Baggage Check

by M. J. Pullen

  The work also went more than twice as fast as it had been going, because he could carry much more than she could at once, and instead of huffing and puffing in and out of the house between each load, Rebecca had more time to spend sorting. Never once did he question her decisions, or comment on the squalid state of the house. He didn’t ask intrusive questions about her mom.

  Normally she had to remind herself to eat while she was working, but by one o’clock Jake had already run out for grilled chicken sandwiches from the tiny cafe in town, and he picked up Gatorade as well. They sat on the front steps, chewing quietly, while the classic rock station played in the background. “So this is where you grew up?”

  “Until senior year,” she said. She knew Jake was from old money, and had grown up in a seven-bedroom historic house that was basically an old plantation. This must have looked like hell on earth to him.

  “And that’s when you met Marci and Suzanne,” he confirmed.

  “Yes. I moved in with my aunt. I wanted … I really wanted to go to Georgia.”

  He swallowed the last bite of his sandwich and washed it down with the Gatorade. “I’m glad you did,” he said, play-punching her gently on the arm as he rose. He went inside the house as though he’d grown up here, too. “I think we’re going to need some different trash bags soon. They make contractor-grade ones that will hold a lot more stuff and you don’t have to worry about sharp edges poking through them.”

  “Oh,” Rebecca said, feeling stupid she hadn’t known this.

  “I’ll run over to Gadsden this afternoon and pick some up.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” she called in to him, as she crumpled up her sandwich wrapper and stood up to straighten her shorts.

  He reappeared in the doorway. “I know I don’t have to, Rebecca. I’m your friend. Let your friends help you.”

  “Okay,” she said softly.

  * * *

  Alex came by at three fifteen, while Rebecca was sorting things in her mother’s bedroom and Jake was on his way to Gadsden for the superpowered trash bags. When she first heard the knock on the door, she thought Jake had forgotten something and yelled, “It’s open!” from her spot behind a stack of plastic tubs.

  “You’ve made real progress in here,” Alex said a minute later, his deep voice making her jump as he stuck his head in the door to her mother’s room.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I didn’t expect to see you again today.”

  “My shift just ended,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. “Great.”

  He stood as though he were too big for the hallway.

  “Sorry there’s no place to sit,” she said. Then, sheepishly, “I have a half bottle of Gatorade over here if you’re thirsty.”

  “No, thanks. I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. After today.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Jake is just an old friend.”

  “From college,” Alex said. “You said.”

  “Yeah. His wife is a good friend as well, from my Georgia high school.” She felt defensive but she wasn’t sure why. “I just had a little breakdown about my family and he was helping me through it. Really, it was nothing.”

  “I was worried about you,” he said. “You can’t blame me for that.”

  “Of course not. It’s just that everything is—”

  “Fine,” he finished.

  “It is fine. Alex, there is nothing between me and Jake.”

  “Hey, you don’t have to explain anything to me.”

  “I want to. And I want to talk about Saturday,” she began.

  “Forget it. I get it now.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Doesn’t matter.”

  Rebecca could not tell what he wanted her to say or do. She hated that. It was so much easier when people just pushed the button and asked for what they needed.

  “Jake just showed up on my doorstep this morning to help. I couldn’t exactly turn him away. His wife sent him.”

  Alex nodded. “I can see that he—that you are good friends.”

  “Yes. We are.”

  “I have to run,” he said. He gestured vaguely toward the door.

  “Of course,” she said.

  He hesitated, and left.

  30

  Jake and Rebecca worked the rest of the week together at her mother’s house. She had not realized how lonely her work had been until she had someone helping her. Even when they went for hours without speaking, just the sound of his whistling in the other room or the door opening and closing as he went in and out was comforting. They worked well into the evenings, surviving on peanut butter, Waffle House, and a couple of trips to Dickie’s for burgers and beer. On both these occasions, Rebecca looked around the bar for a sign of Alex, but he never appeared.

