All's Well That Ends (12 page)

“People . . .” Toy said, letting the idea trail off into whatever negative meaning we wanted to give it. “Imagination . . .
you
can’t imagine . . .” The mini-chandelier laugh sounded at her word play. “When you’ve dealt with as many people in transition as I have . . .” she said in her airy voice. “Well, what can I say?”

She could say a lot, most likely, but so far, she’d said nothing.

“May I?” she asked as she edged toward the dining room.

So this is what became of my students who could not get it straight that they should be called on before they spoke. The ones who raised their hands only after they’d said their piece.

Sasha closed in on her. Phoebe’s house was not large. It took only a few steps for Sasha to be next to Toy, or more accurately, to loom over her. There had to be a foot’s difference in height, though I thought that if psyches and determination were duking it out, it might be a draw. “First tell me,” Sasha said. “You ‘stage’

the house?”

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Toy shook her great yellow mane in a nod.

“The entire house?”

“Attic to basement, if need be,” she said. “We’re a full-service staging operation.”

“And that means what?”

Toy made a sweeping motion with her hand. “Pare down, arrange what’s left, bring in accessories, flowers, paint the walls, replace the furniture, make sure the grounds are inviting—whatever it takes to give the place some juice, some feel, maybe even some pizzazz.”

“But no personality,” Sasha said.

Toy, despite her name and diminutive stature, was in no way intimidated by my friend Sasha’s dark mood or six-foot height.

“No
specific
personality—and no idiosyncratic personality. But more than that, no clutter! You want the buyer to walk in and feel at home, to say, ‘Yes, this is where I belong.’ And you don’t want them to think it’s a dark place, a cramped place, because the former owner stuffed it with too much!” She waved at her surround-ings, almost like an orchestra conductor, then turned toward the dining room. “You want them to have space to breathe, to imagine themselves in here. To imagine putting Aunt Sadie’s enormous breakfront right there and the gigantic flat-screen TV over there. To let them imagine cluttering it up themselves.”

“Specifically, what are we talking about?” Sasha asked. “What does what you’re saying entail?”

“Up to you, and in this case, Dennis, too, I suppose. We can do anything and everything. Make that garage look useable. Replace gangly houseplants with smaller, tidier-looking ones. Replace, recover, redo the furniture if need be—and your budget allows. Trust me, it’s money well spent. Staged houses sell for more and sell more quickly. I have charts and statistical evidence I’ll show you. They’re right outside in my car. You’d be amazed!”

We shook our heads. “No thanks.” She wasn’t going to carry literature with her that made her profession seem less than a basic necessity of life.

GILLIAN ROBERTS

90

She was alive with energy and excitement about making this home look better. I would not have been surprised if she suddenly broke into song, or tap-danced.

“What do you do with the things you pare down?” Sasha asked.

Toy lifted both carefully sculpted eyebrows. “
You
—or Dennis—do whatever you want with them. Take them, give them to charity, keep them as souvenirs, burn them, store them.

If you have no interest in so doing, we’ll dispose of it all for you, but there is a charge for hauling it away.”

She did a few more slow pirouettes, opening her arms in the Evita pose, embracing the house with her vision as she spoke.

“My concern is what this area will
say.
Right now, I’m envisioning it empty, and then I will slowly envision filling it back up. Think of this as my stage. Literally. As if you were in the theater, and the curtain went up and you saw this house up there; and it was set up and painted and decorated so that before the play even started, before anybody walked onstage, you’d know that this was a good house, a happy house, a house to be proud of, though not pretentious.”

Sasha turned and looked at me, deadpan, then turned back to Toy, who continued her narrative with great gusto. “Right now,” she said, “it’s filled with tiny things that don’t make a statement; they chatter. The feeling is decidedly busy, busy, busy! No breathing room. One or two significant pieces would be much more effective than all this clutter. As for the disposition of what’s in here now—well, I don’t have it in writing but Dennis for one didn’t sound that interested in any of it.” Without asking for permission, Toy walked around the dining room. “Oh my!” she squeaked, sounding like a startled Disney mousekin.

