Henry himself, p.10
Henry, Himself, page 10
Kenny and Lisa and Sam and Ella were on the machine. “This is your Mother’s Day song,” they sang. “It isn’t very long.”
“Very nice,” Emily said, erasing it.
Margaret didn’t call till late that afternoon.
“Why, thank you, dear,” Emily said, delighted, as if surprised. “Happy Mother’s Day to you too.”
She set aside her crossword, turned the music down and wandered into the dining room, as if for privacy, where she stood looking out the French doors. Behind the Times’s science section, Henry listened for any hint of discord. He couldn’t hear what she was saying, only her tone, and gauged it for the smallest trace of impatience. In the car he’d reassured her that Margaret didn’t hate her, as if it were an impossibility. Now he could see them screaming at each other across the table, Margaret flinging down her napkin and stalking for the stairs with Emily right behind. He and Kenny learned not to wait for her to return. They ate in silence, the cuckoo clock ticking in the breakfast nook.
Emily laughed, a false alarm, prompting a grumble from Rufus, sacked out on the hearth. She wasn’t saying much, just nodding along. After a while she came back into the living room and made a yammering puppet of her hand. In her more manic phases, Margaret had a tendency to ramble.
“All right, I have to go get dinner started. No rest for the wicked. I hope you have a lovely time. Your father sends his love. Thank you. I love you too, dear.”
She hung up and replaced the phone in the holder.
“How is she?”
“She sounded good.”
“Good.”
“The big excitement there is that Sarah’s going to be the lead in Bye Bye Birdie. Apparently she has a major crush on Birdie. That’s a quote—‘major.’”
As she relayed the details, he thought he’d worried for no reason. She and Margaret battled the way he and Arlene had as children—endlessly, innocently, being natural rivals. He understood that bond, and yet as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t stop replaying what she’d said in the car about her mother—the locked door and the vacuum—and wondered why she’d picked today, of all days, to unburden herself. Having always been loved, he liked to think he’d never hated anyone, especially the people closest to him. They were different, the two of them. He couldn’t fault her honesty. Any other time he would have welcomed her confession, but he was unprepared for it, and while it paled in comparison to his own secrets, at heart he was shocked, and couldn’t shake the feeling that it had become, already, unfairly, something he would never forget.
Root-X
The sewers on Grafton Street, like so many in Pittsburgh, were old, made of glazed terra-cotta pipe prone to cracking. Roots snaked their way in, their blind capillary hairs curling, forming balls that clogged the lines. Plugged solid, they gradually filled with a mix of sewage and wastewater that backed up and overflowed the drain in the basement, leaving a stinking pool Henry couldn’t squeegee away until the plumber had come.
It was the price of owning an old house, along with sagging floors and drafty windows and coal dust in the attic. Rather than dig up the front yard and drop fifteen thousand they didn’t have to replace the line with a single impregnable length of PVC, every spring and fall Henry flushed three cupfuls of bright blue copper sulfate down the powder room toilet, closing the door so Rufus couldn’t get in. The crystals were deadly, according to the nonrecyclable container, and though Henry was no chemist, he accepted their toxicity as a testament to their effectiveness. The first day of spring he’d duly carried out the task marked on his calendar, so he was surprised, the morning before they were supposed to go up to Chautauqua to open the cottage, as he was retrieving their rusty old cooler, to discover a narrow puddle of water on the basement floor.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
Halfway between the dehumidifier and the drain, it might have been from either. The edges had dried, leaving a white outline, so it had been there a while. He tried to remain hopeful, though the center of the puddle was gray. The hose of the dehumidifier could have split. The water could have melted from the cake of ice stuck to its coils.
He knelt and sniffed the air, getting a dank whiff of sewage. If there was any doubt, the drain cover was dotted with bits of dried toilet tissue.
“Dammit.”
