The Beginner's Goodbye (10 page)

I always worried our older clients might feel insulted by Peggy. Her honeyed voice and her overly respectful manner could have
been viewed as, let’s say, patronizing. Condescending.
I
would have found her condescending. But no one else seemed to. Mr. Hogan placed his stack of letters in her hand quite happily, and then he said to me, with a combative lift of his chin, “I was sure it would all work out!”

Somehow, I had turned into the heavy. It wasn’t the first time.

When Mr. Hogan had gone, I told Peggy, “I certainly hope you know what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

“Oh, yes,” she said blandly.

Then she offered to fetch me a cup of coffee, even though it was mid-afternoon. I never drank coffee in the afternoon, as she very well knew. She was just changing the subject.

If it hadn’t been for Peggy, Dorothy would have found her Triscuits exactly where she had left them. I thought about that, sometimes. I turned it over in my mind: could I say that, if not for Peggy, Dorothy would still be alive? But it didn’t really compute. Often, Dorothy had taken her six Triscuits to the sunporch with her. Most likely it would not have changed a thing if she had found them.

So I couldn’t really hold that against Peggy. Although I seemed to hold
something
against her, these days. She was just so, what was it, so sweetie-sweet. And Irene was doing her best to avoid me, as if grief might be contagious, and Charles couldn’t even meet my eyes. Oh, I was sick to death of my officemates.

Maybe I should take a vacation. But how would I fill my time, then? I didn’t even have any hobbies.

“I should start volunteering or something,” I told Peggy. “Sign on with some sort of charity. Except that I can’t think of anything specific I could do.”

Peggy seemed about to say something, but then she must have changed her mind.

My insurance agent’s name turned out to be Concepción. How could I have forgotten
that
? She had more dealings with Gil than with me. I gave her Gil’s cell-phone number and the two of them grew thick as thieves, conferring by e-mail and in person and faxing documents back and forth. Gil’s file folder metamorphosed into a three-inch-thick, color-tabbed notebook stuffed with estimates, receipts, diagrams, and lists. He brought it over most evenings after supper and sat on the couch to lay papers the length of the coffee table, explaining his progress in a degree of detail that would have more than satisfied
The Beginner’s Book of Kitchen Remodeling
. Already the damaged rafters had been replaced and the roof was nearly finished. He was aiming to beat the weather, he said. He would tackle the interior later, after it grew too cold to work outside. He had hired two extra carpenters and so far things were on schedule, as I would see for myself if I ever came to check it all out.

I said, “Maybe one of these days.”

He looked at me for a moment. I thought he was going to start pressing me the way other people did (my sister, to be exact), but all he said, finally, was, “Okay.”

“I mean, of course I’ll stop in at some point.”

“Sure,” he said. “Meantime, I’ll just keep on coming by here. It’s no trouble.”

Whom did he remind me of then? Oh, of course: Peggy. Peggy with Mr. Hogan, so let-me-help-you and tactful. He and Peggy would make a good couple, in fact. I had to grin at the
picture of it: Peggy in her china-shepherdess crinoline, hand in hand with grizzly-bear Gil.

“Hey,” I said. “Gil. Do you have a wife?”

He said, “Aw, no,” in the bashful, head-ducking manner of someone deflecting a compliment.

“You’ve never been married?”

“Nope.” He rubbed his beard. “I had a kind of misspent youth,” he allowed after a moment. “Dropped out of college, got in with the wrong crowd … I guess I missed the window for getting married.”

“Well, you certainly seem to have straightened yourself out.”

“Believe me,” he said, “if it wasn’t for my cousin, I’d still be falling off of some barstool. My cousin Abner; he took me into his business. Saved my life, really.”

“How about your brother?” I asked.

“What brother?”

“Isn’t it Bryan Brothers General Contracting?”

“Well, yeah. But that’s only because ‘Bryan Cousins’ wouldn’t work.”

“It wouldn’t?”

“Think about it. Everybody’d call up on the phone: ‘Could I speak to Mr. Cousins, please?’ ”

I laughed.

“No, I don’t have any brothers,” he said. “Just a bunch of sisters, always on my tail.”

“
Tell
me about it,” I said. “Sisters.”

“Say,” he said, as if seizing his chance. “Pardon me for mentioning this, but I’ve been wondering if you’d want to do something about your things.”

