to prove it was blowing sand.”
“It’s Amica. They’re testy. You call and tell them that story.” Rennie walked over to the sideboard and penned something in a little notebook.
“Is that a shopping list?” Willis asked.
She shut the little notebook and dropped the pen on its cover.
Rennie said, “Do you want kale soup? I’ve still got winter kale in the garden. It’s tough. It’s holding on.”
“Look. Stop the production.”
“It’s good to have you back from Norfolk. How long have you been back? Two, three months? First month doesn’t count. You weren’t exactly clean and sober. You still using my stash? Do I have to go to CVS and get more?”
“Well, shouldn’t you have it on hand? I mean, in case you need it yourself?”
“I’ll get refills. Maybe you can do some work around here—”
“Sure I will. Exactly what?”
“We could do some reshingling,” she said. She didn’t sound serious.
“Sure. I’ll get some cedar shingles. Next week.”
“It’s Munro,” Rennie told him. “He’s getting counsel. He’s not going to let us stop his plans—”
“He was lucky I didn’t kill him. I told you, don’t worry about him.”
“He says I can’t take care of the house anymore. There’s a problem with cash flow.”
Willis said, “The house looks fine. There’s nothing wrong with it, is there?”
“Nothing. Nothing essentially wrong with it.” Rennie took a butter knife from a drawer, but Willis shook his head about the butter. From habit, she rubbed her thumb over the blade before she put it back. It was good to feel the dull blade of a knife when it was supposed to be dull.
“The house needs paint,” Willis said, stuffing a pillow of cake into his mouth. “It’s those vines. They have little sucker feet and they eat right through the trim on the window frames. I can pull them down and get a pressure cleaning kit at the Rent-All.”
“The greenery has nothing to do with it. Maybe it’s the only thing holding the house up. It’s me. I should have the sucker feet.” She wasn’t laughing. “Munro wants me to have a condo at Château-sur-Mer. His treat.”
“Tell him to go fuck himself.”
“We can’t afford this house unless he chips in. It’s blackmail. He won’t let us stay here.”
“How much has that drone been giving you?”
“Just about everything.”
Willis stopped chewing. He went over to the sink and spit out his mouthful of fluffy cake so he could talk. “What? You never said he was paying that much. He’s been paying everything?”
“Everything.”
“He pays my way? I’m going to throw up.”
“Don’t eat so fast.”
“Don’t joke. Are you saying we have money problems? Am I blind or something?”
“It didn’t make any difference until now. Now he wants to make decisions.” She hid her hands behind her apron as she talked.
“I didn’t think it was about money. I thought it was about philosophy.”
“We have plenty of that. We’ve got loads of philosophy.” Willis looked stunned. Rennie rummaged through some drawers while he found his legs. She said, “I’ve been getting dunned by Marcy Oil. Narragansett Electric. Even Ma Bell has her knickers in a twist. My household budget is hanging by a thread.”
“But you have the house. It’s waterfront property.”
“Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.”
Willis walked into the next room and through to the front parlo
r, then he turned around and came back.
Rennie said, “Munro says he’s not going ahead with the property taxes. It’s blackmail. He wants me to sell the place. Century 21 was over here but I chased them out.”
“Taxes? How much?”
“Next year I get Social Security and that would almost cover the taxes on this house, but then he’d freeze me out some other way. He won’t pay my grocery bills at Almacs. He wants me on the inside looking out.”
Willis said, “It’s not going to happen. Not a chance.” He marched through the room thinking how to back it up.
Rennie said, “Château-sur-Mer is supposed to be better than those motel-style nursing homes. What’s the difference? Once you admit defeat, you might as well live over a grate on the sidewalk. Château-sur-Mer is where the upper crust crumbles.”
“It’s for millionaires. We aren’t millionaires,” Willis said, but he waited for her to confirm his assumption.
“Not exactly.”
“That’s the place next to Salve Regina, right? That big setup on the Cliff Walk? I know someone who works in there. A candy striper or something—”
“You mean that little nurse? That’s what I’m saying. Candy stripers are for hospitals. I’m not going back to a hospital. The brochure says it’s ‘resort retirement.’ The last resort.
“First, they put you in something called a ‘villa,’ then they cut you back to an apartment if for some reason you can’t walk across the lawn to the dining hall. Too many cricks or tummy troubles and it’s into the infirmary you go. Where it comes on a tray. The last thing, it’s a tube through your nose. The shortcut, you don’t have to chew it. You know—”
“Come on.” Willis didn’t want her to continue, but she was building momentum.
“It’s the Last Supper every night. Enter at this villa level, then its downhill all the way. It’s the last stop. Everybody off the train. They don’t even try to pretend.”
“Munro’s crazy. That’s years from now. What are you? Fifty? Sixty? You aren’t ready for all of that.”
She looked at him; she was touched that he tried to deny her failing health. He didn’t really want to know her age. He had never really figured her in chronologically; she was a constant, her age didn’t matter. He could have told her Wydette’s age, down to the minute. Wydette would have been fifty. Willis remembered Wydette’s theoretical age, year by year, because she never reached it. Wydette never fulfilled the obligation of those years. Where was Wydette when Willis was sick with throbbing pains and Rennie washed the ochre vomit stains from his sheets and towels? Who took care of him now? Rennie even sliced his meat. He couldn’t handle a knife with his broken arm. She carved the meat, giving extra attention to how she arranged the rare slices across his plate, creating an attractive fan, rose-colored fingers of beef. He was a grown man, but a broken arm made him like a child again. He could hardly zip his pants. He left the brass rivet unbuttoned unless he asked her to do it.
