She shrugged and said, “It didn’t last long.”
“Who was the guy?” I asked her.
“Oh, someone at the bank.”
“And another time almost engaged? What happened?”
“It just didn’t work out,” she told me. “I’m probably too set in my ways. Too, you know. Definite. Too definite for men to feel comfortable with.”
She was wearing the dressy black coat that made her hair look blonder, and the carriage of her head struck me as queenly. I said, “Well, I think definite women are great.” She looked over at me and smiled. “If there’s anything I’m crazy about, it’s definiteness,” I said.
She laughed. I got a little carried away; I said, “In fact, I’ve always dreamed of a having a military wife.”
“Oh?” she said. “You mean a soldier?”
“No, someone whose husband’s a soldier,” I said. “I’ve seen them in the movies. They know how to do everything that needs doing. They could probably build their own houses, if they had to, and deliver their own babies. If that’s not definite!”
“So … would this mean that you’re planning to enlist?” she asked.
“Enlist! God forbid,” I told her.
“Then how …?”
“I only meant …,” I said. “Shoot, I’m just talking out loud.” Which was an expression Mrs. Beeton used to use: Don’t mind me; I’m just talking out loud.
Dummy.
News of all the deaths spread magically among our other clients. I’ve never figured out how that happens. It’s not as if our people know each other, for the most part. But I could sense the agitation in just about every house I went to. Mrs. Rodney got the notion to update her will; so did Miss Simmons. Mr. Shank called on us even more often than he normally did, on even more trumped-up excuses, and one time insisted that I drive him to the emergency room, when as far as I could see there was not one thing the matter with him. I said, “What is it? Are you short of breath? Chest pains? Weak? Dizzy?” All he would say was, he felt “unusual.” For the sake of his unusualness I spent three and a half hours in the Sinai Hospital waiting room, watching homemaking shows on TV. “What I like to do,” this lady on one program said, “I like to place a lead crystal bowl on the credenza in my entrance hall. I fill it with tinted water and I float scented votive candles on the surface, to lend a sense of graciousness when I’m entertaining.” A roomful of sick people — bleak-faced, bleary-eyed, most in threadbare clothes — stared up at her in astonishment. Mr. Shank turned out to be suffering from stress and was sent home with a prescription for some pills.
Then Mrs. Alford started sorting her belongings. That’s always a worrisome sign. For a solid week she had three of us come in daily — me, Ray Oakley, and Martine. (“Two men for the real lifting,” was how she put it, “and a girl so as to encourage the hiring of women.”) She wanted her basement sorted, then her garage, then her attic. This was in mid-April — a busy time for us anyhow, plus it was near Easter and lots of grown children were expected home and our clients were overexcited and crabby and demanding. But Mrs. Alford couldn’t wait, couldn’t put it off. Each morning she met us on her front porch, or even halfway down the walk. “There you are! What kept you?” Martine didn’t have the truck that week; so I had to pick her up, which once or twice made us late, and Ray Oakley was late by nature. But we’re only talking minutes here. Still, Mrs. Alford would be fretting and pacing. Half the time she called Martine “Celeste,” which was the name of our other female employee, and I was “Terry.”
“It’s Barnaby, Mrs. Alford,” I said as gently as possible.
“Oh! I’m sorry! I thought your name was Terry and you played in that musical group.”
Martine snickered — picturing me, I guess, at the harpsichord or something. “No, ma’am,” I told Mrs. Alford. “Must be somebody else.”
In my early days at Rent-a-Back, I’d have feared she was losing her marbles. But I knew, by now, that it was just anxiety. I’ve had an anxious client mistake me for her firstborn son; then next day, she’d be bright as a tack. I didn’t let it faze me.
Sorting the basement was easy, because that was mostly stuff to be thrown out. Paint tins that no longer sloshed; mildewed rolls of leftover wallpaper; galvanized buckets so old they’d been patched with metal disks by some long-dead tin-kef. We crammed them all into garbage cans and hoped the city would collect them. It took us less than a day. I had time to drop Martine off and check my messages before I headed to Mrs. Glynn’s.
The garage was where it got harder. Mrs. Alford’s husband had left a fully stocked workbench there — the lovingly tended kind, with each tool hung on the backboard within its own painted silhouette. Mrs. Alford must have dreaded to face it, because when we showed up the next morning, she managed to get our names one hundred percent wrong. “Hello, Celeste. Hello, Roy. Hello, Terry.” None of us corrected her. On her way up the back steps to the garage, she asked me, “How’s the music?” and I said, “Oh, fine,” because it seemed easier.
But then she wouldn’t let go of it. She said, “Now, what is it you play, again?”
“The … tuba,” I decided.
“Tuba!” She paused at the top of the steps and looked at me. One hand pitty-patting the speckled flesh at the base of her throat. “Funny,” she said. “I had thought it was something stringed.”
“No, it’s the tuba, all right,” I said, wishing I’d never begun this.
“Fancy that! A tuba in a chamber group! I hadn’t heard of such a thing.”
“Oh,” I said. “Ah. Chamber. You hadn’t?”
“But what do I know?” she asked me. “I’m such a babe in the woods when it comes to music.”
“Well, that’s all right, Mrs. Alford.”
We walked through her backyard, where daffodils were blooming in clumps. “I haven’t been to the garage in years,” Mrs. Alford said. “I never go! I don’t like to go.” She stopped at the door, inserted a key in the lock, and turned the knob. Nothing happened. “Oh, well. I guess we can’t get in, after all,” she said.
“Allow me,” Ray Oakley told her. He set his shoulder to the door — he was a big guy, with a giant beer belly — and gave it a shove and fell into the garage.
“Why, thank you, Roy,” Mrs. Alford said, sounding not the least bit grateful.
Mr. Alford’s workbench was one of those objects that seem to go on living after their owner dies. And clearly he had been a hoarder. The rows of baby-food jars on the shelves were filled with various sizes of screws in generally poor condition — some bent, some dulled, some rusted. You just knew he’d saved them for decades, even though his wife had probably begged him to get rid of them. I said, “Tell you what, Mrs. A. You go on back to the house and we’ll see to this without you.”
“But how will you know what to do with it all?” Mrs. Alford asked. A reasonable question. She wandered the length of the workbench, reaching up to touch a coping saw here, a claw hammer there. “My nephew, Ernie: he’s very good with his hands,” she told us. “I should probably give these to him.”
“And the screws and things?”
“Well …,” she said.
“Chuck them?”
She went over to the baby-food jars. She picked one up and looked at it.
“We’ll settle that,” I told her. “You go on back to the house.”
This time she didn’t argue.
So the garage took us slightly longer, what with locating empty cartons and packing them with tools and writing Ernie across the top, and stuffing all the discards into trash bags. “How do people end up with so many things?” I asked Martine. “Look here: a bamboo rake with three prongs left to it, total.”