So the house was secretly falling apart all around him. How he longed to be in orbit once more, to feel that sense of weightlessness, as if the dense matter of his body had become a gas, a vapor, the ether itself. But there was no return. And as if to underscore this simple fact, he looked up to find Jennifer walking across the street toward him. She was not in her workout clothes this time, instead in jeans and a tight white T-shirt, her hair pulled into a rough ponytail. He wondered if he should retreat into the house but then continued to stand there, framed by the open door of the empty garage. “Hey,” he said.
“Hi.”
He stood there in silence, looking at her. “What?” he said at last.
“I just wanted to know what you thought.”
“Of?”
“Our construction project.” She nodded in the direction of the vacant lot, of the tractors, the freshly cleared earth there.
He looked at the lot and then back at her again. “What I think?” he said.
“Walt and I decided to forge ahead,” she said, as if not hearing him. “It’s just been sitting there and we’re getting a great deal on the contractor.”
“You’re telling me you own that lot?”
“We bought that lot with this one. And one other on Creekside but that one got built and rented out.”
“OK.”
She smiled. Her teeth a perfect white arc. “Anyway, sorry you won’t be able to sit out there and do whatever it is you do with your friend. Don’t ask; don’t tell. That’s my policy. Anyway, it’s an investment and the time is now.” Her eyes flicked from his face to the construction site and back again. Bright and wide as if crazed. No, not crazed. Not that. Triumphant. “Just wanted to let you know,” she said.
“That you’re building a house?”
“Yep.”
“OK. You’re building a house.” He looked down the cul-de-sac to the field. The earth flat and dead and empty apart from the two tractors.
“This could have worked out differently, you know,” she said.
“How so?”
“You know.”
He looked at her again. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Really? You really can’t figure this out?”
It was quiet. Then he said: “You’re doing this as some kind of punishment?”
“Oh, come on, neighbor. You’re not that important.”
“The house is sold, Jennifer. I’m moving anyway.”
“Good for you.”
He threw up his hands. “Well, OK,” he said. “Good for me. Good for you. Good for everyone.”
She stared at him in silence, her eyes slowly brimming with tears. “Asshole,” she said at last. She swiveled around and began to walk back across the street quickly. Halfway across she turned back toward him and shouted, “You’re such an asshole,” and then swiveled back again and continued until she reached the door of her house, wrenching the door handle, and then stepping back to pound that flat surface with her clenched fist. Even from across the street, he could hear her words clearly: “Nicole, you unlock this goddamned door right now, young lady. Unlock the door this instant or you will be grounded! Do you hear me? Grounded!” She continued to bang on the door, a dull thunking sound that reverberated and echoed through the subdivision, each report met and repeated by a second and third so that the sound of it seemed a poorly executed drum roll, Keith watching her all the while from the frame of the empty garage. Incredulous. Dumbfounded.
Work on the vacant lot continued all the next day and the day after, the earthmovers replaced with backhoes to dig out the foundation area. Gravel trucks arrived to dump their loads and workmen began putting together the forms for the foundation. The basic footprint of the house was already roughed out with stacks of boards ready to be propped and staked into the various shapes necessary for the pouring of concrete. After that, the solidity of the structure would begin to rise.
In the early evening he opened the garage door and stepped through it and looked out at that scene. The area where the sofa had once rested now carried the rudiments of a foundation and there was a layer of gravel extending across it. He supposed they could walk the telescope over the various impediments and could stand out there or could even bring some metal lawn chairs to sit upon but such an attempt would be a weak substitute. What once had been was already gone and it was likely best to accept that and move on, a lesson he knew to be one he was loath to learn but which kept arriving at his doorstep like a dead bird delivered by a pet cat. Here it was again. He found himself wondering if he could find information on the Internet on hot-wiring a tractor. Perhaps the termites had weakened the structure of his house enough that he could push the whole thing over. That would be something, indeed.
Sally Erler called him in the early afternoon, clearly relieved that he had agreed to the tenting of the house and telling him that the young couple who were buying the place remained interested, assuming the termite damage was dealt with. An hour later, Sally Erler herself arrived with some documents for him to sign, indicating that the sale would continue pending the repairs. The escrow closed in just over a month, which meant the contractor would have to work quickly to finish during that window. Keith knew he was agreeing to pour a substantial amount of money into the house and that it was money he would be essentially throwing away. He would have had to have split any profits with Barb, had there been any, but he had no doubt that the losses would be solely his to bear. Somehow he would have to pay.
Mullins called again soon after Sally Erler and again he let the call go to voice mail. He could not have explained why he did not want to take the call but knew he did not want to talk to Mullins or Eriksson or anyone from NASA, at least not until the house was tented and he knew what he was doing next. He imagined that they were dismantling his office, pulling out the furniture for the next astronaut to occupy, that they had already reclassified him into some other position that would require him to move to a different building entirely. Such were his nightmares. He wondered how far he had fallen and he did not want to know. Not yet. He would have to be out of the house starting tomorrow or the next day, depending on when they tented the house and filled it with poison. He knew he should call the home office but there was also a sense of irritation at the phone calls. They had ejected him from Houston; let them wait a few days for his return call. He had trained himself to think only of the future, had started that training on his own when he was in grade school and he thought he had actually reached the future he had been made for. And maybe he had, at least for that brief moment. The cold fact was that each time Mullins or Eriksson called he thought not of the future but of the past and there was nothing there but his failed marriage and Quinn’s death.
He thought that he should just find some deep recess in the house somewhere — the attic or the crawl space under the stairs — and let them tent the house around him, an idea that left him with a sense of outrage that shivered through him like an electric knife, leaving him raging in silence at the kitchen table, the shadow of the idea remaining under his tongue like a sharp and terrible stone.
He stood and opened the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the concrete patio under the blazing late-afternoon sun and waited for the feeling of unease to pass. His heart beat heavy in his chest and indeed there was the faint whine of his migraine now, the first time he had heard that sound in several weeks, his eyes already clamping shut against the light of the sun as he scuttled back through the sliding glass door sideways like a crab.