The house belonged to Rennie, but none of her three husbands had left her enough money to keep it up. For years Rennie made souvenir jewelry, lighthouse pins, sand-dollar earrings, lobster-claw and sailboat charms which she had sold from her “eight-month” shop. Sometimes, Rennie went to the flea markets where she displayed her old clothes, her extra teacups, which brought good prices, but she didn’t have the energy anymore. She could have unloaded Wydette’s things, which Lester had tried to salvage. Wydette’s shoes were still lined up in the attic along with her stirrup stretch pants folded and sealed in white Jordan Marsh boxes. In a small envelope, Rennie discovered the calcified stub of Willis’s umbilical clamp which Wydette had saved. Willis had seemed disappointed when he examined the tiny relic. He told Rennie that he had always expected the cord to look like the frayed painter on a rowboat.
Willis had the kitchen faucet disassembled. The chrome escutcheon, the tiny O-ring, the packing washer, and stem sleeve were lined up on the counter. He needed a seat wrench, and he went through the kitchen closet until he found what he wanted.
“It’s a tiny leak,” Rennie said. “I can live with it.”
“You shouldn’t have a hot-water leak,” he told her. “The furnace kicks on.”
She sat down at the kitchen table and watched him. She couldn’t remember just how much water had been dripping. She figured Willis was making a point. He would take care of the house until the bitter end.
It was the first time she noticed his boots. She examined the marled, smoke-damaged leather. He hadn’t mentioned where he found these secondhand boots, so she kept quiet. Perhaps he had arrived at those boots through private circumstances.
Willis replaced the faucet and tightened the retainer nut with a cloth-covered pliers. With his left hand he threaded the tiny screen onto the spout. He reached under the sink to turn on the connection. He pulled the tap open and the water convulsed twice, then flattened into a steady line. He twisted the handle shut. The spout bled a few drops. Then it was dry.
Chapter Nine
Between the two houses, there was an oil drum for burning trash. Nicole and Rennie shared it. Holly saw Willis Pratt at the edge of the cliff standing over the trash barrel. Standing beside Willis was another young man; a lean and nervous type was shivering, sinking up and down, as Willis lit matches and tossed them into the drum. Willis lowered something into the fire. He stepped back. He looked up at the sky. His face showed a strange, undefinable disturbance. Willis reached into the rusty barrel to strike additional matches out of the wind. Cooking grease sputtered where it was heavy on the paper sacks. He had the fire going and he added some dirty swatches from the rag box. He lifted another heavy bag of kitchen scraps and put it on. He moved back and threw the remaining pack of restaurant matches into the barrel.
Holly came out of her house. She skirted the stranger and ran up to Willis. She looked inside the barrel. A small, compact mound prickled with sparks. She knew it was the puppy. “What are you doing—” she hollered. She rose up on her toes to get a better look, but the smoke lifted in a heavy screen and she couldn’t see through it. “You can’t burn that dog out here where the children might see it.”
She was standing in the smoke; she moved to the other side of the barrel, but the wind shifted again. Her stomach was clenching and she felt her saliva increasing.
Willis looked at her. He scratched the tip of his nose with the white cuff of his cast. He looked like he was trying to understand Holly’s non sequiturs. She could see him pretending to make the leaps.
“This is sick!” she said.
He looked at the fire.
“Put that out. Put that fire out right now.”
He turned to face her square. His eyes looked wide, then they grew distant. He said, “That dog? That dog is around the house. I dug a hole. You can have your bow-wow funeral when the kids come home from school.”
“Are you saying you made a grave?”
“Over there—see that hole?” He shoved his arm in the direction of the little grave.
Holly saw the trench in the sandy yard. “Oh,” Holly said. “I see it.” Her eyes were swimming, her confusion and shame washing higher. She looked at the fire again.
Willis told Fritz, “This is Holly Temple.”
Fritz said, “A Christmas baby?”
“Close enough,” she said. Her face was stinging.
“This here,” Fritz said, “is Rennie’s garbage. Just the ordinary.”
“I thought I saw that puppy go in,” she said.
“You wear contacts, Miss Temple?” Fritz said.
“Shit,” Holly said.
“You wear glasses, Miss Temple? How’s your prescription? EyeWorld can grind some new lenses in an hour.”
Holly said, “Will you cut out the ‘Miss Temple’ routine.”
“Excuse me. Miss Holy Temple.”
“I was waiting for that,” she said.
Willis let Fritz have his say.
Holly didn’t wear glasses. She marched back into her hous
e and slammed the door. She shut the window, which was opened a crack. Already her rooms smelled of smoke, like a landfill incinerator—burned grapefruit rinds and pork-chop bones. She felt incredibly stupid. Then she realized she couldn’t hang her wash. How could she hang her wash if people were burning their garbage on the only sunny day? She allowed herself to feel this new insult; she was happy to shift it over.
In five minutes she came back outdoors and got into her car. Willis was still there with the skinny outsider. Willis was standing in the trench he had made for the dog. It came up to his shins right below his knees. He stood there, keeping a silent, horrible posture. She didn’t acknowledge the little grave he had made and she looked away. He was crazy. Of course, he was crazy. She tossed her hair away from her face and squinted in her rearview to back down the driveway.
Holly couldn’t think about it now; she and Robin had to cook for a hundred and fifty. There were big sheets of stuffed peppers to bake, and they could be tricky. The peppers along the outside edges of the wide pans always blackened while the middle ones were too soggy. The kids hated stuffed peppers anyway. The students would eat stuffed peppers or they would starve. She received her paycheck either way.