The Fixer Upper (27 page)

Ella Kate narrowed her eyes, steeling herself for a fight.

“Has the cancer spread anywhere else?” I asked.

“They tell me it ain’t got any worse,” Ella Kate said.

“I’m glad,” I told her. And surprisingly, I was glad.

“You ain’t gonna fuss at me? Try to make me change my mind?”

“Nope. It wouldn’t do any good.”

“Durn tootin’,” Ella Kate said. Her thin lips crinkled up a little on one side, in what might have been a smile.

W
hen I climbed into the front seat of the Mercedes, Tee handed me a paper sack. I pulled out a still-warm cheese Danish and another cup of coffee. He started the engine and pulled out of the hospital parking lot.

“Now you’re just showing off,” I said, biting into the Danish.

“How’s Ella Kate?”

“Meaner than ever,” I told him. “She’s pissed off because she has to stay for at least another day, which she’s sure is just a diabolical plan by the hospital to steal all her money. She’s also unhappy that her doctor didn’t go to med school at the University of Georgia, and that she’s a ‘foreigner.’”

“That Ella Kate,” Tee said. “She’s just a big ol’ ray of sunshine, ain’t she?”

“I asked her about the cancer,” I said, sipping the coffee.

He winced. “How’d that go?”

“About like you’d expect. She told me it was none of the doctor’s ‘bidness’ and none of mine neither. She had a mastectomy years ago, but she said the cancer recurred on the other side last year. Her doctor in Atlanta wanted to remove the cancerous breast, but Ella Kate told him no deal. She says she’s too old to go through surgery again, and if it’s her time, so be it.”

“So…what’s she doing about the cancer?”

“Praying.”

“And what are you going to do?”

“Me?” I broke off a tiny piece of the Danish and turned around and offered it to Shorty, who eagerly lapped it up. “What can I do? She’s a
grown woman. I can’t force her to accept treatment she doesn’t want. Maybe she’ll change her mind, but I doubt it.”

“I don’t disagree,” he said. “I guess what I meant to say is, have you thought about your future? At Birdsong? In Guthrie? Does this change things?”

“Why should it? Ella Kate will be discharged tomorrow, probably. I’ll have to fix her up a place to sleep downstairs, I guess, until her hip gets better. But the work on the house is going better than I expected. Bobby is supposed to come today to start tiling in the kitchen. He says he’ll teach me how to tile too. Big fun, huh?”

Tee steered the Mercedes out of Macon traffic and back onto the state highway to Guthrie. The only signs that an ice storm had blown through the night before were some stray tree limbs and roofing shingles scattered on the roadside. The morning sunlight had already dried up most of the rain. My hand throbbed, reminding me of everything that had happened.

“Ella Kate is not going to get better without treatment, Dempsey,” he said after a while. “My mother died of breast cancer, you know. I don’t know the type of cancer Ella Kate has, but I can tell you, things are probably going to get really awful by the end. And here’s the thing—you’re going to be the one to take care of her. You’re it, you know? The only family she’s got.”

“Yeah. Next of kin. Bummer.”

“I told Dad about the cancer,” he said. “You know, he’s Ella Kate’s lawyer too. The old man’s a stickler for client confidentiality, but he did tell me that she can afford whatever health care she needs. Doctors, hospitals, round-the-clock nursing care. Whatever. She’s not hurting for money.”

“Yippee,” I said dully. “Maybe we’ll both check into the Ritz-Carlton and order room-service chemo. Except Ella Kate would probably refuse chemo.”

“Something to think about,” Tee said, glancing over at me.

I didn’t tell him that I’d been thinking about little else, ever since Dr. Bhiwandi told me about Ella Kate’s cancer.

When we got back to Birdsong, Bobby’s pickup truck was parked in
the driveway. The bright blue tarp tacked to the roof fluttered in the breeze, and Bobby and Trey were struggling to lift an enormous white object out of the truck bed.

Tee pulled the Mercedes to the curb and hopped out. “Let me give you a hand,” he called to the men. Even with Tee holding up one end of the thing, the men staggered under the weight of it.

I got out of the car and offered to help, but they bravely declined my assistance. “We got it,” Bobby grunted, his knees wobbling crazily. Eventually, they wrestled the thing into the open kitchen door, and onto a set of waiting sawhorses.