He’d done everything he could, he protested. Since the last time, he’d tie-wrapped one of Emily’s old stockings onto the discharge hose coming from the washer to act as a lint trap. He Dranoed the sinks religiously, and never put grease down the disposal. He’d been as careful as he could be, and it hadn’t been enough. Just to have the plumber come out cost a hundred dollars.
As he knelt there, beaten, feeling sorry for himself, the pipes above him sang.
“Turn it off!” he yelled at the ceiling, more in panic than anger. He knew Emily couldn’t hear him.
Without a sound, dark water welled up through the holes of the cover, quickly filling the shallow bowl, breached the lip and overflowed, a tongue streaming for the puddle. He shoved the cooler out of the way and ran for the stairs, calling her name.
She wasn’t in the kitchen.
“What’s wrong?” She came rushing down from the second floor as if he’d cut off a finger. Rufus bounded past her, happy, almost running him over.
“Don’t use the water.”
“I’m not.”
“You were.”
“Is it flooding again? I thought we fixed that.”
How many times had they gone over this? “We did not fix it. It’s not something that can be fixed.”
“Don’t yell at me. I didn’t do anything.”
“I’m not yelling at you. I’m trying to keep it from getting worse than it already is.”
“How bad is it?”
“It’s worse now.”
“I’m sorry, I had to flush.”
“It’s not your fault,” he said. “I don’t know what happened. I thought we were all right.”
Now doubt crept in. Had he forgotten to add the crystals? He could picture it, could hear them plopping into the water, but the memory might have been from the fall or last spring, the seasons overlapping.
“Sometime today I need to do laundry,” Emily said. “I still have all the sheets and towels.”
“We’ll see how long it takes for them to get here.”
The magnet with the plumber’s number was on the basement fridge for this very reason. The woman who took his information seemed uninterested, and he wondered if it was an answering service. She couldn’t tell him when someone would be there. They’d call to let him know they were on the way.
“We’ll be here,” Henry said.
The puddle was wider, covering the hose of the dehumidifier. He couldn’t begin to clean it until the clog was gone. He lugged the cooler upstairs, spritzed the inside with Windex and left it on the back porch to air. Normally he’d take satisfaction in crossing off a chore, except his list had grown that much longer. With every passing minute he was falling further behind.
In his office he flipped the calendar to March. There, on the twenty-first, next to ROOT-X, was a check mark. It was no consolation.
All afternoon they waited in suspense. The lunch dishes sat in the sink. They could use the toilet, they just couldn’t flush. The basement stank. The waste of time discouraged him. When the guy finally called at half past four, it was too late to salvage the day.
Henry let him in through the hatch and stood by like a supervisor, training a flashlight on the drain as the man opened the cleanout and paid the flexible auger through a racketing machine that sent it spinning into the line. As the auger burrowed, the water in the drain rose and dipped as if it were breathing. Every so often the plumber stopped to attach another fifteen-foot segment. With all five, he could reach the street. By now Henry had seen the process so many times he could do it himself. He bent over the hole, focused on a blob of light that changed shape with the rising level. Beneath the surface, sediment boiled, and suddenly the water dropped a foot and stayed there.
“You got it,” Henry called over the motor.
The plumber reeled in the auger segment by segment. The end bristled with hairy roots.
“I’ve been using Root-X,” Henry said.
“It’s this old pipe. Once they get in, there’s not much you can do.”
The bill was a hundred and thirty. Henry gave the man a check and shook his hand for saving them again.
Emily had held off starting dinner, so they ate late. She put in a load of sheets as he was rinsing the dishes, the water pressure cutting out on him. Once he got the dishwasher going, he went downstairs and squeegeed the puddle into the drain, then mopped it with a bucket of bleach and hot water. He set up a pair of fans to create a cross breeze, shooting air freshener through them to cover the stench. Every twenty minutes he checked on their progress, and by the end of the eleven o’clock news the floor was dry. He could still detect a faint note of sewage, but that would fade. He unplugged the fans and put everything back in its place. Surveying his work, hands on hips, he thought he’d earned a hard-fought draw—expensive and temporary, but a victory still, holding off the forces of chaos until the next time.