  Rebecca was so tired by the end of the week that she was sure she could sleep for a full twenty-four hours if it were not for Jake’s loud snoring on the couch. She caught him rubbing his back and neck a few times when he thought she wasn’t looking, but he never complained. What they accomplished, however, was astonishing: by Friday afternoon, when they were joined by Marci and Suzanne, Jake thought the Dumpster was close to ready for pickup.

  “It looks like there is more in here than in the house,” Suzanne said, looking doubtfully into the Dumpster once Rebecca had given them a tour. “This must have been awful, Rebecca. I’m sorry we didn’t come out sooner.”

  “That’s okay,” Rebecca said. “I told you not to.”

  “Next time, I’m not taking no for an answer,” Suzanne said. “Sometimes we get caught up in our own stupid lives and don’t pay enough attention. You shouldn’t have to ask us to be there for you, but sometimes … well, sweetie, ask.”

  “Really, it’s not such a big deal,” Rebecca said.

  “Everything is a big deal for Suzanne the last few days,” Marci said. “Dylan has been out of town and she is lost without her new husband.”

  “Shut up, Marci,” Suzanne said. “That has nothing to do with it. I’m just sorry that Rebecca didn’t tell us how bad this was. We could have come sooner.”

  “I was a little embarrassed, I guess,” Rebecca said. She gestured at the Dumpster and the ramshackle house behind her. “This isn’t exactly the Atlanta Country Club.”

  Suzanne put her hands to her mouth, and then stepped forward and wrapped Rebecca in an unexpected embrace. “Oh, honey,” was all she said.

  Sunday afternoon, the Dumpster Dude returned. Suzanne, Jake, and Rebecca had spent the day before and all that morning carting things from the house, while Marci opened boxes and bins using Rebecca’s mask and gloves, looking for obvious trash. She took frequent breaks for fresh air but never complained about the smell of the house and her sensitive pregnancy nose.

  Even once the Dude had parked in the driveway and was directing a team of unhappy-looking young men in tie-dye, Rebecca continued to pull things out of the bedrooms and toss them on top of the pile in the giant metal container.

  On her third trip, Jake stopped her in the hall. “Let it go, sweetheart. You still have trash service, and maybe your mom will want to keep some of what’s left. I’ll bring the truck back in a few weeks and help you take more to the dump if you need it, okay?”

  Rebecca nodded and joined the others on Lorena’s front steps. The four of them stood and watched more than a decade of squirreled-away items and rotting trash be lifted onto a large flatbed truck for disposal at the county landfill. If I’d had more time, Rebecca thought, I could have recycled more of it, or gone through some of those moldy boxes to see if anything in them was salvageable for charity.… That road led nowhere, and she knew it, but her brain could not turn it off.

  “Has your mom seen any of this?” Marci asked as the Dumpster Dude drove away, and they turned back into the house.

  “No. I don’t think she can handle it.”

  “Do you worry what she’ll say when she does?”

  “Every minute.”


  * * *

  They walked in silence from one room to the next. The living-room furniture and floor were now visible, including her mother’s antique couch with the green cushions, which seemed to have been spared most of the cat urine by being the first piece of furniture Lorena had covered with boxes and newspapers. Except for a couple of boxes in the middle of the floor, the kitchen looked almost usable again thanks to Jake. As he wiped the scratched wood of the kitchen table with a rag, Rebecca had a sudden, vivid memory: sitting with Cory and her parents, playing rummy one rainy afternoon. The smell of microwave popcorn, and the delightfully fizzy-soggy feel of it on her tongue, soaked with orange soda. Cory’s favorite. For a span of several years, every memory of her brother included the soft line of an orange mustache.

  In a true gesture of friendship, Suzanne had bleached and scrubbed both bathrooms. There was a pile of musty towels in a basket ready for the Laundromat. The master bedroom still had a fair number of plastic bins in it, but they had been sorted by the girls into type and size of items and meticulously labeled by Marci, using multicolored sticky notes she’d pulled from her purse.

