“Good night, Mr. Loper,” I said, pulling out the house keys. There should have been nothing in the Dumpster that smelled worse than old rubber balls or well-worn tennis shoes, but I had to admit that, as I passed it, I caught a whiff of something that had acquired a certain gamey tang. Maybe a neighbor had contributed some household garbage to the mix inside.
Later, with Max snoring in the room next door to mine and Susan safely tucked in bed in the room at the end of the hall, I slept the sleep of the dead.
– -
Monday morning, five trucks were scheduled to come and haul things to various destinations. The first of them arrived early, before we had finished our first cups of coffee. Uncle Max declared that he would be most helpful if he stayed out of the way. He took his telephone and his yellow legal pad to the backyard to make phone calls on Kevin’s behalf and I went out front to make sure that whoever was backing into the driveway did not go off the side into Dad’s beautiful flower borders.
A staffer and a student assistant from the university library came to pick up the books the science librarian had selected from Dad’s collection. They loaded the boxes quickly and were hardly out of the driveway before the truck from the thrift store arrived. The pile of donations in the garage seemed huge, but the crew worked efficiently and had it loaded in a surprisingly short time; I could again see most of the garage floor. As the driver handed me a receipt for Mom’s tax records, I asked him to please come again on Tuesday for what I hoped would be one last load.
With space in the garage now cleared away, after I swept the floor I would be able to bring out the things I was taking home so that the house cleaning crew scheduled for Tuesday could do their work unimpeded by extraneous clutter. We were still waiting for the piano movers to pick up Mom’s baby grand and the haulers who would ship Susan’s pieces to her home in Minneapolis. The refuse company promised to pick up the Dumpster and replace it with an empty as soon as a truck was available; as the day grew warmer, the gaminess coming from the Dumpster grew more pungent.
Susan had looked closely at everything marked with a yellow sticky note, deciding what to keep and what to leave. She knew right away that an armoire in an upstairs bedroom and the long mahogany sideboard in the dining room that had come from the family farm in Ohio, furniture that was oversized for most contemporary houses, belonged in the nearly century-old house in South Minneapolis she and her husband Bob had restored. There were other pieces that she found interesting or were very old, but thought might not be worth the cost and hassle of shipping. With a felt marker, she put question marks on their sticky notes.
I am not much of a decorator. My cousin is. She helped me shove aside the furniture I was taking home with me so that we could see what would be left for the tenants. There were a few pieces with blue sticky notes, designating that they were staying, that she thought I might want to think about keeping, Dad’s chair-side table among them. She put question marks on those notes as well.
Father John called when I was in the kitchen getting us each a fresh cup of coffee.
“McGumption,” he said, “My stalwart cook, Larry, is still MIA. I could use some help with lunch today. Sorry for the short notice, and I know you have things to do, but I was hoping you might be able to give me a hand.”
“I would, Padre,” I said. “But there is just too much going on here this morning for me to leave. Why don’t you call Kevin Halloran? Tell him I said he should help you. It’ll do him good.”
“Fine idea,” he said. “Fine idea.” He did not, and would never, say a word about why he thought so, but I knew. Kevin could certainly have used some of Father John’s wise counsel, or just a good listener, as long as the price to pay wasn’t a string of Hail Marys and Our Fathers; Kevin had fallen away from the church long before I had.
With her friends due in from the Oakland Airport at any time, Susan and I retreated to the dining room. She helped me move a stack of boxes someone had set on top of the access hatch to the gravity heater under the house so that the inspector coming Tuesday could get at it. Then we sat on the floor in front of the sideboard she was taking and sorted out its contents. She was interested in the old linens. There were tablecloths, napkins, runners, and doilies variously embellished with crocheted edges, Madeira work, embroidery, ladder-stitched hems, hand-painted or silk-screened flowers and bucolic scenes. Some had come down through Mom’s family, some from Dad’s, and some my parents had acquired during their fifty-eight years together. Neither Susan nor I had any idea what came from where, and it didn’t really matter. As we went through them, taking turns making selections, we got caught up on family and each other.
“I always loved Max,” she said, setting aside hand-crocheted antimacassars I didn’t remember ever seeing before-too fussy for Mom’s taste, and mine. “But he’s awfully young to be your uncle. Is there a story?”
“A short one,” I said. “When Dad was in college, his mother died. A year or two later, my grandfather married again, a younger woman, and they had Max. When Max was about ten, his parents died in an accident on an icy road. And Max came to live at our house.”
“You and I weren’t around yet, were we?”
“No. Mark and Emily were just toddlers, I think, and they were fourteen years older than me. Max was like their big brother, but he always made them call him Uncle. Me, too, when I finally showed up.”
Susan folded a linen tablecloth and matching napkins into a box. “I was sorry Bob and I couldn’t come out for Emily’s funeral. I was abroad somewhere, working on a project.”
“Your mom and dad came,” I said. “It was good to see them. But to tell you the truth, my parents were so numb that I doubt they noticed who was there and who wasn’t. They were burying their second child, and it’s just not supposed to happen that way for parents.”
“No it isn’t.”
Odd though, that before I thought about Mom and Dad at Emily’s funeral, an image of Bart Bartolini at his wife’s service flashed behind my eyes.
My sister lay locked in a coma for several years before she decided to die. I think that all of us who loved her suffered through the worst shockwaves of grief at the beginning, when she was shot, so that by the time of her funeral, though we were all sad because the inevitable had at last occurred, there was more than a little relief that her ordeal, and ours, was at last over.
It had been very different when Mark died in Vietnam. For weeks, maybe months, after the news of his death came, my parents moved through space and time as if they were deaf and blind tourists from another place floating among us in their own fragile bubble. They didn’t always hear me when I spoke to them, they answered questions I never asked. From moment to moment they forgot where they were and what they had been doing. Dinner burned on the stove. And Max slept on the floor in my room until the worst was over.
That somnolent, semi-coherent state they were in is the way I remember Bart after his wife died. It would have been as pointless for the police to interview him then as it would have been to ask Mom to recite the Gettysburg Address after Mark died.
“Maggie?” Susan rubbed my hand. “I’m sorry. Talking about Emily made you sad.”
“No.” I sat up straight and took a deep breath. “I’m just very ready to be finished here.”
The four book club friends arrived in a flurry of excited conversation. All those female voices brought Max inside.
It took a few minutes to sort Ann from Angie and Jean from Maureen:
“The baby in the seat behind me cried through the entire flight.”
“I love this house. It reminds me of my grandmother’s.”
“Is that a Stickley chair?”
“It was so humid when we left home, and it is so lovely here. What a relief.”