Add It to the List
Memorial Day they opened the cottage. Historically, in a nod to democracy, the entire Maxwell clan gathered for the long weekend to tackle the list of chores passed down through the generations. Chautauqua, being a retreat from the grind of city life, was supposed to be rustic, and over the years, unlike their neighbors, whose places had grown apace with the stock market, they’d made few improvements. Henry took a special pleasure in knowing Justin and Sarah were washing the same windows he and Arlene had as children, even if the job they did was less than perfect. More than the cottage itself, this sense of belonging and continuity was their inheritance, and if they didn’t appreciate it now, they would in time.
With the children living so far away, and the grandchildren busy with activities, every year it grew harder for all of them to get together. Lisa had to help her parents move into a new condo and couldn’t come. “No great loss,” Emily said, except with Sarah’s rehearsal schedule, now there was some doubt about Margaret being able to make it as well. Emily worried that without help Henry would try to do everything himself, and lobbied Kenny to talk to her. Henry, who thought Emily was overreacting, wasn’t privy to their discussions and resented being the subject of them, as if they were plotting against him. He might have slowed down some, but he wasn’t an invalid.
After much back-and-forth, everyone was coming except Lisa and Sarah and Jeff.
“That should be more than enough,” Henry said.
“I feel bad for Ella,” Emily said. “She’ll have no one to hang out with.”
“I’m sure you two will find something to do.”
“I’ll put her in charge of the boys.”
“They’ll love that.”
“I’m not surprised about Jeff.”
“I’m not either.”
Friday morning they left right after breakfast so they’d arrive around lunchtime. Arlene, who liked her sleep, was driving herself and would be up later. The kids both had to work and wouldn’t pull in till after midnight, blearily unloading in the dark. The forecast called for scattered showers—a crapshoot, as his father would say, typical Chautauqua weather. Traffic would be bad either way—79 was constantly under construction. As they ate up the miles, dense forest and rolling farmland scrolling by on both sides, hawks perching on fenceposts, Henry kept expecting to see sprinkles on the windshield, a line of stopped cars ahead. There was nothing. He didn’t remark on their luck, afraid he’d jinx them.
Heavy, with a mammoth engine, the Olds was at its best on the interstate. They rode in insulated quiet, Emily knitting beside him, counting to herself, leaning over every so often to peek at the speedometer while he watched the turnarounds for cops. In back, nestled against the cooler, Rufus slept. He was prone to a volcanic, prostrating carsickness and for that reason hadn’t eaten. Henry didn’t want to wake him, but since finishing his second coffee had been suppressing the urge to pee, and in a concession to age pulled into a rest area, taking the closest possible spot.
As he levered himself out and stood, his lower back spasmed, an electric twinge, as if he’d been jabbed with a cattle prod. He grabbed for it, gritting his teeth.
“Jesus please us.”
“Are you okay?” Emily asked.
“I’m fine. Just creaky.”
He thought he was stiff from sitting and from mopping the floor last night, the torsion doing a job on his spine. He’d be fine once he got moving, and he was, crossing the walk to the windowless building and back with no problem, but he’d never felt that kind of pain before. Now he worried it could happen at any time. He said nothing to Emily, knowing she’d seize on it.
At Erie they caught I-90, which was a mess, a double line of trucks crawling along, before jumping onto the new, unnecessary, completely empty 86. An old freight line shadowed the road, its raised right-of-way cutting through pastures, riveted iron bridges spanning creeks. He remembered when he and Arlene used to take the train to Jamestown, their grandmother Maxwell waiting for them at the station. From a safety island out front they boarded the trolley that ran to the Institute, the conductor making a special stop at Prendergast Point to let them off. The fall after the war, he’d come up by himself to do some fishing and was shocked to find the trolley gone, the tracks already overgrown, as if he’d been away for twenty years instead of two. One starry night, drunk, he walked them back from a bar in Ashville, expecting any second the rails to sing, a headlight looming out of the dark, a bell clanging a warning. All gone, like Sloan and Embree and his dreams of being a saint. He wasn’t a boy anymore. He wasn’t anything. Then he’d found Emily.
