It was wasted on both of them, though. Peggy merely dimpled at me, and Mr. Hogan was busy fitting his letter back in its envelope.
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.”