“It doesn’t look so straightforward to me,” Daphne told her.
“Well, naturally. That’s because you live here. You feel guilty getting rid of things. This one old lady I had, she could never throw out a gift. A drawing her son made in nursery school — and that son was sixty years old! A seashell her girlfriend brought from Miami in nineteen twenty—‘I just feel I’d be throwing the person out,’ she told me. So what I did was, I didn’t let her know. Well, of course she knew in a way. What did she suppose was in all those garbage bags? But she never asked, and I never said, and everyone was happy.”
She slammed the cabinet door shut. “I’ve seen houses so full you couldn’t walk through them. I’ve seen closets totally lost — I mean crammed to the gills and closed off, with new stuff piled in front of them so you didn’t know they existed.”
“Your own apartment must be neat as a pin,” Daphne said.
“Not really,” Rita told her. “That Nick saves everything. I would end up with a pack rat!” She laughed. She hooked a kitchen chair with the toe of her boot, pulled it out from the table, and sat down. “Now,” she said, drawing a pencil and a note pad from her breast pocket. The pencil was roughly the size of a cartridge. She licked its tip and started writing. “Six rooms plus basement plus finished attic. Your attic’s in pretty good shape, but that basement …”
Ian appeared at the back door, lugging a large cardboard box. “Open up!” he called through the glass, and when Daphne obeyed he practically fell inside. Whatever he was carrying must weigh a ton. “Genuine ceramic tiles,” he told Daphne, setting the box on the floor. “We’re replacing an antique mantel at a house in Fells Point and these were just being thrown out, so—”
“Will you be putting them to use within the next ten days?” Rita asked.
He straightened and said, “Pardon?”
“Ian, this is Rita diCarlo,” Daphne said. “My uncle Ian. Rita’s here to organize us.”
“Oh, yes,” Ian said.
“Do you have a specific bathroom in mind that’s in need of those tiles within the next ten days?” Rita asked him.
“Well, not exactly, but—”
“Then I suggest you walk them straight back out to the trash can,” she said, “or else I’ll have to tack them onto my estimate here.”
“But these are from Spain,” Ian told her. He bent to lift one from the box — a geometric design of turquoise and royal blue. “How could I put something like this in the trash?”
Rita considered him. She didn’t give the tile so much as a glance, but Ian continued holding it hopefully in front of his chest like someone displaying his number for a mug shot.
“You see what I have to deal with,” Daphne told Rita.
“Yes, I see,” Rita said.
Oddly enough, though, Daphne just then noticed how beautiful that tile really was. The design looked kaleidoscopic — almost capable of movement. She couldn’t remember now why stripping the house had seemed like such a good idea.
Rita did do an excellent job, as it turned out, but Daphne hardly had time to notice before something new came along for her to think about: Friday afternoon, she was fired.
It wasn’t entirely unexpected. Ever since she’d got her raise, she seemed to have lost interest in her work. She had shown up late, left early, and mislaid several orders. The messages people sent with their flowers had begun to depress her. “Well, I think I’ll say … well, let me see,” they would tell her, frowning into space. “Why don’t we put … Okay! I’ve got it! ‘Congratulations and best wishes.’ ” Then Daphne would slash CBW across the order form. “To the girl of my dreams” was G/dms. “Thanks for last night,” Tx/nite. She felt injured on their behalf — that their most heartfelt sentiments could be considered so routine. And when they were not routine, it was worse: I am more sorry than I can tell you and you’re right not to want to see me again but I’ll never forget you as long as I live and I hope you have a wonderful marriage. “With delivery that comes to twenty-seven eighty,” she would say in her blandest tone.
The way Mr. Potoski put it was, she could either leave now or stay on for her two weeks’ notice, but she could see he was eager to get rid of her. He already had a new girl lined up. “I’ll leave now,” Daphne told him, and so at closing time she gathered her few possessions and stuffed them into a paper sack. Then she slipped her jacket on and ducked quietly out the door, avoiding an awkward farewell scene. On the way to the bus stop she found herself composing messages to Mr. Potoski. Tx/fun: Thanks, it’s been fun. TK: Take care. Not that she had anything against Mr. Potoski personally. She knew this was all her own fault.
Her bus was undergoing some heater problems, and by the time she reached home she was chilled through. Still in her jacket, she went directly to the kitchen and lit the gas beneath the kettle. Ian must be working late this evening. She could hear her grandfather down in the basement, rattling tools and thinking aloud, but she didn’t call out to him. Maybe there was some advantage to living alone after all — not dealing with other people, not feeling responsible for other people’s happiness. Although that was out of the question, now that she had no salary.
She took a mug from the cupboard, where everything sat in straight rows — eight mugs, eight short glasses, eight tall glasses. The mugs that didn’t match and the odd-sized glasses had been sent to Good Works. The cereals that people had tried once and never again had disappeared from the shelves. In just three days Rita had turned this house into a sort of sample kit: one perfect set of everything. But Daphne hadn’t quite adjusted yet and she felt a little rustle of panic. She wanted some extras. She wanted that crowd of cracked, crazed, chipped, handleless mugs waiting behind the other mugs on the off chance they might be needed.
She ladled coffee into the drip pot and then poured in the boiling water. Coffee was her weakness. Reverend Emmett said coffee clouded the senses, coffee stepped between God and the self; but Daphne had discovered long ago that coffee sharpened the senses, and she loved to sit through church all elated and jangly-nerved and keyed to the sound of that inner voice saying enigmatic things she might someday figure out when she was wiser: if not for you, if not for you, if not for you and down in the meadow where the green grass grows … She waited daily for caffeine to be declared illegal, but it seemed the government had not caught on yet.
She poured the coffee and sat down at the table with it, warming her hands around the mug. Now her grandfather’s footsteps climbed the basement stairs and crossed the pantry. Daphne looked up, but the figure in the doorway was not her grandfather after all. It was Rita. Daphne said, “Rita! Aren’t you done with us?”
Well, she was done. She had finished yesterday afternoon and even presented her staggeringly high bill, which Daphne was going to mail on to Agatha as soon as she figured out where the stamps had been moved to. But here Rita stood, flushed from her climb, looking a bit better put together than usual in a flowing white shirt that bloused above her jeans and a tan suede jacket as soft as washed silk. “Daphne,” she said flatly. “I thought you were Ian.”
Ah.
Daphne had been through this any number of times. Back in high school, girlfriends of hers showed up unannounced, wearing brand new outfits and carrying their bosoms ostentatiously far in front of them like fruit on a tray. “Oh,” they’d say in just such a tone, dull and disappointed. “I thought you were Ian.”