They got off at Sherman, cutting north on the county road, patched blacktop breaking up at the edges, beer cans in the ditches. For ages it had been dairy country, the hillsides dotted with cows the children used to count for one of their games. Now the barns had fallen, the stony fields reclaimed by nature, full of jagger bushes and spindly weed trees. Only the old farmhouses remained, pillared Greek revivals hidden in windbreaks.
“Imagine the winters,” he said, not for the first time.
“I’m almost at the end of this row,” Emily said, holding him off. “Okay, what?”
“I said imagine winter up here.”
“No thank you. Was that it?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry. I was supposed to have this done for Justin’s birthday.”
“I understand.” Because he did. Once they got there, she’d be too busy to knit. He knew the impatience of suddenly being rushed after the slack weeks and months. Since retiring, he was so accustomed to his time being his own that even the smallest obligation—a ball game or a doctor’s appointment on the calendar—felt like an imposition.
They passed the ramshackle bait shop and its abandoned school bus that let them know they were close, dipped across a shady creek and crested the last hill and the lake came into view, whitecapped, a sailboat heeling out in the middle.
“Looks breezy,” he said.
Emily nodded, concentrating on her stitches.
In the corner of a cornfield, a billboard for Webb’s Resort presided over the intersection with 394. He slowed for the stop sign. In back, Rufus sat up.
“He knows,” Henry said.
“He ought to by now.”
He took the back way, past the fish hatchery, craning to see if the ponds were full. After dinner they’d have to bring Rufus over and let him chase the geese.
The speed limit on Manor Drive, set by the homeowners’ association to slow down the locals towing their boats to the launch, was a once-comic fourteen and a half miles an hour. He let up on the gas and the Olds floated. Rufus was standing, antsy, and Henry lowered the window for him. They were early. The Loudermilks’ turnaround was empty, but Len Wiseman’s white Caddy was parked by their garage. In the meadow across from the Nevilles’ compound, a fleet of golf carts waited for the horde to descend.
The first thing he noticed about the cottage was the grass. The mowers must have just come. He was pleased, as if he’d cut it himself.
“It hasn’t burned down,” he said.
“That’s good.”
Closer, he could see there was moss on the roof and weeds growing out of the gutters. For years he’d been meaning to get rid of their old TV antenna, a winged aluminum monstrosity banded to the chimney, and added it to the list. The window frames, the screen porch, the whole place could use a fresh coat of paint, but that would have to wait till next year, if he could find the money. He was just glad it had survived the snows.
“Why do they do that?” Emily asked, aggrieved, because the mouth of the mailbox was stuffed with junk mail.
He pulled in, bumping over the grass, their tires snapping dead branches shed by the chestnut, stopping beside the kitchen door so it would be easier to unload. “Lafayette, we are here.”
“Thank you for not driving like a maniac.”
His back was fine, his knees no stiffer than normal.
Released, Rufus squatted in the middle of the yard and peed and peed.
“You know there’s a whole field over there.”
“Stop,” Emily said. “We’re not doing that again.”
“We should have brought his rock.”
As he was digging for his keys, he noticed a dead sparrow on the ground beneath the kitchen window, its wings spread, its neck bent. A common accident, mistaking the glass for air. He shielded Emily from it, letting her in first. “Here we go,” he said, holding the door for Rufus, who came galloping after her. Henry separated a blue plastic bag from the organizer on the back of the door and wrapped his hand as if he were picking up Rufus’s poop. The bird was surprisingly light, dried flat as a shingle. He tossed it in the trash and slipped back out, grabbed the sopping mail from the mailbox and threw that on top of it, as if hiding the body, then started bringing the bags in.
