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Red said, “When my father built this house, it had only the one bathroom off the upstairs hall.”
“Well, that was back in the—”
“Then he added the downstairs powder room after we moved in, and we thought we were something special.”
“Yes, you certainly need a—”
“The master bathroom itself he didn’t put in till my sister and I were in high school. What he’d say if he heard about his-and-hers, I can’t even begin to imagine.”
“It’s customary, though, in the finer homes these days. As I’m sure you must have learned in your business.”
“He himself grew up with just a privy,” Red said. He turned to the others. “I bet you didn’t know that about your grandfather, did you?”
They did not. They knew next to nothing about their grandfather, in fact.
“Well, a privy,” Helen said with a laugh. “That would be a hard sell!”
“So we’ll forget about the his-and-hers,” Red told her. “Now, how long do you expect it will take to find a buyer?”
“Oh, once you’ve installed the air conditioning, and maybe upgraded your kitchen counters—”
“Kitchen counters!”
But then he clamped his lips tightly, as if reminding himself not to be difficult.
“It does seem the market’s started looking up,” Helen said. “There was a time there when places were languishing for a year or more, but lately I’ve been averaging, oh, just four to six months, with our more desirable properties.”
“In four to six months it will go to seed,” Red told her. “You know it’s not good for a house to sit empty. It will molder; it will get all forlorn; it will break my heart.”
Amanda said, “Oh, Dad, we would never let that happen. We’ll come and, I don’t know, throw family picnics here or something.”
Red just gazed at her miserably, his eyes so empty of light that he seemed almost sightless.
“Be honest,” Jea
“You mean on account of her lapses,” Amanda said.
“They would only have gotten worse; we can be pretty sure of that. Whatever they were. And Dad would be trying to look after her, and so would Nora; and De
“But maybe it was just, oh, a circulation problem or something, and the doctors could have fixed it.”
“That’s not very likely,” Jea
They were up in Red’s bedroom on a rainy Sunday afternoon, packing cartons while the others watched a baseball game downstairs. Both of them wore scruffy clothes, and Amanda’s chin was smudged with newspaper ink.
All week they had been packing, any free moment they could find. Separate islands of belongings had begun rising here and there in the house as people put in their requests: Abby’s crafts supplies and her sewing machine in the upstairs hall for Nora, the good china packed in a barrel in the dining room for Amanda. (Red would keep the everyday china, which they were leaving in the cupboard until just before moving day.) Color-coded stickers dotted the furniture — a few pieces for Red’s apartment, a few more for Stem and Jea
Jea
“It’s true,” Amanda said. “Her advance directive basically asked us to put her out on an ice floe if she developed so much as a hangnail.” She was collecting framed photos from the top of Abby’s bureau. “I’m going to pack these up for Dad,” she told Jea
“Will he have space for them?”
“Oh, maybe not.”
She studied the oldest photo — a snapshot of the four of them laughing on the beach, Amanda barely a teenager and the rest of them still children. “We look like we were having such a good time,” she said.
“We were having a good time.”
“Well, yes. But things could get awfully fraught, now and then.”
“At the funeral,” Jea
“Marilee Hodges was a ni
“Goodness, what brought that on?”
“It was hell riding in that truck bed. I doubt it was even legal. And I believe children should have their own rooms. And Mom could be so insensitive, so clueless and obtuse. Like that time she sent De
“I don’t remember that.”
“Supposedly one of those inkblot thingies showed he’d been disappointed in his early childhood by a woman. ‘What woman could that have been?’ Mom kept asking us. ‘He didn’t know any women!’ ”
“I don’t remember a thing about it.”
“It was pretty clear she loved him best,” Amanda said, “even though he drove her crazy.”
“You’re just saying that because you’ve got only one child,” Jea
“—differently, is all,” Amanda finished for her. “Yes, yes, I know.” Then she held up a photo of Stem at age four or five. “Would Nora like this, do you think?”
Jea
“And what do I do with this one of De
“Does he have a box?”
“He says he doesn’t want anything.”
“Start a box for him anyhow. I bet wherever he lives is nothing but bare walls.”
“I asked him yesterday,” Amanda said, “whether he had let his landlady know that he was coming back, and all he said was, ‘We’re working on that.’ ”
“ ‘Working on that’! What is that supposed to mean?”
“He’s so darn secretive,” Amanda said. “He pokes and pries into our lives, but then he gets all paranoid when we ask about his.”
“I think he’s mellowing, though,” Jea
“Good,” Amanda said promptly. “Let’s give him these.” And she reached for a sheet of newspaper and started wrapping a photo.
“De
“Oh, well, Dad,” Amanda said. “It’s like you can’t say anything right to him.” She placed the wrapped photo in the carton Jea
“The Brills,” Jea
“The original-owner Brills. The ones who had the house built in the first place.”
“Yes, I know who they are, Amanda, but wouldn’t they be dead by now?”
“Not the sons, I don’t imagine. The sons were only in their teens when Dad was a little boy. So I said, ‘What if all these years the sons have been pining over this house and wishing they still lived here?’ You remember what one of them said when their mother said they were moving. ‘Aw, Ma?’ he said. Well, you would think I’d suggested lighting a match to the place. ‘What are you thinking?’ Dad asked me. ‘Where did you get such a damn-fool notion as that? Those two spoiled Brill boys are not ever getting their hands on this house. Put it right out of your mind,’ he said. I said, ‘Well, sorry. Gee. My mistake entirely.’ ”