  Cory’s room had been the hardest. After Rebecca’s outburst of throwing things against the wall weeks earlier, she had still found it difficult to decide what to do with her brother’s things. Jake had boxed up and labeled a few of the surviving trophies, and whatever he had done with the things she’d broken, she did not know. He had set aside the toys and baseball cards he thought might be worth something on eBay, and a couple of Cory’s football uniforms. Everything else they had thrown into boxes and piled near the closet, ready to donate to charity. The bed, however, was still made, and the teddy bear her brother had loved since early childhood still sat in his spot.

  Rebecca picked it up. “I think I’ll keep Simpson,” she said. “He’s a bit dusty, but he can be washed.”

  “That’s sweet,” said Marci.

  “Next time you guys come over for dinner, he’ll be around in case Bonnie needs someone to cuddle with. Or the new baby.”

  “You’ve never had us over for dinner,” Marci said gently. She was definitely showing now, Rebecca noticed. And she looked tired.

  “Let’s add that to the list of things that need to change when I get home. And that’s enough work for today.”

  “When are you coming home?” Suzanne asked.

  “Soon, I think,” Rebecca said.

  They made their way out, turning off lights as they went, and discussing the limited dinner options for the evening. Jake led the way, and he was the first to the front door.

  “Bec,” he called, as Rebecca located the house key on the kitchen counter. “There’s a car pulling into the driveway.”

  He came, Rebecca thought. He’s finally over being mad. He’ll make some terrible joke. We’ll all go out to dinner and he’ll get to know my friends, and …

  What? What are you hoping for? She found that she did not know the answer but her smile widened as she moved past Suzanne and Marci toward the door. But it was not Alex Chen getting out of the car in the driveway. It was her dad.

  Richard Williamson shook Jake’s hand and nodded a greeting to the women, while Sonia tittered and fussed over introducing herself to everyone as “Richard’s friend.” Rebecca could not help but think of her conversation with Alex on this subject and tried not to smile. She noticed that Sonia was keeping her eyes carefully away from the house, as though it were haunted. She may not be wrong, Rebecca thought darkly.

  “Hey,” she said to her dad. “We were just leaving for the night.”

  “I thought that might be the case.” He slung an arm around Rebecca’s shoulders. “Rockstar mentioned y’all were here, and we came by to see if we could have you all over to dinner to celebrate.”

  “And,” Sonia added, “we hoped maybe y’all would spend the night with us, too. I know it must be crowded with all four of you wedged into Richard’s little old place.”

  The four of them answered simultaneously. Rebecca said, “Oh, Sonia, thanks anyway,” shaking her head, while the other three said various forms of “yes, please,” “thank you,” and maybe even “Oh, thank God.”

  Rebecca looked at her friends, who all looked carefully away, and realized she couldn’t refuse them a little comfort their last night here. Since she’d been sleeping on the floor for two nights herself, she had to admit that even one of Sonia’s guest bedrooms sounded like an improvement. “Thanks, Sonia, that’s really generous.”

  When she turned to see how her dad felt about the sleepover, Rebecca saw that he had gone into the house. “Why don’t we wait out here?” Sonia said. “Rebecca and her dad might need a moment.”

  She stayed a few steps behind him as he went through the house, examining little cracks in the walls and the condition of the windowsills as though he were considering the house for purchase. Rebecca realized he and her mom must have done this together, nearly thirty years ago, when she and Cory were still little and they were moving up from the even tinier house she’d been born in. She knew they had put every penny they had into the down payment on this place back then, and that her dad had taken pride in maintaining it for years. Rebecca felt her anger dissipating as she realized why it was so hard for him to be here anymore.

  Richard looked in the office that had once been her bedroom, and the master that had once been his. “Wow,” he said. “You got a lot more done than I thought you would.”

  “Thanks,” Rebecca said. She noticed that he hesitated for a moment in Cory’s doorway, and wished she had remembered to close the door. Then he went in.