“Very nice,” Emily said, erasing it.
Margaret didn’t call till late that afternoon.
“Why, thank you, dear,” Emily said, delighted, as if surprised. “Happy Mother’s Day to you too.”
She set aside her crossword, turned the music down and wandered into the dining room, as if for privacy, where she stood looking out the French doors. Behind the Times’s science section, Henry listened for any hint of discord. He couldn’t hear what she was saying, only her tone, and gauged it for the smallest trace of impatience. In the car he’d reassured her that Margaret didn’t hate her, as if it were an impossibility. Now he could see them screaming at each other across the table, Margaret flinging down her napkin and stalking for the stairs with Emily right behind. He and Kenny learned not to wait for her to return. They ate in silence, the cuckoo clock ticking in the breakfast nook.
Emily laughed, a false alarm, prompting a grumble from Rufus, sacked out on the hearth. She wasn’t saying much, just nodding along. After a while she came back into the living room and made a yammering puppet of her hand. In her more manic phases, Margaret had a tendency to ramble.
“All right, I have to go get dinner started. No rest for the wicked. I hope you have a lovely time. Your father sends his love. Thank you. I love you too, dear.”
She hung up and replaced the phone in the holder.
“How is she?”
“She sounded good.”
“Good.”
“The big excitement there is that Sarah’s going to be the lead in Bye Bye Birdie. Apparently she has a major crush on Birdie. That’s a quote—‘major.’”
As she relayed the details, he thought he’d worried for no reason. She and Margaret battled the way he and Arlene had as children—endlessly, innocently, being natural rivals. He understood that bond, and yet as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t stop replaying what she’d said in the car about her mother—the locked door and the vacuum—and wondered why she’d picked today, of all days, to unburden herself. Having always been loved, he liked to think he’d never hated anyone, especially the people closest to him. They were different, the two of them. He couldn’t fault her honesty. Any other time he would have welcomed her confession, but he was unprepared for it, and while it paled in comparison to his own secrets, at heart he was shocked, and couldn’t shake the feeling that it had become, already, unfairly, something he would never forget.
Root-X
The sewers on Grafton Street, like so many in Pittsburgh, were old, made of glazed terra-cotta pipe prone to cracking. Roots snaked their way in, their blind capillary hairs curling, forming balls that clogged the lines. Plugged solid, they gradually filled with a mix of sewage and wastewater that backed up and overflowed the drain in the basement, leaving a stinking pool Henry couldn’t squeegee away until the plumber had come.
It was the price of owning an old house, along with sagging floors and drafty windows and coal dust in the attic. Rather than dig up the front yard and drop fifteen thousand they didn’t have to replace the line with a single impregnable length of PVC, every spring and fall Henry flushed three cupfuls of bright blue copper sulfate down the powder room toilet, closing the door so Rufus couldn’t get in. The crystals were deadly, according to the nonrecyclable container, and though Henry was no chemist, he accepted their toxicity as a testament to their effectiveness. The first day of spring he’d duly carried out the task marked on his calendar, so he was surprised, the morning before they were supposed to go up to Chautauqua to open the cottage, as he was retrieving their rusty old cooler, to discover a narrow puddle of water on the basement floor.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
Halfway between the dehumidifier and the drain, it might have been from either. The edges had dried, leaving a white outline, so it had been there a while. He tried to remain hopeful, though the center of the puddle was gray. The hose of the dehumidifier could have split. The water could have melted from the cake of ice stuck to its coils.
He knelt and sniffed the air, getting a dank whiff of sewage. If there was any doubt, the drain cover was dotted with bits of dried toilet tissue.
“Dammit.”
He’d done everything he could, he protested. Since the last time, he’d tie-wrapped one of Emily’s old stockings onto the discharge hose coming from the washer to act as a lint trap. He Dranoed the sinks religiously, and never put grease down the disposal. He’d been as careful as he could be, and it hadn’t been enough. Just to have the plumber come out cost a hundred dollars.
