She expected to find a couple of flying squirrels, dead in each other’s caped arms. But when she poked her head into the crawl space and flashed her light around, she at first saw nothing but dust and boxes. Then her eyes fell on it: a pile of furry flesh with the intertwined tails of rats. They were a single creature like a wreath and flies buzzed around them and excrement bound them at the center while their bodies were arrayed like spokes. Only one of them still had a head that moved and it opened its mouth noiselessly.
“It’s a rat king,” said Dench. “They were born like that, with their tails attached, and could never get away.”
She scrambled down the ladder and shoved it back up. “That is the most revolting thing I’ve ever seen.”
“They’re supposed to be bad luck.”
“Put the hatch door back down.”
“A surprise for Ian. I did phone the pest removal place, but they charge a thousand dollars. I said, ‘Where are you taking them to, Europe?’ We may just have to burn the house down. It’s completely haunted.”
“Really.”
“We could work up plausible deniability: What kerosene can? Or, Many people are known to go shopping while cooking pot-au-feu.”
She studied Dench’s face as if — once again — she had no idea who he was. Now having found the rat king, he seemed to be the star of a horror film. He was trying to be funny all the time and she no longer liked it, as if he were auditioning for something. Soon he might start telling Milt’s jokes: I keep thinking of the hereafter: I walk into a room and say, What am I here after? She only liked Dench’s Jesus jokes, since in them Jesus was kind of an asshole, which she thought was perhaps a strong possibility in real life, and so the jokes seemed true and didn’t have to be funny and so she didn’t have to laugh. “Don’t ever show me anything like that again,” she said.
Cat came up and started to hump Dench’s leg. “Sheesh,” said Dench, as KC turned to leave. “He’s had his balls cut off and he still wants to date.”
Summer warmed all the houses though most of them did not have air conditioners, Ian’s and Milt’s included. She took Milt one evening to a nearby café and they had to dine outside, at a wobbly metal table near the parking lot, since the air within was too slicing and cold. “I think I would have liked that cold air when I was about seventeen,” he said. “Now I feel heat is good for old bones.”
They ate slowly, and although the food clung to his teeth, KC did not alert him. What would be the point? At some point, good God, just let an old guy have food in his teeth! They ate squash soup with caramel corn on top — molar-wrecking.
“You know,” he said, chewing and looking around. “People get fired from the barbershop, a restaurant closes, this is a slow town and still things change too fast for me. It’s like those big-screen TVs: all the bars have them now. I can’t watch football on those — it feels like they’re running right at me.”
KC smiled but said nothing. At one point he said loudly of his custard, “The banana flavor doesn’t taste like real banana but more like what burped banana tastes like.”
She glanced over at the next table. “I kind of know what you mean,” she said quietly.
“Of course old people are the stupidest. It’s the thing that keeps me from wanting to live in a whole facility full of them. Just listen to them talk: listen to me talk. It’s like: I’ve been walking around with the dumb thought for forty years and I’m still thinking it, so now I might as well say it over and over.” He then again sang the praises of his wife, her generosity and social commitment, and then turned his attention to KC. “You are not unlike her, in a way,” he said. Behind him the sun set in the striped hues of a rutabaga.
“I can’t imagine,” she said. Instead her mind was filled with wondering what the neighbors must think.
“Your faces are similar in a way. Especially when you smile!” He smiled at her when he said this and she returned it with a wan one of her own, her lips in a tight line.
When she walked him back to his house, the crickets had started in with their beautiful sawing. “Tinnitus!” Milt exclaimed.
But this time she didn’t laugh, and so he did what he often did when he was irritated: he walked with his most deaf ear toward her so that he could stew in peace. She noticed him weaving and knew that his balance was off. At one point he began to tilt and she quickly caught him. “An old guy like me should wear a helmet all the time,” he said. “Just get up in the morning and put it on.”
He then turned and peered through the dusk at her. “Sometimes at home I think the ringing in my ears might be the phone and I pick it up, hoping it might be you.”
She helped him into his house — he took the front stairs with greater difficulty than he used to. She turned on the lights. But he switched them off again and, grabbing her hand, sat in a chair. “Come here and sit on my lap,” he said, tugging her firmly. She fell awkwardly across his thin thighs, and when she tried to find her footing to stand again, he braced and embraced her with his arms and began to nuzzle her neck, the u and r of Decatur. His eyes were closed, and he offered his face up to her, his lips pursed but moving a little to find hers.
KC at first let him kiss her, letting their lips meet slightly — she had to be obliging, she had to work against herself and find a way — and then his rough and pointed tongue flicked quickly in and out and she jolted, flung herself away, stood, switched the lights back on, and turned to face him. “That’s it! You’ve gone off the deep end now!”
“What?” he asked. His eyes were barely open and his tongue only now stopped its animal darting. She swept her hair from her face. The room seemed to whirl. Life got you ready for dying. She had once caught a mouse in a mousetrap — she had heard the snap and when she looked it seemed merely to be a tea bag, a brown mushroomy thing with a tail, then it began flopping and flipping and she’d had to pick it up with a glove and put it in the freezer, trap and all, to die there.
It was time. “You’re completely crazy!” she said loudly. “And there’s nothing I can do at this point but call the hospice!” Words that had stayed in the wings now rushed into the crushed black box of her throat.
His face now bore the same blasted-apart look she’d seen when she first met him, except this time there was something mangled about the eyes, his mouth a gash, his body slumped in banishment. He began silently to cry. And then he spoke. “I looked him up on — what do you call it: Spacebook. His interests and his seekings.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Good luck,” he said. “Good luck to you and your young man — I wish you both the best.”
“It’s done.”
She sank against the door. She had waited all night for the hospice people to come and carry Milt off the next morning, and then she had signed some forms and promised to visit, promised to come help him with the crossword puzzle, and taking the keys of the house, she had locked it, then walked hurriedly home.
Dench was putting his cell phone away. He looked at her worriedly and she returned his gaze with a hard glare. He then stepped forward, perhaps to comfort her, but she shoved him off. “KC,” he said. And when he cocked his head as if puzzled and tried in forgiveness to step toward her again, she made a fist and struck him hard in the face.
Her life in the white-brick house was one of hostessing — and she poured into it all the milk of human kindness she possessed. There were five bedrooms and one suite turned entirely over to the families of children at the hospital whose new pediatric wing was now complete. She had painted the walls of every room either apricot or brown, and she kept the crown moldings white while she painted the ceilings a celestial blue. In summer she opened up the sleeping porches. Every morning she got up early and made breakfast, a ham-and-egg bake, which she served in a large casserole in the dining room, and although she made no other meals she made sure there were cookies in the front room and games for the siblings (who also played with the dog). She sometimes attempted music in the afternoons, sitting at the piano while people tried to smile at her. She wore high collars and long sleeves and necklaces of blue slag to hide her tattoos. She left magazines for people to read but not newspapers, which contained too much news. She maintained the book nook, stuffing it with mysteries. She watched the families as they went off in the morning, walking their way to the hospital to see their sick children. She never saw the sick children themselves — except at night, when they were ghosts in white nightgowns and would stand on the stairwell landings and recite their names and wave — as she roamed the house, thinking of them as “her children” and then not thinking of them at all, as she sleeplessly straightened up, but she would hear of their lives. “I missed the good parts,” the mothers would say, “and now there are no more good parts.” And she would give them more magazines for flipping through in the surgery lounge, in case they grew tired of watching a thriving aquarium of bright little fish.