“Look here, Dempsey,” Bobby said proudly, mopping his brow. “Look what I brung you from the dump.”

The thing was a kitchen sink of
Titanic
proportions. Porcelain over cast iron, it had double basins, and ridged drainboards jutting out from each side, along with a rounded humpback backsplash. The faucet was nickel and the handles were cross-hatched, with porcelain buttons in the center,
C
for cold and
H
for hot. The basins were filthy and matted with dried leaves and unspeakable detritus. The sink was absolutely gorgeous.

“Oh, Bobby,” I said, running my hand over the cool porcelain. “From the dump? For real?”

“For true,” he said, grinning with pleasure. “What do you think?”

“It’s spectacular,” I said. “Better than a double-glass-door Traulsen.”

“Better than an eight-burner double-oven stainless-steel Viking with the griddle in the middle?” he teased.

“Better than a Fisher and Paykel warming drawer or a Miele dishwasher. Better than a brushed-nickel Waterworks bridge faucet, better than custom Ann Sacks tile, better than…” I struggled to come up with another superlative dredged from my extensive knowledge of shelter magazines.

“Huh?” Trey said.

“Got me,” Tee told him. “I think they’re talking about kitchen stuff.”

I went over to the old sink, the old, stinking, battered, stained, chipped pink porcelain sink, and picked up a bottle of Windex from the counter beside it. I tore off about a yard of paper towels, and set to
work on the
Titanic
sink, spritzing and rubbing while the men looked on, bemused.

“This here,” I said, patting the new sink, “this is the shit.”

Trey nodded his understanding. “Gotcha.”

“Was it really at the dump?” I asked Bobby. “Who would get rid of something like this?”

“You’d be surprised,” he said. “I get lots of good stuff out there.”

“He calls it the Mall of Guthrie,” Trey volunteered. “Half the stuff in our house came from there. Mama hollers at him about it, but he just keeps on bringing stuff home.”

“Did you mind getting a new bumper for your car when I drug it home from the mall?” Bobby asked.

“No, sir,” Trey admitted.

“See, there’s lotsa folks round here don’t like nothin’ old,” Bobby explained. “They want shiny and new. Even if ain’t nothin’ beneath the shine except cardboard and sawdust.”

“I saw a sink just like this in the December issue of
Elle Decor,
” I told him. “I think it was in Meg Ryan’s house on Nantucket.”

Tee looked down at the sink with obvious distaste. “It’s kinda gunky, isn’t it?”

“You wait,” I told him. “It will be awesome. It will be the centerpiece of this kitchen.”

“If you say so.”

Bobby preened for just a moment. “You right about that, Dempsey. We get this thing cleaned up, this sink gonna be just the thing.”

“Speaking of cleaning up,” Tee said, glancing down at his watch. “I better get home and get to work on that downed oak tree in our backyard before Dad decides to try to cut it up by himself.”

“Oh yeah,” Bobby said. “I rode by your house this morning, Tee. That’s some kinda mess you got over there. And what about Ella Kate? Did you-all track her down last night?”

“Eventually,” I said. “It’s a long story. The short version is that she took the Catfish to go pick up Shorty at the animal hospital in Macon, got caught in the middle of the ice storm, and pulled off the road to wait it out. A tree fell on the car, trapping her and Shorty inside.”

“Sweet Jesus!” Bobby said. “I didn’t have no idea.”

“She’s all right,” I said hastily. “She’s got some bumps and bruises, and a hairline fracture of her hip, so they kept her in the hospital last night.”

“And the Catfish?” Bobby asked, looking from me to Tee.

“The Catfish might be totaled,” Tee said. “But the good news is, they’ll probably let Ella Kate come home from the hospital tomorrow.”

I walked Tee outside to the Mercedes. “Thanks,” I told him. “For everything.”

“You’re welcome,” he said.

W
e spent the rest of the morning prying the old Formica countertops off and the sink out of its cabinet, and hauling them out to Bobby’s truck for a return trip to the dump. Then, Bobby and Trey nailed down a new plywood top, and on top of that, a layer of green backer board that he explained would be the platform for the new tile.