As he knelt there, beaten, feeling sorry for himself, the pipes above him sang.
“Turn it off!” he yelled at the ceiling, more in panic than anger. He knew Emily couldn’t hear him.
Without a sound, dark water welled up through the holes of the cover, quickly filling the shallow bowl, breached the lip and overflowed, a tongue streaming for the puddle. He shoved the cooler out of the way and ran for the stairs, calling her name.
She wasn’t in the kitchen.
“What’s wrong?” She came rushing down from the second floor as if he’d cut off a finger. Rufus bounded past her, happy, almost running him over.
“Don’t use the water.”
“I’m not.”
“You were.”
“Is it flooding again? I thought we fixed that.”
How many times had they gone over this? “We did not fix it. It’s not something that can be fixed.”
“Don’t yell at me. I didn’t do anything.”
“I’m not yelling at you. I’m trying to keep it from getting worse than it already is.”
“How bad is it?”
“It’s worse now.”
“I’m sorry, I had to flush.”
“It’s not your fault,” he said. “I don’t know what happened. I thought we were all right.”
Now doubt crept in. Had he forgotten to add the crystals? He could picture it, could hear them plopping into the water, but the memory might have been from the fall or last spring, the seasons overlapping.
“Sometime today I need to do laundry,” Emily said. “I still have all the sheets and towels.”
“We’ll see how long it takes for them to get here.”
The magnet with the plumber’s number was on the basement fridge for this very reason. The woman who took his information seemed uninterested, and he wondered if it was an answering service. She couldn’t tell him when someone would be there. They’d call to let him know they were on the way.
“We’ll be here,” Henry said.
The puddle was wider, covering the hose of the dehumidifier. He couldn’t begin to clean it until the clog was gone. He lugged the cooler upstairs, spritzed the inside with Windex and left it on the back porch to air. Normally he’d take satisfaction in crossing off a chore, except his list had grown that much longer. With every passing minute he was falling further behind.
In his office he flipped the calendar to March. There, on the twenty-first, next to ROOT-X, was a check mark. It was no consolation.
All afternoon they waited in suspense. The lunch dishes sat in the sink. They could use the toilet, they just couldn’t flush. The basement stank. The waste of time discouraged him. When the guy finally called at half past four, it was too late to salvage the day.
Henry let him in through the hatch and stood by like a supervisor, training a flashlight on the drain as the man opened the cleanout and paid the flexible auger through a racketing machine that sent it spinning into the line. As the auger burrowed, the water in the drain rose and dipped as if it were breathing. Every so often the plumber stopped to attach another fifteen-foot segment. With all five, he could reach the street. By now Henry had seen the process so many times he could do it himself. He bent over the hole, focused on a blob of light that changed shape with the rising level. Beneath the surface, sediment boiled, and suddenly the water dropped a foot and stayed there.
“You got it,” Henry called over the motor.
The plumber reeled in the auger segment by segment. The end bristled with hairy roots.
“I’ve been using Root-X,” Henry said.
“It’s this old pipe. Once they get in, there’s not much you can do.”
The bill was a hundred and thirty. Henry gave the man a check and shook his hand for saving them again.
Emily had held off starting dinner, so they ate late. She put in a load of sheets as he was rinsing the dishes, the water pressure cutting out on him. Once he got the dishwasher going, he went downstairs and squeegeed the puddle into the drain, then mopped it with a bucket of bleach and hot water. He set up a pair of fans to create a cross breeze, shooting air freshener through them to cover the stench. Every twenty minutes he checked on their progress, and by the end of the eleven o’clock news the floor was dry. He could still detect a faint note of sewage, but that would fade. He unplugged the fans and put everything back in its place. Surveying his work, hands on hips, he thought he’d earned a hard-fought draw—expensive and temporary, but a victory still, holding off the forces of chaos until the next time.