“My things,” I said.

“Your papers and such and your personal things that you left behind in your house. Your mail, even. Any time I walk in, there’s mail all over your front-hall floor. It’s no bother to
me
, bringing it over, but did you know you could just get online and notify the Post Office to start delivering here?”

“You’re right,” I said. “I’ll do that.”

“And then your kitchen items. Your dishes in the cupboards. Once we start to work inside, you’ll want to box all that up and move it to the bedroom or someplace.”

“I’ll see to it,” I told him.

“Your sister took the stuff from the fridge already, but there’s other things, cereals and canned goods and things.”

“My sister’s been there?”

“Just to get the stuff from the fridge.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“I guess she didn’t want to bother you with it.”

I looked down at the sheet of expenses I was holding. I said, “I realize I must seem sort of unreasonable about going back to the house. It’s just that I think I’d feel, maybe, overwhelmed or something.”

He said, “Well. I get that.”

“To tell the truth, I don’t know if I’ll
ever
want to go there.”

“Oh, wait till you see how we fix it up,” he told me. “I was thinking we might put a lighter shade of floorboard in the front hall. I mean, assuming you approved it.”

“But even so,” I said. “Even with lighter floorboards.”

He waited, patiently, with his eyes fixed on mine.

“Hey!” I said. “You wouldn’t want to buy the place, would
you? Buy it for, like, an investment? Once you get it fixed up you could make a tidy profit, I bet.”

Then I gave a sort of laugh, in case he laughed himself. But he didn’t. He said, “I don’t have the money.”

“Oh.”

“Look,” he said. “Don’t worry about your stuff. I’ll just have my guys box it up, as long as you don’t mind them messing with it.”

“Of course I don’t mind,” I told him. “I probably wouldn’t miss it if they took it all to the dump.”

“Oh, they won’t do that. Then, anything we find that we think you might need here, I’ll just bring it over in the truck the next time I come.”

“Well, thanks,” I said.

I cleared my throat.

I said, “One other thing …”

He waited.

I said, “Do you think you could bring me some clothes?”

“Clothes.”

“Just whatever’s in my closet, and the bureau across from my bed?”

“Huh,” he said.

I gestured toward what I was wearing. So far I had been making do with the clothes I’d found in my old room, but there was no denying that I was dressed a bit too youthfully. “You could just throw it all in your truck bed,” I said. “I’m not asking you to pack it up or anything.”

“Well,” he said, “we can handle that.”

“Thank you,” I said.

·  ·  ·

I knew I should have felt grateful to Nandina for making that fridge trip. (Even though I had no doubt there’d been an investigative element to it.) Oh, whenever I took the trouble to notice, I could see that I was surrounded by people who were doing their best to look out for me. It wasn’t only Nandina. Charles brought me foil-wrapped loaves of his wife’s banana bread, heavy as bricks. Irene left fliers on my desk for life-threatening adventures designed to take my mind off myself—hang-gliding and rock-climbing and coral-reef-diving. My ex-neighbors called frequently with dinner invitations, and when I made excuses they said, “O-ka-ay …,” in this reluctant drawl that implied they were letting me off the hook this time, but not forever. And Luke had turned our supper at the restaurant into an almost-weekly event, while Nate had reinstated our racquetball games at the gym.

But I wasn’t all that good at gracious acceptance. Oh, especially not with Nandina. With Nandina I was constantly on the defensive, bristling at every intrusion and batting away her most well-meant remarks. Not that she didn’t deserve some of this. The things she came up with! Once, for instance, she said, “At least you’re not going to have to make any big domestic adjustments. I mean, seeing as how Dorothy never cooked your meals for you or anything.”

(“No,” was my rejoinder to that, “we had a very equitable marriage. We treated each other like two competent adults.”)

Or another time, when I undertook to do the laundry for the two of us: “No doubt
Dorothy
found it sufficient to split the wash into just whites and colors,” she told me in a forbearing
tone, “but as a rule we divide the colors, then, into pales and darks.”

I didn’t let on that Dorothy would more likely have thrown all three categories into one washer load and let it go at that.

More and more often I could hear my sister thinking,
It’s too bad his wife had to die, but was she really worth quite this much grief? Does he have to go on and on about it?