After two days of emotional highs and lows, it was a relief to lose myself in working on the house again.

Right before noon, my cell phone rang. My caller was Dr. Bhiwandi.

“Good news, Ms. Killebrew,” she said, in her crisp British-influenced accent. “Your cousin is feeling much, much better. If she continues like this, we will send her home to you in the morning. Do you have any questions for me?”

I had more questions than she could answer in a lifetime. I started with the most obvious. “Will she be able to walk?”

“Yessss,” Dr. Bhiwandi said. “She needs to stay ambulatory so that we don’t get any nasty complications like pneumonia or blood clots. However, we may send her home with a walker. And, of course, no stairs or anything taxing. We’ll also want to schedule her for some physical therapy when she gets stronger.”

No stairs. Walker. Physical therapy. Oh, Ella Kate was going to love this set of doctor’s orders. I could hear her complaints already.

“Dr. Bhiwandi,” I said. “About Ella Kate’s cancer. I want you to know I wasn’t aware that she had cancer until you let me in on her secret.”

“Oh. Oh dear.”

I laughed. “My cousin is uh, pretty cantankerous, as I guess you’ve noticed.”

“She’s very high spirited,” Dr. Bhiwandi agreed.

“That’s one way of putting it. Anyway, I did ask her about the cancer this morning. And she’s absolutely dead set against any further surgery.”

Dr. Bhiwandi sighed. “I see. Well, we hear that sometimes in patients your cousin’s age. There is a quality of life issue. Your cousin’s mental state is quite good for her age. When I saw her a little while ago she was alert and focused on going home. It seems she knows what she wants. And probably, you will have to respect her wishes in that regard.”

“I don’t have much choice in the matter,” I said ruefully. “Is there anything…I should know? About her prognosis? Or a timeline, or anything else like that?”

“Without any more information about the nature of her cancer, or her bloodwork, I really can’t tell you very much,” Dr. Bhiwandi said. “I’m afraid you’ll need to talk to her surgeon and her oncologist.”

“And I’m afraid she won’t share that with me,” I said. “She’s pretty secretive about a lot of stuff. So…you can’t tell me what to do? If she’s in pain, or something like that?”

“I’ll speak to her about following up with the oncologist. If the cancer advances and she starts experiencing pain or other symptoms, you should urge her to let you take her to a doctor. We have very good methods of pain management that will allow her to stay comfortable at home, without being admitted to a hospital, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Dr. Bhiwandi gave me more instructions about Ella Kate’s prescriptions and the details of bringing her home from the hospital.

I hung up and looked over at Bobby, who’d been trying different arrangements of tile on the new plywood countertops. He had a tool he called a nipper, and was cutting the corners of the tiles to fit around the new junkyard sink.

“Ella Kate’s coming home from the hospital tomorrow,” I told him.

He looked up. “That’s good, right?”

“I guess. The thing is, she won’t be able to climb stairs.”

He nodded. “We gonna fix her up a room downstairs?”

“Can you give me a hand? I thought maybe we’d clear out Norbert’s
study, and move her bed down here. It’s close to the bathroom, so I think it would work.”

“Oh yeah,” he said, putting down the nippers. “Me and Trey can handle it. That ain’t no problem.”

I opened the door to Norbert’s study and looked around. The yellow covers of the
National Geographic
s gave the room a weird golden glow. I looked at Bobby. “You know anybody who’d like to have fifty years of
National Geographic
?”

“Not me,” Bobby said.

“Me either,” I said. “Do they have a recycling center at that dump of yours?”

“Sure do. That’s where I get some of the wife’s favorite magazines,” he said.

We brought in a wheelbarrow from the toolshed and loaded it up with shelf after shelf of old magazines. It was nasty work. Clouds of dust and paper particles rose up every time we touched the magazines, and what seemed like millions of tiny cigar-shaped bugs came swarming out of the pages.

I barely managed to stifle a scream at the sight of that first bug when it scuttled across my wrist.

“What the hell?” I asked, madly stomping bugs as fast as they emerged from the rotting paper. “This is what I hate about living in Georgia. Bugs! Roaches and spiders, and now these—”

“Silverfish,” Bobby said, flicking a couple to the floor. “They’re nasty, but they won’t hurt you none.”

