“Oh, this is fine,” KC said. What did she care if Dench got no coffee today? He would prefer this mission of neighborly friendliness.
She sat down at Milt’s table and he placed the muffin on a plate in front of her. Then he sat down himself. “So tell me about yourself,” he said, then grinned wanly. “What brings you to this neighborhood?”
“Do I stand out that much?”
“I’m afraid you do. And not just because of those tattoos.”
She only had three. She would explain them all to him later, which was what they were for: each was a story. There was “Decatur” along her neck, the vow never to return there. There was also a “Moline” one along her collarbone — a vow never to return there. The “Swanee” along her left biceps was because she liked the chord ascension in that song, a cry of homesickness the band had deconstructed and electrified into a sneer. It was sometimes their encore. When there was one. It was also a vow never to return there. She mostly forgot about all these places until she looked into a mirror after a bath.
“My music career didn’t work out and I’m subletting here. I came back to this town because this is where I used to visit my grandmother in a nursing home when I was young. I liked the lake. And she was in a place that looked out onto it and when I went to see her I would go into a large room with large windows and she would race over in her wheelchair. She was the fastest one there with the chairs.”
He smiled at her. “I know exactly the place you mean. It’s got a hospice wing in it called Memory Station. Though no one in it can recall a thing.”
KC stuffed the muffin in her mouth and flattened its moist crenellated paper into a semicircle.
“What kind of music do you play? Is it loud and angry?” he asked with a grin.
“Sometimes,” she said, chewing. “But sometimes it was gentle and musing.” Past tense. Her band was dead and it hadn’t even taken a plane crash to do it because they hadn’t been able to afford to fly except once. “I’ll come by and play something for you sometime.”
His face brightened. “I’ll get the piano tuned,” he said.
There was that smell again, thawing with the final remnants of winter, in their walls. This was the sort of neighborhood where one would scarcely smell a rancid onion in a trash can. But now this strange meaty rot, with its overtones of Roquefort.
“What do you really think that is?’ ” KC asked Dench through the bathroom door. The change of seasons had brought new viruses and he was waterboarding himself with a neti pot.
“What?”
“The smell,” she said.
“I can’t smell anything right now — my nose is too congested.”
She peeked into the bathroom to see him leaning sideways with the plastic pot, water running down his lips and chin. “Are you disclosing national security secrets?”
“No fucking way!” he exclaimed. “The netis will never learn a thing from me.”
“You can take a book or leave it. There is a simple latch, no lock.” The honey-hued planes of the hutch, angled like a bird feeder, might indeed attract birds if it didn’t soon fill up with books and the clasp was not shut.
“Let’s see what you have in there already.” She moved in close to him. His waxy smell did not bother her.
“Oh, not much really.” An old copy of The Swiss Family Robinson and one of Infinite Jest. “I’m aiming for the kids,” he said. He had put up a sign that said, TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT BOOK-NOOK: HAVE A LOOK. As with a community bicycle, you could take one and never have to bring it back. Dench himself had a community bike from several communities ago. “Now that the bookstore has gone under, and with the hospital so close, I thought people might need something to read.”
In addition to the elegance of the wood, there was something antique and sweet in all this — far be it from her to bring up the topic of electronic downloads.
“Probably there is a German word for the feeling of fondness one gets towards one’s house the more one fixes it up for resale.”
“Hausengeltenschmerz,” said KC.
But he did not laugh. He was thinking. “My wife would have known,” he said.
His wife had been a doctor. He told KC this now as she ate another muffin in his kitchen. It had been a second marriage for his wife and so there was a bit of sunset in it for them both: he had been stuck in his bachelor ways and hadn’t married until he was sixty.
(“Bachelor ways!” Dench would seize on later. “You see what he’s doing?”)
“She was a worldly and brilliant woman, an oncologist devoted to family medicine and public health policy,” said Milt.
There was a long silence as KC watched him reminisce, his face wincing slightly as his mind sifted through the files.
“I never got on with her daughters much. But she herself, well, she was the love of my life, even if she came late to it and left early. She died two years ago. When it came it was a blessing really. I suppose. I suppose that’s what one should say.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. But she was brilliant company. My brain’s a chunk of mud next to hers.” He stared at KC. “It’s lonely in this neck of the woods.”
She picked off a moist crumb from the front of her jacket. “But you must have friends here?” she said, and then she put the crumb quickly in her mouth.
“Well, by ‘neck of the woods,’ I mean old age.”
“I sort of knew that, I guess,” she said. “Do you have friends your age?”
“There are no humans alive my age!” He grinned his sepia teeth at her.
“Come on.” Her muffin was gone and she was eyeing the others.
“I may be older than I seem. I don’t know what I seem.”
She would fall for the bait. “Thirty-five,” she said, smiling only a little.
“Ha! Well, that’s the sad thing about growing too old: there’s no one at your funeral.”
She always said thirty-five, even to children. No one minded being thirty-five, especially kindergartners and the elderly. No one at all. She herself would give a toe or two to be thirty-five again. She would give three toes.
He looked at her warmly. “I once studied acting and I’ve kept my voice from getting that quavery thing of old people.”
“You’ll have to teach me.”
“You have a lovely voice. I take note of voices. Despite my deafness and my tinnitus. Which is a nice substitute for crickets, by the way, if you miss them in the winter. Sometimes I’ve got so much whistling going on in my ears I could probably fly around the room if it weren’t for these heavy orthopedic shoes. Were you the singer in your band?”
“How did you know?” She slapped her hand down on the table as if this were a miracle.
“There’s a way you have of wafting in and hitting the sounds of the words rather than the words themselves. I mean to clean off this piano and get you to sing.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. I’m very much out of tune. Probably more than the piano. As I said, my career’s a little stalled right now: we need some luck, you know? Without luck the whole thing’s just a thought experiment!”
“We?”
“My musical partner.” She swallowed and chewed though her mouth was empty. He was a partner. He was musical. What was wrong with her? Would she keep Dench a secret from Milt?
Dench would want it. “What can I get for you?” she had asked Dench this morning, and he had stared at her balefully from the bed.