The three Coopers were a matched set: dark hair, overweight, shorts and T-shirts with slogans. Cheryl’s read, NOPE, STILL DON’T CARE. Bob’s read, PETA and beneath that, PEOPLE EATING TASTY ANIMALS. All three shirts were sweat-soaked; Helen had had a window air conditioner, which was sitting in the middle of the living room.
Helen’s house had only one bedroom, but it had another small room, which might have accommodated a twin bed and which Helen had used as a home office: a couple of filing cabinets, rarely used, a midcentury office chair, a tiny desk, pictures on the wall. No computer. An elaborate old steamer trunk, probably dating back to the 1930s, substituted for a coffee table. It had been full of scrapbooks and other memorabilia, which now lay on the floor with the contents of the filing cabinets. The filing cabinets and trunk were gone, apparently loaded into the U-Haul. All the pictures that had been on the wall had been stripped of their frames, which were gone, the pictures scattered on the floor.
“Here’s the deal,” Bob said. “If we don’t leave for home in an hour, it’ll take us three hours to get down the Five. We need to get all this crap outta here so we can sell the place. We were thinking we could throw you a few bucks and you could bag it and stick it in Helen’s trashcan and your trashcan over the next couple of weeks, and that way we don’t have to pay to haul it and you get a few bucks, which you look like you need anyway.”
Andi ignored the implied insult. “What’s a few bucks?”
“Fifty?”
Andi looked at the mess on the floor. “Fifty is a pizza for two and a couple of beers. For cleaning out this house?”
“Well... tell you what. You play the guitar, right? I saw all those guitars. Helen had a guitar in the closet. We’ll give you the guitar.”
“Let’s see it.”
Bob went out to the U-Haul and came back a minute later with the guitar. Solid body, weighed a ton. Two rusty strings still attached, four broken and curled around the neck, specks of rust on the bridge and the tuners.
“Electronics are probably shot,” Andi said. She squinted down the fretboard. “But... neck looks straight, anyway.” She grimaced and hefted the guitar. “Okay.”
“Great,” Don said. He waved at the paper, the photos, a round rag rug on the floor. “Just dump everything. The rug smells like a cat shit on it.”
“Cat died a couple of years ago,” Andi said. “It was seventeen.”
“Good. Hate fuckin’ cats,” Bob said.
“I gotta ask,” Cheryl said. “You didn’t help yourself to anything when you found Helen, did you?”
“What? No! Jesus!”
Cheryl shrugged. “Had to ask. You’d think she would have built up a little more of an estate, you know. She was ninety-six or something. We got her rings, the diamond was like a half carat, about the size of Don’s dick.”
“And she’d know,” Bob said.
“Fuck you,” Cheryl said.
“We got that camera,” Bob said. An old camera sat on a windowsill, an Argus C3. “That’s gotta be worth something.”
“She was ninety-nine,” Andi said, still pissed about being asked if she’d taken anything.
“Whatever,” Cheryl said. She had a cigarette in her hand, lit it with a yellow plastic Bic lighter, blew smoke. “Got the house, anyway. We looked at houses around here on Zillow; that’s a nice piece of change. One down the block like this sold for eight-fifty. Mom said the three of us could split half and she keeps the other half.”
“Hello, cherry-red Camaro,” Don said.
“Piece of shit,” said Bob. “I’m going ZR1!”
“What’s that?” Andi asked, waving smoke away from her face.
Bob did a spit take. “Corvette. Play your cards right, I’ll give you a ride, sweetpuss.”
“Yeah, well, before you spend the money, you better talk to Gray Aid,” Andi said.
“What’s that?” Don asked.
“Reverse-mortgage company. Helen had a reverse mortgage,” Andi said. “I’m not sure, but I don’t think there was much left. Maybe some.”
“What the fuck? The old twat spent the house?”
“Most of it. Not all of it yet,” Andi said. “She told me that she wouldn’t get paid anymore after she turned 102, so she planned to die before then.” She gestured at the papers on the floor. “The contract’s probably in there. I’ll go through it, see if I can turn it up.”
Cheryl slapped her forehead. “Ah, Christ! She spent it? What about us?”
“Let’s see if we can find the contract,” Bob said, and kicked a pile of the papers.
“That won’t do it,” Andi said. “It’s only going to be a few sheets of paper, probably.”
They spent fifteen minutes looking, then Cheryl said, “Let’s get the air conditioner in the U-Haul. We gotta get moving. If there’s a mortgage, the hired hand can find it.”
“We called and had the water company turn off the water,” Bob said. “The toilets don’t work. You think anybody would see me if I took a dump in the backyard?”
Andi: “Hey, I gotta live here...”
“And I gotta go,” Bob said. He walked down the hall to the bathroom, reappeared with a half roll of toilet paper, and went out the back door.
“He’s a real classy guy,” Cheryl said. She lit another cigarette. “He’d take a dump on the White House lawn if he had to go. One time at a rock concert—”
“So fuckin’ hot in here,” Don interrupted. “Shoulda left the air conditioner to last.”
“You really don’t want all the pictures and photo albums and stuff ? You don’t think your mother would?” Andi asked. “It’s Helen’s whole life in here.”
“Shit-can it,” Bob said. “We don’t care about that shit.”
“You know, Helen once told me that she posed for a painting for a really famous painter,” Andi said. “Back like... eighty years ago.”
“You see a painting in here?” Don asked.
“No, but...”
“Then fuck it,” he said.
Bob came back, threw the remnants of the roll of toilet paper on the floor, and he and Don staggered out of the house with the air conditioner. Cheryl was stacking plates and glasses into cardboard boxes and said to Andi, “Don’t just stand there; you want the fifty,” so Andi helped out. The dishes were old and never had been expensive: “I’ll unload them on the wetbacks down at the flea market,” Cheryl said. “That’s a hundred bucks right there.”
Bob and Don came back and carried boxes out to the U-Haul. Helen had had a couple of hundred books, many of them old Reader’s Digest versions of fifties novels, along with a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica, which Andi knew from her own flea market experience were virtually worthless. It amused her to see the two men sweat them out to the trailer.
And it went on for an hour like that: “Fuck her, fuck this place, fuck you.”
When the house was empty, except for the thousands of sheets of paper and folders of old memorabilia, the Coopers headed out for San Diego. Bob gave a final kick to the stuff that had been in the steamer trunk, the photo albums, sending it exploding across the floor, faces of forgotten men and women, forgotten times, black-and-white images of men in army and navy uniforms...
“Old bat,” he said.
Andi: “How about my fifty dollars?”
The Coopers had gone.
Andi took a closer look at the guitar, decided to leave the broken strings on it, placed it in a clear corner of the living room, and went to work on the paper. There was a lot of it: she went through it carefully, into the evening, and halfway through one of the stacks that had apparently been dumped from the file cabinet she found the reverse-mortgage papers, and also the original mortgage on the house, which apparently had been paid off in the sixties.