Without another word, he went out to the kitchen and brought me a pair of work gloves that extended nearly to my elbows. I tied a bandanna over my hair and plugged the iPod into the docking station, and gritted my teeth and got back to work. As I cleared out magazines and stomped bugs with my dead uncle’s old work boots to the tune of “Billie Jean” I wondered what my old roomies in Washington would say if they could see me now. Dempsey Killebrew, former fashionista, was a bona fide construction worker. All I lacked were some tattoos and a pickup truck to call my own.

When the shelves were finally cleared and the magazines on their
way to the dump, Bobby carried Norbert’s old desk and chair down to the basement. I swept and dusted and mopped and scrubbed the room with my new favorite cleaning solution—Fabuloso, which smelled like the chemical version of an apple orchard, and which I’d found in the Mexican foods section at the Bi-Lo.

Bobby got a ladder and swiped down several decades’ worth of cobwebs along the ceilings and window casings. He even washed the windows inside and out. By the time we were done cleaning, weak afternoon sunlight sparkled through the old wavy glass windows.

“What now?” Bobby asked.

“Furniture,” I said. “Let’s bring Ella Kate’s bed, dresser, nightstand, and easy chair downstairs.”

“We might oughtta wait till Trey gets back from the dump,” he said. “You don’t wanna be carrying no dresser down them stairs.”

“I can do it,” I assured him. “Anyway, I feel kind of funny about letting anybody else besides you see Ella Kate’s room.”

Bobby raised an eyebrow.

“She’s a total nut about her privacy,” I said. “She always keeps her door locked. Day in and day out. And I wouldn’t have gone in there, except yesterday, when the weather was getting so scary looking, I needed to find out what the storm was doing. And she has the only television in the house.”

He nodded his understanding, but it didn’t make me feel any less guilty.

“You’ll have to see it to believe it,” I told him finally when we were upstairs.

Bobby stood wordlessly in the open doorway.

“Oh my,” he said, taking it all in. “Oh my my.”

“It’s all the furniture from the rest of the house,” I said.

He inched his way through the narrow path to Ella Kate’s bed, and stopped when he reached the faded chintz-draped dressing table with the silver-topped mirror, combs, brushes, and cold cream jars.

“This here was Miss Olivia’s,” he said quietly, nodding at the silver-framed photograph on Ella Kate’s nightstand.

“It’s all my grandmother’s furniture and stuff, isn’t it?”

“And then some,” Bobby agreed.

“What’s it doing here?” I asked.

He stood with his hands on his hips, looking around the room. “Well,” he started. “I know she was tore up pretty bad when Mr. Norbert finally died. He was sick a good long time, and you know, she wouldn’t let nobody else in the house to take care of him. Had to do it all her ownself. Maybe she started moving this stuff up here after she found out that Mr. Norbert left the house to your daddy. She mighta thought you-all would come down here and cart all this stuff outta here.”

“We wouldn’t have,” I said quietly.

“Ella Kate didn’t know that. She only knew it was Mitch Killebrew got the house, and you know she and the Killebrews had bad blood between ’em.”

I sat down on Ella Kate’s bed. The bedsprings creaked and the mattress sagged badly.

“Bobby, will you tell me now?”

He put his hands in the pockets of his overalls and looked around the room.

“The wife’s aunt told me there was talk around town. Back when your granddaddy got the divorce and up and took the baby—that’s your daddy—with him. And Miss Olivia was left back here in Guthrie.”

“What kind of talk?”

He squirmed uncomfortably. “Which one of these dressers you want to take downstairs for Ella Kate?”

“This one,” I said, nodding at a heavy walnut chest of drawers standing near the door. I’d seen Ella Kate’s simple white cotton underpants, shirts, and slacks folded in it the day before.

“Bobby,” I said patiently. “I know you don’t like to repeat gossip. And I respect you for that. But this is my family we’re talking about here. If you have an idea about why Ella Kate acts the way she does, it would help me to understand her better.”

“Yeahhh,” he said reluctantly.

“So. Will you tell me what you know?”

He started pulling the drawers out of the dresser, and stacking them outside in the hallway.

“Bobby?”

