“Worst thing in the world,” the other man agreed.
“Heat of your body …” Gary said.
“Linty old socks …”
“Bottoms of your feet mashing flat against the wood …”
They were still moaning and shaking their heads when Gil opened the front door. I knew it was Gil because he always knocked before he let himself in. “Hey there, guys,” he said, appearing in the living-room archway. He wore his after-hours outfit: khakis and a clean shirt. “Hey, Aaron.”
“Hi, Gil.”
“How we coming along?”
“Just finishing up, boss,” the man with the carton said.
Gil walked over to inspect the sunporch floor. “Looks good,” he said. “Now, give it twenty-four hours before you step on it,” he told me, “and then for a few days after that—”
“I know: not in my stocking feet,” I said.
“Worst thing in the world,” he said.
He saw the men out to the hall, then, clapping Gary on the shoulder, reminding them both they were due at Mrs. McCoy’s early Monday morning. (I felt a little twinge of sibling rivalry.) Then he returned to the living room.
“So,” I said, “I hear you’re all done here.”
My voice echoed hollowly in the empty room.
“She’s good as new,” Gil told me.
“Actually, better than new,” I said. “I appreciate the care you took, Gil.”
“Oh, any time. God forbid.”
“God forbid,” I agreed.
“Monday I’ll send a couple of men to move the furniture back. You want to be here for that?”
“No, that’s okay. It’s pretty cut-and-dried, in a house this small.”
He nodded. He pivoted to survey the living room. “And window washers,” he said. “You’ll be needing those. We’ve got a list of names, if you want.”
“I’m sure Nandina knows someone.”
“Oh,” Gil said suddenly.
He clapped a hand to the right front pocket of his khakis. A certain staginess in the gesture caught my attention. “By the way,” he said, falsely casual. He pulled a tiny blue velvet box from his pocket, clearly a ring box.
“Oho!” I said.
“Yeah, well …”
He snapped the lid open and stepped closer to show me. (I caught a strong scent of aftershave.) The ring was yellow gold, set with a little winking diamond.
“That’s really pretty, Gil,” I said. “Who’s it for?”
“Ha ha ha.”
“Does she know about this?”
“Just in theory. We’ve had the talk about getting married. Gee,” he said, “I guess I should have asked you first. I mean asked for her hand or something.”
“Take it,” I said, and I gave him a breezy wave.
“Thanks,” he said with a grin. He looked down at the ring. “I know the stone is kind of small, but the jeweler claimed it’s flawless. Not the least little flaw, he said. I had to take his word for it. Would I know a flaw if I saw one?”
“She’s going to love it,” I told him.
“I hope so.” He was still studying it.
“How did you know what size to buy?”
“I traced the band of that opal of hers when she was in the shower once.”
He reddened and glanced up at me, maybe worrying he had revealed more than he should have, and I said, “Well, great. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have for a brother-in-law.”
“Thanks, Aaron.” He closed the box and returned it to his pocket. “There’s a wedding ring that matches it, but I figured I should make sure Nandina likes this before I buy it. I already know she wants me to wear a ring.”
“Yes, that’s how people do these days,” I said. I started to raise my left hand to show him my own ring, which I still wore, but then I thought — I don’t know. It seemed that might have been tactless, somehow.
No couple buying wedding rings wants to be reminded that someday one of them will have to accept the other one’s ring from a nurse or an undertaker.
It was kind of a nuisance having to wait till Monday for the furniture moving. I started doing some of the work ahead of time — dragging the living-room rug into place and unrolling it, setting a few of the lighter-weight objects where they belonged. And on Saturday evening, when the sunporch floor was dry, I fitted what books I still owned into the new bookshelves. I carried the photo albums from the kitchen and lined them up in order, oldest first. Even the most recent wasn’t all that recent. The last picture in that album — my mother’s butterfly bush in full bloom — came immediately after our wedding photo, so I’m guessing it dated from late summer of 1996. Or ’97 at the latest, because my father died in early ’98, and he was the one who took the pictures in our family.
This business of not labeling photos reminded me of those antique cemeteries where the names have worn off the gravestones and you can’t tell who is buried there. You see a little gray tablet with a melted-looking lamb on top, and you know it must have been somebody’s child who died, but now you can’t even make out her name or the words her parents chose to say how much they missed her. It’s just so many random dents in the stone, and the parents are long gone themselves, and everything’s been forgotten.
Even my mother’s butterfly bush struck me as poignant, with its show-offy clusters of blossoms in a vibrant, electric purple. Although in fact that bush still existed; it stood right there in Nandina’s backyard, where I could see it every time I took the garbage out.
In our wedding photo Dorothy did not, of course, carry her satchel, but her dress-up purse was almost equally bulky and utilitarian — a heavy brown leather rectangle with a strap that crossed her chest in the same theft-deterrent fashion. She had said, “Would you like me to wear a white gown? I could do that. I wouldn’t mind. I could ask if our receptionist would take me to this place she knows. I thought maybe something, oh, not strapless or anything but maybe with a scoop neck, white but not shiny, not lacy, just a lustrous white, you know what I mean? And I was thinking a bouquet of all white flowers. Baby’s breath and white roses and … are orange blossoms white? I do know they’re not orange, although it sounds as if they would be. I’m not talking about a veil or anything. I’m not talking about a long train or anything like that. But something elegant and classic, to mark the occasion. You think?”
“Oh, God, no. Good Lord, no,” I said.
“Oh.”
“We’re neither one of us the type for that, thank heaven,” I said.
“No, of course not,” she said.
In the photograph her blue knit was not very becoming, but in real life it had looked fine, as far as I can recall. (Photos have a way of frumping people; have you noticed?) Anyhow, I had never paid much heed to such things. At the time I was just glad that I’d landed the woman I wanted. And I believe that she was glad to have landed me — the diametrical opposite of that needy “roommate” who had demanded too much of her.
Then why was our marriage so unhappy?
Because it was unhappy. I will say that now. Or it was difficult, at least. Out of sync. Uncoordinated. It seemed we just never quite got the hang of being a couple the way other people did. We should have taken lessons or something; that’s what I tell myself.
Once, when we had an anniversary coming up — our fifth, I believe — I invited her out to dinner. “I was thinking of the Old Bay,” I told her. “The first place I ever took you to.”
“The Old Bay,” she said. “Really. Are you forgetting that we couldn’t even see to read the menus there?”