“You assume people won’t notice if you skip a day’s shaving or wear the same clothes all week,” she said, “but they do. Betsy Hardy told me she crossed the street the other day when she saw you coming, because she thought you wouldn’t want to be caught looking the way you did. I said, ‘Well, you were sweet to be so considerate, Betsy, but frankly, I don’t believe he’d even care.’ ”

“Betsy Hardy? I didn’t see her.”

“She saw
you
, is my point,” Nandina said. “I thought you were planning to fetch some better-looking clothes from your house.”

“Oh, Gil’s going to bring those over.”

“What: you mean you’d let him go through your belongings?”

“Well, yes.”

She gave me a narrow-eyed look. “When Jim Rust recommended Gil,” she said, “did he give you any clue to his background? Did he tell you what his history is? Where he’s from? Is he a Baltimore person?”

“He’s
fine
, Nandina. Take my word for it.”

“I was just curious, is all.”

“He never should have let you know that he was in AA.”

“I don’t have anything against AA.”

“It’s better than
not
being in AA if he ought to be,” I pointed out.

“Well, of course it is. You think AA is why I asked about his background? I’m completely sympathetic to his being in AA! Why, every time he comes over I offer him fruit juice or lemonade.”

“True,” I said.

But I knew that was only because she’d caught him once with a can of Coke. Nandina had a real thing about soft drinks. She didn’t just dislike them; she viewed them with moral outrage. If there were a twelve-step program for cola drinkers, I bet she would have sent them a hefty contribution.

Well, but listen to me. I had no business complaining about her. She had taken me in without hesitation when I didn’t have anywhere else to go, and she hadn’t shown the least annoyance at my upsetting her private routine. She was my closest living relative. We shared childhood memories that no one else had been part of.

Often, when we were by ourselves, one of us would start a sentence the way our father used to. “Needles to say …” we would begin—Dad’s habitual little joke, if you could call it that. And the other one would smile.

Or when I was sorting through the porcelain bowl after Gil brought it over—the bowl from my front hall, with its layers of junk mail and take-out menus and random chits of paper. I spread it all on the kitchen table one night while Nandina was fixing supper, and there was Bryan Brothers’ business card. I said, “Gilead!”

“What?”

“That’s Gil’s name: Gilead Bryan. I’d been assuming it was Gilbert.”

Nandina stopped stirring the soup and said, “Gilead. Like the song?”

“Like the song,” I said, and it was another “Needles to say” moment, because how many other people would come up with “There Is a Balm in Gilead”? It was our mother’s favorite hymn, the one she sang when she washed the dishes, only I always thought it was a
bomb
in Gilead, and when one of our cousins made fun of me for singing it that way, Nandina cracked him over the head with a Monopoly board.

Living in this house again was not half bad, really. In a way it was kind of cozy.

At Christmastime, the company always made a big production out of one of our past titles,
The Beginner’s Book of Gifts
. We arranged to have it displayed next to cash registers all over town, with a red satin bow tied around each copy. I myself felt the bow was illogical. After all, the book was
about
gifts; it was not a gift in itself. But Irene was very fond of the bow, which she had dreamed up several years back, and Charles claimed it went over well. Generally we deferred to Charles in matters of public taste. He was the only one of us who led what I thought of as a normal life—married to the same woman since forever, with triplet teenage daughters. He liked to tell little domestic-comedy,
Brady Bunch
-style anecdotes about the daughters, and the rest of us would hang around listening like a bunch of anthropologists studying foreign customs.

Nandina and I let Christmas pass almost unobserved. We had stopped exchanging gifts years ago, and apart from the balsam
wreath that Nandina brought home from the supermarket we made no attempt to decorate. On Christmas Day we went to Aunt Selma’s for dinner, as we had done since our childhood. Even my marriage hadn’t changed that, although Dorothy and I had sworn every year that we would do something different the next time Christmas came around. The food was dismal, and the guest list had shrunk as various relatives died or moved away. This year there were just five at the table: Aunt Selma herself, Nandina and I, and Aunt Selma’s son Roger with his much younger third wife, Ann-Marie. We had not seen Roger and Ann-Marie since the previous Christmas, so there was the issue of Dorothy’s death to be waded through. Roger was one of those people in favor of pretending it hadn’t happened. He was clearly embarrassed that I had had the bad taste to show up, even. But Ann-Marie plunged right in. “I was so, so sorry,” she said, “to hear about Dorothy’s passing.”