Add It to the List
Memorial Day they opened the cottage. Historically, in a nod to democracy, the entire Maxwell clan gathered for the long weekend to tackle the list of chores passed down through the generations. Chautauqua, being a retreat from the grind of city life, was supposed to be rustic, and over the years, unlike their neighbors, whose places had grown apace with the stock market, they’d made few improvements. Henry took a special pleasure in knowing Justin and Sarah were washing the same windows he and Arlene had as children, even if the job they did was less than perfect. More than the cottage itself, this sense of belonging and continuity was their inheritance, and if they didn’t appreciate it now, they would in time.
With the children living so far away, and the grandchildren busy with activities, every year it grew harder for all of them to get together. Lisa had to help her parents move into a new condo and couldn’t come. “No great loss,” Emily said, except with Sarah’s rehearsal schedule, now there was some doubt about Margaret being able to make it as well. Emily worried that without help Henry would try to do everything himself, and lobbied Kenny to talk to her. Henry, who thought Emily was overreacting, wasn’t privy to their discussions and resented being the subject of them, as if they were plotting against him. He might have slowed down some, but he wasn’t an invalid.
After much back-and-forth, everyone was coming except Lisa and Sarah and Jeff.
“That should be more than enough,” Henry said.
“I feel bad for Ella,” Emily said. “She’ll have no one to hang out with.”
“I’m sure you two will find something to do.”
“I’ll put her in charge of the boys.”
“They’ll love that.”
“I’m not surprised about Jeff.”
“I’m not either.”
Friday morning they left right after breakfast so they’d arrive around lunchtime. Arlene, who liked her sleep, was driving herself and would be up later. The kids both had to work and wouldn’t pull in till after midnight, blearily unloading in the dark. The forecast called for scattered showers—a crapshoot, as his father would say, typical Chautauqua weather. Traffic would be bad either way—79 was constantly under construction. As they ate up the miles, dense forest and rolling farmland scrolling by on both sides, hawks perching on fenceposts, Henry kept expecting to see sprinkles on the windshield, a line of stopped cars ahead. There was nothing. He didn’t remark on their luck, afraid he’d jinx them.
Heavy, with a mammoth engine, the Olds was at its best on the interstate. They rode in insulated quiet, Emily knitting beside him, counting to herself, leaning over every so often to peek at the speedometer while he watched the turnarounds for cops. In back, nestled against the cooler, Rufus slept. He was prone to a volcanic, prostrating carsickness and for that reason hadn’t eaten. Henry didn’t want to wake him, but since finishing his second coffee had been suppressing the urge to pee, and in a concession to age pulled into a rest area, taking the closest possible spot.
As he levered himself out and stood, his lower back spasmed, an electric twinge, as if he’d been jabbed with a cattle prod. He grabbed for it, gritting his teeth.
“Jesus please us.”
“Are you okay?” Emily asked.
“I’m fine. Just creaky.”
He thought he was stiff from sitting and from mopping the floor last night, the torsion doing a job on his spine. He’d be fine once he got moving, and he was, crossing the walk to the windowless building and back with no problem, but he’d never felt that kind of pain before. Now he worried it could happen at any time. He said nothing to Emily, knowing she’d seize on it.
At Erie they caught I-90, which was a mess, a double line of trucks crawling along, before jumping onto the new, unnecessary, completely empty 86. An old freight line shadowed the road, its raised right-of-way cutting through pastures, riveted iron bridges spanning creeks. He remembered when he and Arlene used to take the train to Jamestown, their grandmother Maxwell waiting for them at the station. From a safety island out front they boarded the trolley that ran to the Institute, the conductor making a special stop at Prendergast Point to let them off. The fall after the war, he’d come up by himself to do some fishing and was shocked to find the trolley gone, the tracks already overgrown, as if he’d been away for twenty years instead of two. One starry night, drunk, he walked them back from a bar in Ashville, expecting any second the rails to sing, a headlight looming out of the dark, a bell clanging a warning. All gone, like Sloan and Embree and his dreams of being a saint. He wasn’t a boy anymore. He wasn’t anything. Then he’d found Emily.
