Then Father Matt started waving his pencil.
I slid into bed next to Jean. “We’re sure the historic designation doesn’t protect the Levin house?”
She shuffled her papers. “Texas seems to consider property rights a kind of holy writ. If the owner — which, in this case, is the archdiocese now — doesn’t want the place protected, then not even a listing on the register can save it.”
I tugged the pages from her hands and pulled her close. “You’re sticky,” she said.
“Sorry. Haley was affectionate tonight. Well, not quite. A brief touch.”
“She’ll warm up eventually.”
“You think she thinks she’s betraying her dad if she’s cuddly with me?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she licked two fingers and lightly stroked my nipples. “Still numb?” she asked softly.
The gesture, and the question, almost made me cry. Before my surgery, eight months ago, Jean had been delighted at how sensitive I was. “I’ve never met a man who got so aroused there!” Post-op, this pleasure had apparently been snatched from us.
She flattened her palm across my sticky ridges. Mercy! What had I become? “Is there some kind of list I can get my name on, to preserve what’s left of me?” I said.
“You think Haley’s asleep yet?”
“Yeah, she was beat.”
“Then I’ve got your list right here,” Jean said, rolling on top of me.
What were those people thinking?
A dozen times a day Jean and I floated this question as we erased the Wards from the house. We opened up the pass-through; pulled up the carpet in the living room, exposing a gorgeous oak floor; took down a gray, accordion-style divider in the entry between the foyer and the den; removed wallpaper, repainted.
In the front garden the Wards had created a small grotto. A three-foot plaster statue of Mary had been enshrined there; the Wards had taken her with them, leaving the structure empty. On a whim one Saturday morning in mid-February, as we were shopping for trellises at a nursery, Jean bought a stone chicken head, a novelty garden item, and we set it in the grotto. We referred to it as the Chicken Virgin and joked about scrambling eggs for the Last Supper. I felt little guilty stabs, participating in these wisecracks, but I knew it was part of our ritual of claiming ownership. We meant nothing personal against the Wards, I told myself. We held no ill will toward the Catholic church.
One afternoon, right before leaving to get Haley at the Boys and Girls Club, I was uprooting part of the old garden with a shovel, tilling the soil, when the Wards drove up. Though they’d informed the post office of their new address, a few letters still came for them each week. We’d called and told them this. Now, Don handed me a stack of mailing labels and asked if we’d forward the letters to him. He frowned at my handiwork. I thought Mrs. Ward might cry. “We loved this garden,” Don said.
I wiped the sweat from my forehead. A mild breeze gave me a chill, now that I’d stopped digging. My chest was numb. “We plan to enjoy it, too.” I wasn’t feeling charitable. That morning, in a meeting at City Hall, Father Matt had threatened the neighborhood again. “This is classic Nimbyism,” he said. “If you continue to protest our development plans, I might be forced, as I’ve said, to sell the lot to commercial interests, and you’ll be dealing with fast food chains.” Then he accused me (as a lost sheep) of acting out of anti-Catholic bias. “Absolutely not!” I exploded, aware that I was overreacting — probably because of my chicken jokes. “This is about neighborhood compatibility, pure and simple. Historic preservation. It’s about who owns our community’s future, about the people who actually live here, not some out-of-town developer who just so happens to have religious affiliations.”
Father Matt had glared at me. In my mind I heard him say, Your wife’s a Jew, isn’t that right? Like that Manischewitz-soaked old Levin woman? I inhaled slowly and tried to relax. “You talk about fast food as a bad neighbor, but I don’t think it’s neighborly of you, Father, to draw up a plan, not consulting any of the locals, then threatening us when we don’t go along with it.”
“All right,” he’d said, gathering his papers into a calfskin briefcase. “I’ll see you next week, in front of the planning commission.”
That morning, letters had appeared in our local paper, arguing both sides of the proposal. Among the project’s supporters, those who accused the neighbors of narrow self-interest, rejecting the Levin house’s historic importance — “it’s just a ratty old shack”—were the Wards. Their letter pointed out that Comalia was a growing college town, in need of more student housing, and that unlike most absentee landlords, the archdiocese would be a thoughtful and conscientious caretaker.
Now the couple stood beside me, shocked by the stone fowl and my methodical disembowelment of their landscaping. I stabbed the shovel into the dirt. “How’s the new place?” I asked, with a hostile inflection, I admit.
“Oh fine, just fine,” said Mrs. Ward. She wore a blue head scarf and thick tinted glasses. The flesh on her cheeks looked as thin as the petals of the Siberian iris Jean hoped to plant here someday. “We loved this house but, you know, it was just too much for us to take care of with the kids all gone. The new condo isn’t special or anything, but it’s manageable. Better for us now.”
Don cleared his throat and glanced next door at the Levin place. The shingles sagged. “Tell me the truth,” he said, straining for a jolly tone. “Won’t it be good to have that old eyesore gone?”
His wife placed her hand on his arm.
“Don, do you realize how amazing it is that that house, built in 1880, anticipates Frank Lloyd Wright and the Craftsman movement? What a visionary Sarah Levin was?” I said.
“Father Matt is really a very good man,” Don answered.
“I’m sure he is. But in his dealings with us, he’s been less than forthright and cooperative. He doesn’t care about this town,” I said, siphoning energy from this morning’s anger. “Student enrollment is backsliding here. We don’t need more housing.”
“That’s debatable,” Don said.
“Father Matt only cares about wheeling and dealing — and hiding his business affairs behind the facade of ‘good works.’”
Mrs. Ward flinched and tried, once more, to tug her husband’s arm.
“Well now, you’re quite the revolutionary, aren’t you?” Don said. The old Navy man, I guessed, suspicious of anyone younger than he was.
“Just putting together testimony, based on the city codes. I’m simply exercising my legal rights as a citizen, Don.” I reached for the shovel. “Like, for example, I had a legal right to know that developers were going to raze the house next door and slap up a four-story behemoth less than twenty yards from my stepdaughter’s bedroom. Don’t you think I had a right to know that?”
“Listen to me, now — ,” Don began.
“Come on, Don,” Mrs. Ward urged him.
“We didn’t know — ”
“That doesn’t wash,” I said.
“Well, all right, but we weren’t sure which plan — ”
“You just wanted your money and you wanted out. Not very saintly of you, Don.”
“Your realtor should have checked, she should have — ”