“Well, I guess I must not have traveled with them long enough, then,” Daphne told her.
“How can you say that? With Ian doddering about the house calling you his ‘Daffy-dill’ and spending every Saturday at Good Works — Good Works! Good God. I bet half those people don’t even want a bunch of holy-molies showing up to rake their leaves in front of all their neighbors. And marching off to services come rain or shine; never mind if his niece is here visiting and will have to go to the airport on her own—”
“He gets a lot out of those services,” Daphne said. “And Good Works too; it kind of … links you. He doesn’t have much else, Agatha.”
“Exactly,” Agatha told her. “Isn’t that my point? If not for Second Chance he’d have much more, believe me. That’s what religion does to you. It narrows you and confines you. When I think of how religion ruined our childhood! All those things we couldn’t do, the Sugar Rule and the Caffeine Rule. And that pathetic Bible camp, with poor pitiful Sister Audrey who finally ran off with a soldier if I’m not mistaken. And Brother Simon always telling us how God had saved him for something special when his apartment building burned down, never explaining what God had against those seven others He didn’t save. And the way we had to say grace in every crummy fast-food joint with everybody gawking—”
“It was a silent grace,” Daphne said. “It was the least little possible grace! He always tried to be private about it. And religion never ruined my childhood; it made me feel cared for. Or Thomas’s either. Thomas still attends church himself. Isn’t that so, Thomas? He belongs to a church in New York.”
Thomas said, “It’s getting on toward eleven, you two. Maybe we should be setting out for the airport.”
“Not to change the subject or anything,” Daphne told him.
He pretended he hadn’t heard. They all stood up, and he said, “Then driving back, you and Grandpa can drop me at the train station. I’ll just get my things together. You want me to put my sheets in the hamper, Daph?”
“Are you serious?” Daphne asked. “Those sheets are good for another month yet.”
Agatha rolled her eyes and said, “Charming.”
“You have no right to talk if you’re not here to do the laundry,” Daphne told her.
“Which reminds me,” Agatha said. She stopped short in the dining room, where their grandfather was collecting his cards. “About the linen closet and such—”
“Don’t give it a thought,” Daphne said. “Just go off scot-free to the other side of the continent.”
“No, but I was wondering. Isn’t there some kind of cleaning service that could sort this place out for us? Not just clean it but organize it, and I could pay.”
“There’s the Clutter Counselor,” Daphne said.
Stuart laughed. Agatha said, “The what?”
“Rita the Clutter Counselor. She lives with this guy I know, Nick Bascomb. Did you ever meet Nick? And she makes her living sorting other people’s households and putting them in order.”
“Hire her,” Agatha said.
“I don’t know how much she charges, though.”
“Hire her anyway. I’ll pay whatever it costs.”
“What?” their grandfather spoke up suddenly. “You’d let an outsider go through our closets?”
“It’s either that or marry Ian off quick to that Clara person,” Agatha told him.
“I’ll call Rita this evening,” Daphne said.
Rita diCarlo was close to six feet tall — a rangy, sauntering woman in her late twenties with long black hair so frizzy that the braid hanging down her back seemed not so much plaited as clotted. She’d been living with Nick Bascomb for a couple of years now, but Daphne hadn’t really got to know her till just last summer when a bunch of them went together to a rock concert at RFK Stadium. They’d had bleacher tickets that didn’t allow them on the field, where all the action was; but Rita, bold as brass, strode down to the field anyway. When an usher tried to stop her she held up her ticket stub and strode on. The usher considered a while and then spun around and called, “Hey! That wasn’t a field ticket!” By then, though, she was lost in the crowd. Daphne hadn’t seen much of her since, but she always remembered that incident — the dash and swagger of it. She thought Rita was entirely capable of yanking their house into shape.
On the phone Rita said she could fit the Bedloes into that coming week, so she dropped by Monday after work to “case the joint,” as she put it. Wearing a red-and-black lumber jacket, black jeans, and heavy leather riding boots, she ambled about throwing open cupboards and peering into drawers. She surveyed the basement impassively. She seemed unfazed by the smell in the linen closet. She did not once ask, as Daphne had feared, “What in hell has hit here?” She poked her head into Doug’s bedroom and, finding him seated empty-handed in his rocker, merely said, “Hmm,” and withdrew. This was tactful of her, of course, but Doug’s room had urgent need of her services; so Daphne said, “Maybe after Grandpa’s gone downstairs …”
“I got the general idea,” Rita told her.
“That’s where Grandma’s closet is and so—”
“Sure. Clothes and stuff. Hatboxes.”
“Right.”
“I got it.”
She climbed the wooden steps to the attic, which had a stuffy, cloistered feeling now that it was no longer in regular use. She bent to look into the storeroom under the eaves. When she plucked one of Bee’s letters from a cardboard carton, Daphne felt a pang. “I guess these … personal things you’ll leave to us,” she said, but Rita said, “Not if you want this done right.” Then she added, “Don’t worry, I don’t read your mail. Or only enough to classify it. Stuff like this, for instance: too recent to have historical interest, no postage stamps of value, and the return address is a woman’s so we know it’s not your grandparents’ love letters. I’d say ditch them.”
“Ditch them?”
Rita turned to look at her. Her face was tanned and square-jawed; her heavy black eyebrows were slightly raised.
“But suppose they told us what young women used to think about,” Daphne said. “Politics, or feminism, or things like that.”
Rita shook a piece of ivory stationery out of the envelope. Without bothering to unfold it, she read off the phrases that showed themselves: “… tea at Mrs.… wore my new flowered … self belt with covered buckle …”
“Well,” Daphne murmured.
“Ditch them,” Rita told her.
They went back downstairs. Daphne felt like a little fairy person following Rita’s clopping boots. “What I do,” Rita said, “is sort everything into three piles: Keep, Discard, and Query. I make it a practice to query as little as possible. Everything we keep I organize, and what’s discarded I haul away; I’ve got my own truck and two guys to help tote. I charge by the hour, but I generally know ahead of time how long a job will run me. This place, for instance — well, I’ll need to sit down and figure it out, but offhand I’d say if I start tomorrow morning, I could be done late Thursday.”
“Thursday! That’s just three days!”
“Or four at the most. It’s a fairly straightforward house, compared to some I’ve seen.”
They were back in the kitchen now. She opened one of the cabinets and gazed meditatively at a collection of empty peanut butter jars.