“What is he thinking?” Sasha whispered to me. “He tells me to take care of things, then he sends
her
here? Doesn’t he trust me? Or did he tell her to throw everything of his mother’s away? I haven’t even had time to think about half of it. Plus, God knows what she charges, and am I supposed to pay it out of my half be-91

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS

cause I’m taking care of this sale? I won’t; but even if it’s out of both of our shares equally—who wants this?”

I felt it wise to stay out of this altogether.

“Well, some of these pieces might work,” Toy said when she’d recovered from the shock of Phoebe’s dining-room collections.

Every surface was covered, but not the way Ramona’s had been.

No plastic here, only objects. Lots and lots of them. The center of the dining-room table had a wide runner on it holding candle-holders. Some were beautiful, some were silly, but you didn’t have to be a professional stager to know there were too many of them.

If all had been in use, the house might explode from the heat they’d produce.

“I wouldn’t keep much,” Toy now was saying, “that’s for sure.

Maybe that breakfront, and we could put a few important pieces in it if there’s anything that—”

“I know, makes a statement,” Sasha muttered.

“—sings to me,” Toy said. “And let me check out the kitchen, not that we can do too much in there, unless Dennis is up for some remodeling. But even something like colored place mats, and clean counters, and—”

“I’d have to be up for it, too,” Sasha declared loudly from the living room.

“Sorry!” Toy trilled. “Of course I meant both of you.”

“I vote no remodeling,” Sasha continued. “Also, I need a whole lot more information before you talk about painting and finding things that sing to you. Furthermore, I haven’t heard from Dennis, and he should have let me know. He put me in charge of this house, and I’m not ready to sign off on expenses and decisions I know nothing about.”

“But,” I whispered, giving up on my decision to stay out of this, “You don’t want to do this yourself. You were complaining about it when I got here. This place is a mess—not dirty, but I’ve never seen more clutter.”

Sasha’s mouth tightened. “Don’t give me common sense, Amanda. If there’s one thing I hate when I’m pissed off it’s logic!

GILLIAN ROBERTS

92

Why did he hire somebody behind my back? Doesn’t he trust me to do a decent job? His high-handedness is the point!”

“The man’s a jerk. Why be surprised when he does something jerky?”

Toy came back into the living room. “I’ve promised Dennis a solid guesstimate ASAP. So as soon as I’ve seen the rest of the house and crunch some numbers, I’d be happier than happy to give it to you, too; and then you and Dennis can decide whether it’s worth it. I can tell you right now—it absolutely is. Without me, this house won’t sell for what it’s worth. Not close. With all due apologies to the deceased, she wasn’t thinking about market value, curb appeal.”

“Right. She was thinking about living in it,” Sasha said,

“about having it appeal to her own self, not the curb.”

Toy was already on the third riser of the staircase, ignoring us. “May I?” she said as she went upstairs. “The bedrooms are relatively simple to freshen up. Shouldn’t take me but a minute to evaluate.”

“What are you really afraid of?” I asked when Toy was out of earshot.

“She lived with us—I lived with her. Some of her memories are mine, too. I don’t want some stranger stomping through everything.”

“Then, instead of deciding what has to go—let’s go through the place tonight, or however many other nights it takes, and tag each thing you want as a keepsake. There has to be less of those than there are of the get-rid-ofs, and it shouldn’t take that long.

It’s not that large a house. Do you think there’s lots you’d want to keep?”

Sasha shrugged. “Not really. I remember some things from way back when we were, officially, family. They had sentimental attachments for her, so now they do for me as well. But I really resent Dennis, and this makes me wonder if he wasn’t the surprise visitor that night.”

“Are you honestly saying he killed his own mother?”

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“I wouldn’t put it past him.” She looked serious, and the expression on her face and what she was suggesting frightened me.

“He’s screwed up most of his life and he’s still not exactly a roar-ing success, and the money he’ll get from this house is going to matter to him a lot. Not that it won’t matter to me—it definitely will, and I’m probably poorer than Dennis. But even so, it won’t matter in the same way. There’s always something desperate about Dennis.”

I thought I understood at least enough of what she was trying to say.