He sighed. “Reckon you got a right to hear it. You know that when your grandmother, Miss Olivia, up and got married to Mr. Killebrew, it was a big surprise around Guthrie.”

“I’d heard that.”

“He was from away, and Miss Olivia, she’d gone off to college in Atlanta, was gonna be a schoolteacher or something like that. And Ella Kate, she was your grandmama’s best friend since they were little-bitty kids. And cousin too, although I don’t rightly know exactly how the family connection goes on that.”

“Nobody seems to know,” I agreed. “Except maybe Ella Kate.”

“What we heard was that they got married up in Atlanta, right before Christmas, that first year Miss Olivia went off to college. And then, of course, they moved on down here, to Birdsong, right afterward. And Ella Kate, she was Miss Olivia’s roommate at Agnes Scott, and she was kinda shy and a little backward, you know? Her people had all these children, and they didn’t have no kind of money. Everybody always figured one of the Dempseys give the Timmonses the money to send Ella Kate off to college.”

“Interesting,” I said.

“So, with Miss Olivia dropping out of college, I guess Ella Kate didn’t have no reason to stay up there at Agnes Scott College. So she come on home to Guthrie too.”

“And she went to work at the bedspread mill.”

“Sure,” Bobby said. “Got a good job in the office. She wadn’t no lint head, working out on the floor like everybody else.”

“So Olivia had a shotgun wedding?”

He squirmed and jingled some change in his pockets. “Back then, it wadn’t like it is now, with the young folks talkin’ ’bout hookin’ up, and having babies and never gettin’ married and all like that. It caused some talk—them two getting married all the way up in Atlanta instead of back here at Guthrie First United Methodist, where the Dempseys paid for the stained-glass windows, and the church steeple, and even the pipe organ, over the years.”

“So, maybe they just sort of told all the home folks a little white lie
about when they actually got married,” I mused. “Maybe they moved the date up by a few weeks.”

“They did say your daddy was born premature,” Bobby admitted. “And he was a sickly baby. The wife’s aunt said Miss Olivia had a real hard delivery. She weren’t right for a long time after your daddy was born.”

“Why’d they get divorced?” I asked.

“Nobody knows,” Bobby said. “Miss Olivia’s daddy was an important man in this town. Owned the mill, went to church with the doctors and lawyers. And the judge. All anybody knew was, one day, they were married, living here at Birdsong, and the next, they were divorced. And your granddaddy left town and took little Mitch with him.”

“How on earth did he get a judge to award him custody instead of Olivia?” I wondered. “Especially if Olivia’s father was friends with the judge. You would think they would have run him out of town on a rail.”

“Seems like your granddaddy had some dirt on your grandmama,” Bobby said. “And it wadn’t nice. Not nice at all.” He looked meaningfully at Ella Kate’s bedside table, with its shrine to her old friend.

“No!” I said. “Really? My grandmother and Ella Kate?”

“Don’t know if it was true. Thing is, he mighta tol’ the judge it was true. And that woulda been a big old scandal. Guthrie, it’s a small town. It ain’t like up there in Atlanta where you got your gay pride parades and all like that. Maybe Miss Olivia’s daddy made a deal with Mr. Killebrew to keep it quiet. Nobody knows.”

“What does your wife’s aunt think?” I asked.

Bobby made a face. “She didn’t like your granddaddy Killebrew no way! She called him a lying, two-faced Yankee. What she says is—that man got Miss Olivia pregnant, and then, when he seen how rich her family was, he decided to get him some of that money for his own self. He just made up any old kind of lie he could get away with. And then he took the money, and that baby, and got as far away from Guthrie, Georgia, as he could get.”

“Mitch can only remember coming back here a few times after the divorce,” I told Bobby. “And then, of course, Olivia died when he was still pretty young.”

“Yeah, that was awful sad,” Bobby said. “Auntie says Miss Olivia pined for that boy. She never was right again after he took that baby away from her.”

“What did she die of?” I asked.

“Uh, heart disease, or something like that,” Bobby said.

“But she was so young!” I protested. “Barely in her twenties.”

“Your uncle Norbert, he had a bad heart,” Bobby pointed out.

“And he lived well into his nineties,” I countered. “What else aren’t you telling me? Come on, Bobby, I know there’s something else.”