“Stop for lunch?” Marco asked when the table at last held only filled boxes.
Stella’s stomach had started grumbling an hour before; she was more than happy to take a break. She reached instinctively for her phone to check the time, then stopped herself and peeled the gloves off the way she’d learned in first aid in high school, avoiding contamination. “I need to wash my hands.”
“Do it at the deli on the corner. You don’t want to get near any of these sinks.”
The deli on the corner hadn’t been there when they were kids. What had been? A real estate office or something else that hadn’t registered in her teenage mind. Now it was a hipster re-creation of a deli, really, complete with order numbers from a wall dispenser. A butcher with a waxed mustache took their order.
“Did he go to school with us?” Stella whispered to Marco, watching the butcher.
He nodded. “Chris Bethel. He was in the class between us and Denny, except he had a different name back then.”
In that moment, she remembered a Chris Bethel, pre-transition, playing Viola in Twelfth Night like a person who knew what it was to be shipwrecked on a strange shore. Good for him.
While they waited, she ducked into the bathroom to scrub her hands. She smelled like the house now, and hoped nobody else noticed.
Marco had already claimed their sandwiches, in plastic baskets and waxed paper, and chosen a corner table away from the other customers. They took their first few bites without speaking. Marco hadn’t said much all morning, and Stella had managed not to give in to her usual need to fill silences, but now she couldn’t help it.
“Where do you live? And how long have you and Justin been together?”
“Outside Boston,” he said. “And fifteen years. How about you?”
“Chicago. Divorced. One son, Cooper. I travel a lot. I work sales for a coffee distributor.”
Even as she spoke, she hated that she’d said it. None of it was true. She had always done that, inventing things when she had no reason to lie, just because they sounded interesting, or because it gave her a thrill. If he had asked to see pictures of her nonexistent son Cooper, she’d have nothing to show. Not to mention she had no idea what a coffee distributor did.
Marco didn’t seem to notice, or else he knew it wasn’t true and filed it away as proof they had drifted apart for a reason. They finished their sandwiches in silence.
“Tackle the living room next?” Marco asked. “Or the rec room?”
“Rec room,” she said. It was farther from the kitchen.
Farther from the kitchen, but the basement litter pans lent a different odor and trapped it in the windowless space. She sighed and tugged the mask up.
Marco did the same. “The weird thing is I haven’t found a cat. I’m hoping maybe it was indoor-outdoor or something…”
Stella didn’t know how to respond, so she said, “Hmm,” and resolved to be extra careful when sticking her hands into anything.
The built-in bookshelves on the back wall held tubs and tubs of what looked like holiday decorations.
“What do you want to do with holiday stuff?” Stella pulled the nearest box forward on the shelf and peered inside. Halloween and Christmas, mostly, but all mixed together, so reindeer ornaments and spider lights negotiated a fragile peace.
“I’d love to say toss it, but I think we need to take everything out, in case.”
“In case?”
He tossed her a sealed package to inspect. It held two droid ornaments, like R2-D2 but different colors. “Collector’s item, mint condition. I found it a minute ago, under a big ball of tinsel and plastic reindeer. It’s like this all over the house: valuable stuff hidden with the crap. A prize in every fucking box.”
The size of the undertaking was slowly dawning on her. “How long are you here for?”
“I’ve got a good boss. She said I could work from here until I had all Denny’s stuff in order. I was thinking a week, but it might be more like a month, given everything…”
“A month! We made good progress today, though…”
“You haven’t seen upstairs. Or the garage. There’s a lot, Stella. The dining room was probably the easiest other than the kitchen, which will be one hundred percent garbage.”
“That’s if he didn’t stash more collectibles in the flour.”
Marco blanched. “Oh god. How did I not think of that?”
Part of her wanted to offer to help again, but she didn’t think she could stomach the stench for two days in a row, and she was supposed to be spending time with her parents, who already said she didn’t come home enough. She wanted to offer, but she didn’t want him to take her up on it. “I’ll come back if I can.”
He didn’t respond, since that was obviously a lie. They returned to the task at hand: the ornaments, the decorations, the toys, the games, the stacks of DVDs and VHS tapes and records and CDs and cassettes, the prizes hidden not in every box, but in enough to make the effort worthwhile. Marco was right that the dining room had been easier. He’d decided to donate all the cassettes, DVDs, and videotapes, but said the vinyl might actually be worth something. She didn’t know anything about records, so she categorized them as playable and not, removing each from its sleeve to examine for warp and scratches. It was tedious work.
It took two hours for her to find actual equipment Denny might have played any of the media on: a small television on an Ikea TV stand, a stereo and turntable on the floor, then another television behind the first.
It was an old set, built into a wooden cabinet that dwarfed the actual screen. She hadn’t seen one like this in years; it reminded her of her grandparents. She tried to remember if it had been down here when they were kids.
Something about it—the wooden cabinet, or maybe the dial—made her ask, “Do you remember The Uncle Bob Show?”
Which of course he didn’t, nobody did, she had made it up on the spot, like she often did.
Which was why it was so weird that Marco said, “Yeah! And the way he looked straight into the camera. It was like he saw me, specifically me. Scared me to death, but he said, ‘Come back next week,’ and I always did because I felt like he’d get upset otherwise.”
As he said it, Stella remembered too. The way Uncle Bob looked straight into the camera, and not in a friendly Mr. Rogers way. Uncle Bob was the anti-Mr. Rogers. A cautionary uncle, not predatory, but not kind.
“It was a local show,” she said aloud, testing for truth.
Marco nodded. “Filmed at the public broadcast station. Denny was in the audience a few times.”
Stella pictured Denny as she had known him, a hulking older teen. Marco must have realized the disconnect, because he added, “I mean when he was little. Seven or eight, maybe? The first season? That would make us five. Yeah, that makes sense, since I was really jealous, but my mom said you had to be seven to go on it.”
Stella resized the giant to a large boy. Audience didn’t feel like exactly the right word, but she couldn’t remember why.
Marco crossed the room to dig through the VHS tapes they’d discarded. “Here.”
It took him a few minutes to connect the VCR to the newer television. The screen popped and crackled as he hit play.
The show started with an oddly familiar instrumental theme song. The Uncle Bob Show appeared in block letters, then the logo faded and the screen went black. A door opened, and Stella realized it wasn’t dead-screen black but a matte black room. The studio was painted black, with no furniture except a single black wooden chair.