  “The high school might want these uniforms,” he said to her. “They asked for them years ago but your mother wouldn’t part with them. They’d probably take a couple of the trophies from his senior year, too. The others, just leave on the floor here. I’ll take them to Sonia’s.”

  “To Sonia’s? You’re officially moving in?”

  He sighed. “I figure it’s time. She’s already putting up with me most of the time anyway. I’m going to retire in January, and Sonia wants to travel more. Be easier to have one less house to worry about.”

  “That makes sense,” Rebecca said uncertainly.

  “It never ends like you think it will,” he said. He sat down hard on Cory’s bed and Rebecca saw a little puff of dust rise in the late-afternoon light from the window behind him. “You make all these plans, you know? And God laughs. When I was your age … no, younger, even. We had plans, your mom and I.”

  “I know, Daddy.”

  “When you take out a thirty-year mortgage, the end of it seems so far away, and all you can picture is how happy you’ll be. You imagine the promotions at work that will make the payments easier to bear, and you think of watching your children grow.”

  “You don’t have to explain—”

  “You don’t think about burying a child. You don’t think about letting go of the house with eight months left on the mortgage. You don’t think that the woman you love with all your heart will become a stranger, and that you’ll be too weak and selfish to help your baby girl take care of things.…”

  “Daddy. You’re not weak.”

  He smiled at her. “You going to see your mom tomorrow?”

  “After everyone leaves, yeah.”

  “I’m filling in for Route 3 tomorrow, so I’ll be done early. Want some company?”

  “Sure, Dad.”

  31

  When her friends left for Atlanta the next morning, Rebecca was genuinely sorry to see them go. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she felt comfortable with her place in their little circle.

  They had sneaked out of Sonia’s house early, not long after they heard Richard’s car leave the driveway, stopped off for a quick breakfast at Waffle House, and returned in Suzanne’s car to Richard’s little bungalow. Rebecca’s own car was there, and Jake’s truck as well. He transferred his wife and her bags to the truck while Suzanne complained in advance about bein
g lonely on the drive home.

  “Don’t you have your husband’s CDs in the car?” Jake asked. “Can’t you listen to those?”

  Suzanne was already tearful, which was uncharacteristic, especially when sober. Jake’s teasing seemed to make this worse, and she gave Rebecca more hugs in a half hour than she had in the past year. “Don’t tell me you’re pregnant, too,” Rebecca said. “Based on the pictures you sent, I don’t know if you have much room to grow in that wedding dress.”

  “No,” Suzanne said. “Maybe in a year or so, after I figure out what it’s going to be like having Dylan back on tour. Then we’ll see.”

  Marci hugged Rebecca so tightly that she could feel the hard little lump of her pregnant belly pressing against her. The sensation was strange, but Rebecca did not pull back from it. Her relationship with Marci had improved exponentially over the last few weeks, and she didn’t want to risk putting a damper on it.

  “You’ll call us as soon as you’re back?” Jake said. “Or if you need my help again?”

  “Yes,” she said, accepting his side-arm hug. “But I think I’ll be okay. Dad said he would help me finish things up. And I’ll be home soon.”

  She stood in the driveway and waved as they pulled out, noting with amusement that Suzanne already had her hands-free headset on and was talking animatedly to someone before she even got out of the driveway. Rebecca smiled and went back inside, feeling full and hollow at the same time.

  She called Valerie on impulse, and was surprised that she answered the phone almost immediately. “Hey, girl.”

  “Hi, Val, I was just going to leave a message. I figured you’d be working today.”

  “Nope, I’m stuck in Toronto,” she said. “Stomach bug.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too. If I’m going to have to call out sick, I’d rather be at home in my own bed instead of some hotel room. Did you know room service charged me fifteen dollars for some ginger ale and stale crackers? Like it’s not bad enough I’ve got it coming out both ends, I have to lose it from my pocketbook, too.”