“No love was lost between them,” she said. “You heard the way he talked at her memorial service.”

“Good thing is: He’s in Chicago and we’re here. Take all the time you need to go through this house. Then, maybe, Toy can get rid of the things you don’t want. Let her worry about getting Dumpsters and trucks. We can start taking the small things home with us tonight.”

“Well, well, well,” Toy said, clunking down the stairs in her boots. “You aren’t going to believe this place when we’re finished with it. It will be a doll’s house, a little showplace. It has decent enough bones. Now we have to give it a chance to shine. A little powder and lipstick, or if you will, a little face-lift. Let me work up my estimate and get back to you. I think I could have it ready by tomorrow, but I may need to get into the house one more time first. Maybe during the day? With good light? Then meet here and talk over each idea?”

“Fine,” Sasha snapped. “I’ll see you at five p.m.”

She made it sound as if the appointment were for a duel.

Eight

We didn’t make much headway, or maybe there isn’t much headway to make,” I said to Mackenzie.

“Sasha’s digging in, literally and figuratively, but after yesterday, I’m calling quits to the sorting and packing up. Friendship goes far, but sifting through junk in search of other people’s memories gets old fast.”

“Who names their kid Toy?” Mackenzie asked. “But aside from her name, I don’t see why hiring her is such a big deal. It’s the smart and easy thing to do. As long as Dennis divvies up the spoils properly, including the cost of staging, then let the Toy girl make the place sell.”

“I’m sure that’s what’s going to happen. It wasn’t really about that. It was about staking a claim, about rights and privileges.

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About Sasha having Toy appear versus Sasha making the decision to hire her herself.”

“Interesting what things are really about versus what we say they’re about,” he murmured.

Milky winter morning filtered through the skylight. When I’d looked out the windows of the loft that faced the street below, I’d seen people huddling and bundled, and I was glad I had the car again today. “I couldn’t find anything interesting so far,” I said. “I’m pretty sure she wasn’t far enough along with online dating for there to have been some unknown crazy person who did her in. She probably was waiting for that new photo.”

Mackenzie finished his coffee and stood up. “You know this is hogwash, don’t you? Phoebe killed herself, on purpose or acci-dentally. We don’t know the reason and she didn’t choose to share it with us. Her business was failing, her partner accusing her of all kinds of evil behavior, her husband was dead, she’d done the marriage thing too many times already, and her only child was a creep. So maybe she was simply tired of it all, or she drank too much and mixed it up with pills by accident. Invent-ing a conspiracy, a crime, isn’t an appropriate way for Sasha to mourn.”

“I promised.”

He cocked his head and raised an eyebrow. “You know what Napoleon said?”

“ ‘Not tonight, Josephine’?” He winced. “ ‘Able was I ere I saw Elba’?”

“You know what Napoleon said about promises.”

“I’m fresh out of Napoleonic quotes.”

“He said, ‘If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing.’ ”

“Are you sure
he
said that? Most of our politicians could have; and why are you quoting Napoleon so early in the morning?”

“Because I want to impress you with my learning, and because I thought it was apt.”

GILLIAN ROBERTS

96

“I am impressed. Incredulous, actually, that I say the word

‘promise’ and that you’ve got that quote at the ready, right on the tip of your tongue.”

“Well,” he said with a wink, “might not have been there a week ago, but I’m reading this terrific biography and I just read that line.”

“You’re reading for fun? I thought you were up to here with schoolwork and moonlighting and your family’s woes and—”

“I am. But sometimes I need a break from the here and now.

Don’t you? You’ve been talkin’ about
A Tale of Two Cities,
which got me to thinkin’ about the Revolution, the Terror, and how little I really know about how Napoleon came to power—or much of anything, except for word games like that Able/Elba thing you said.”

“Promise everything and deliver nothing. Does that mean you won’t really check the databases for Sasha?”

“ ’Course not. I’m too tall to have a Napoleon complex. I’m checking out as much as I can about Phoebe, and Dennis, and the late lamented Mr. Ennis, too, just in case he left dangerous enemies behind. Any lawsuits, debts, prison experiences—”