They got off at Sherman, cutting north on the county road, patched blacktop breaking up at the edges, beer cans in the ditches. For ages it had been dairy country, the hillsides dotted with cows the children used to count for one of their games. Now the barns had fallen, the stony fields reclaimed by nature, full of jagger bushes and spindly weed trees. Only the old farmhouses remained, pillared Greek revivals hidden in windbreaks.
“Imagine the winters,” he said, not for the first time.
“I’m almost at the end of this row,” Emily said, holding him off. “Okay, what?”
“I said imagine winter up here.”
“No thank you. Was that it?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry. I was supposed to have this done for Justin’s birthday.”
“I understand.” Because he did. Once they got there, she’d be too busy to knit. He knew the impatience of suddenly being rushed after the slack weeks and months. Since retiring, he was so accustomed to his time being his own that even the smallest obligation—a ball game or a doctor’s appointment on the calendar—felt like an imposition.
They passed the ramshackle bait shop and its abandoned school bus that let them know they were close, dipped across a shady creek and crested the last hill and the lake came into view, whitecapped, a sailboat heeling out in the middle.
“Looks breezy,” he said.
Emily nodded, concentrating on her stitches.
In the corner of a cornfield, a billboard for Webb’s Resort presided over the intersection with 394. He slowed for the stop sign. In back, Rufus sat up.
“He knows,” Henry said.
“He ought to by now.”
He took the back way, past the fish hatchery, craning to see if the ponds were full. After dinner they’d have to bring Rufus over and let him chase the geese.
The speed limit on Manor Drive, set by the homeowners’ association to slow down the locals towing their boats to the launch, was a once-comic fourteen and a half miles an hour. He let up on the gas and the Olds floated. Rufus was standing, antsy, and Henry lowered the window for him. They were early. The Loudermilks’ turnaround was empty, but Len Wiseman’s white Caddy was parked by their garage. In the meadow across from the Nevilles’ compound, a fleet of golf carts waited for the horde to descend.
The first thing he noticed about the cottage was the grass. The mowers must have just come. He was pleased, as if he’d cut it himself.
“It hasn’t burned down,” he said.
“That’s good.”
Closer, he could see there was moss on the roof and weeds growing out of the gutters. For years he’d been meaning to get rid of their old TV antenna, a winged aluminum monstrosity banded to the chimney, and added it to the list. The window frames, the screen porch, the whole place could use a fresh coat of paint, but that would have to wait till next year, if he could find the money. He was just glad it had survived the snows.
“Why do they do that?” Emily asked, aggrieved, because the mouth of the mailbox was stuffed with junk mail.
He pulled in, bumping over the grass, their tires snapping dead branches shed by the chestnut, stopping beside the kitchen door so it would be easier to unload. “Lafayette, we are here.”
“Thank you for not driving like a maniac.”
His back was fine, his knees no stiffer than normal.
Released, Rufus squatted in the middle of the yard and peed and peed.
“You know there’s a whole field over there.”
“Stop,” Emily said. “We’re not doing that again.”
“We should have brought his rock.”
As he was digging for his keys, he noticed a dead sparrow on the ground beneath the kitchen window, its wings spread, its neck bent. A common accident, mistaking the glass for air. He shielded Emily from it, letting her in first. “Here we go,” he said, holding the door for Rufus, who came galloping after her. Henry separated a blue plastic bag from the organizer on the back of the door and wrapped his hand as if he were picking up Rufus’s poop. The bird was surprisingly light, dried flat as a shingle. He tossed it in the trash and slipped back out, grabbed the sopping mail from the mailbox and threw that on top of it, as if hiding the body, then started bringing the bags in.
