“At this rate,” she said, “you’ll be growing yourself a rain forest!”
“Got to do my bit for the planet,” I told her.
She placed the tip of her umbrella between her feet and rested both hands on the handle. “Have you moved back in?” she asked.
“I figured it was time.”
“We were all afraid you might be gone for good.”
“Oh, no,” I said, as if I hadn’t had the same thought myself once.
“I was asking Mary-Clyde just last week; I said, ‘Shouldn’t somebody let him know that that lawn service of his is mowing grass that’s not even there anymore?’ But Mary-Clyde said, ‘Oh, I’m sure he must be aware; he’s got those construction men around; I’m sure they would have told him.’ ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel construction men are very sensitive to lawns.’ ”
“Would you care to sit down, Mimi?” I asked. I felt bad about her shoes, which were plastered with a good half-inch of mud and damp yellow grass blades.
But she was pursuing her own line of thought. “This is just providential,” she said, “because I’ve been thinking I would like to have you over for dinner some night.”
“Oh, well, I’m not — I’m not—”
“I would like for you to meet my niece. She’s had a hard time of it since she lost her husband, and I’m thinking it would do her good to talk to you.”
“I’m not all that social,” I told her.
“Of course you’re not! Don’t you think I realize that? But this is different. Louise lost her husband last Christmas Eve morning, can you imagine? Poor thing has been just devastated.”
“Christmas Eve?” I said. “Haven’t I heard about this person?”
“Oh, well, you know, then! She’d accepted that he had a terminal illness, but it never entered her mind that he would pass on Christmas Eve.”
“Yes,” I said, “I guess she won’t celebrate Christmas ever again without remembering that.”
I was just trying to sound sympathetic, but it seemed I’d succeeded too well, because Mimi gave me a look of surprise and said, “That’s exactly right! See? You would have so much to say to her!”
“No, no!” I hurried to say. “No, believe me, it’s not as if I could offer her any … household hints or anything.”
“Household hints?”
“Besides, for the next little bit I’m going to be busy setting things straight. My golly, the place is a mess! I’ve got everything stuffed in one room: furniture, books, bric-a-brac, lamps, curtains, rugs.…”
I drove her away with words, finally. She gave me a wilted little wave and started back toward the alley, raising her umbrella again as she approached the sprinkler, although I’d gallantly shut the faucet off the instant she turned to leave. Anyhow, I had to admit the lawn was pretty well watered by now.
Having reminded myself of the mess in the bedroom, I went to tackle it after lunch. There wasn’t much point in putting things back in place yet, since they would only hamper the workmen, but I figured I could probably discard some stuff ahead of time. Dorothy’s medical books, for instance, and maybe a few of those decorative doodads that tended to accumulate for no useful purpose.
It turned out that a good many of the books had gotten damp — not just Dorothy’s but mine as well. They had dried in the months since, more or less, but their covers had buckled and they had a moldy, mousy smell. Carton after carton I would open, dig through dispiritedly, and then drag to the front hall for Gil’s men to carry out to the alley. I did try to save a few of my favorite biographies, though, and the family photo albums. I’d appropriated the albums after our mother died, and I felt guilty about the state they were in. I took them to the kitchen and spread them across the table and all available counters, where I pried the faded black pages apart in hopes that they would air out.
With the doodads, I was more callous. What did I care about my bronzed baby shoes? (A pair of tiny Nikes; how witty.) Or the little china clock that always ran slow, or the tulip-shaped vase someone had given us when we got married?
I ate supper standing up, since the table was covered with albums. I cruised around the kitchen studying sepia-colored photos as I munched on my taco. Men in high collars, women in leg-of-mutton sleeves, solemn-faced children whose clothes looked stiff as sandwich boards. Nobody was identified. I guess the album-keeper had thought they didn’t need to be identified; everybody knew who everybody was in those days, in that smaller world. But then the sepia changed to black-and-white, and then to garish Kodacolor, and none of those photos bore any labels, either — not my parents getting married, or Nandina in her christening gown, or the two of us attending a children’s birthday party. Nor did the single snapshot from my own wedding: Dorothy and I standing side by side on the front steps of my parents’ church, looking uncomfortable and uncertain. We were both of us badly dressed — I in a brown suit that left my wrist bones exposed, Dorothy in a bright-blue knit stretched too tightly across the mound of her stomach. Fifty years from now, strangers discovering this album at some parking-lot flea market would glance at us and flip the page, not even interested enough to wonder who we’d been.
Gil’s men and I barely crossed paths, since we had such different schedules. They arrived each weekday morning just as I was finishing breakfast. They brought paper cups of coffee that steamed in the early coolness, and they scuffed their soles heavily on the hall mat to let me know they were here. After we’d exchanged a few weather remarks I would leave for work, and by the time I returned they were already gone, no sign of them remaining but their little nest of belongings on a scrunched-up drop cloth in one corner of the living room. Something hung on in the atmosphere, though — something more than the scent of their cigarette smoke. I felt I’d interrupted a conversation about richer, fuller lives than mine, and when I drifted through the bare rooms it wasn’t only to reclaim my house; it was also, just a little bit, in the hope that some of that richness might have been left behind for me.
On Friday, however, two of the men were still there when I got home. One was just completing the varnishing of the sunporch floor while the other walked around collecting paint cans, brushes, and rollers in an empty cardboard carton. “We were figuring we’d be gone by now,” the one with the carton told me, “but then Gary here bought the wrong color varnish and set us back some.”
“It wasn’t my fault, bro!” Gary said. “It was Gil the one wrote the wrong number down.”
“Whatever,” the other man said. “Anyways, we’re finished,” he told me. “Hope you like how it all turned out.”
“You mean you’re finished finished?” I asked.
“Yup.”
“Nothing more needs doing?”
“Not unless you say so.”
I looked around me. The place was spotless — the living-room walls a gleaming white, the new bookshelves in the sunporch just waiting to be filled. Somebody had swept up the last traces of sawdust, and the paper cups and the jar-lid ashtrays had disappeared, which made me feel oddly forlorn.
“No,” I said, “I can’t think of a thing.”
Gary straightened and laid his brush across the top of his can. “Now, don’t go walking on this, you hear?” he said. “Not for twenty-four hours. And then, the next few days or so, keep your shoes on. You wouldn’t believe how many folks think they’re doing a floor a favor to take their shoes off and walk in their stocking feet. But that’s the worst thing.”