Revenant Rising (32 page)
Hoop wakes a little before sunup, the time he’d stir himself for the job back home at the IGA store or if he was filling in at the abattoir. Unlike yesterday morning, he knows for sure where he is and that he didn’t sleep unmoving like a corpse. All in all he feels quite good other than for the hunger that he ought to be used to by now and the disappointment about Audrey’s condition he’ll never get used to.
The hunger he can do something about, though. While he takes a sponge bath and slicks stray hairs back into his plait, his mouth and stomach remember the breakfast he treated himself to in California and push him to hold out for something at least that good here in New Jersey.
If he weren’t planning to buy all new clothes today, he’d feel ashamed of wearing the same duds the fourth day in a row. Similar could be said about moving his cartload of possessions back to the Jimmy. If he weren’t planning to find a better way to store all this stuff, he’d feel embarrassed about parading it through the lobby every time he comes or goes.
While he’s in the lobby he thinks to ask the desk clerk if they offer a weekly rate, a notion that struck him last night when he realized that with the found money he can sleep in a bed every night and eat real meals if he wants to.
A sickly looking sun is burning through low clouds by the time the truck’s loaded and ready to roll. The first order of the day is finding a decent place to eat. He knows he won’t find one on the first turnoff that presents itself, the big main road that costs money to drive on. But when he tries to turn onto a likelier prospect he misses the entrance and gets shunted onto Route 3—the road that brought him to North Bergen in the first place and the selfsame road that took him to Glen Abbey yesterday.
As he did when the unseen hand steered him off the interstate, he gives over to this guidance without a struggle. At this hour on a Saturday morning there’s little traffic to bother with and although his stomach’s rumbling, it’s not like he’s starving to death. Unquestioning of where he’s being led, he slows for the exit to the gateway he stumbled across yesterday.
Nothing’s open on Holbrook Road when he gets to it and nothing much is moving either. This stays true the rest of the way to Old Quarry Court. Taking another look at the layout and maybe proving beyond a doubt this is where the lawyerwoman lives was always in the back of his mind. He would have wound up here even if the spirit hadn’t moved him, but it would have been after breakfast.
He enters the court at a crawl and hasn’t gone far when something leaps out at him from a tall stand of bushes. He yelps and barely avoids running over whatever it is—a trickster in human form or maybe an ordinary witch because it’s swinging a broom.
It turns out to be an old woman who orders him in a high-pitched voice to halt and get out of the truck or be turned over to the authorities. He’d be a jackassed-fool not to mind her; she can’t be the only early riser in this neighborhood, so he pulls over to the curb and gets out. In the same screechy voice she then orders him to follow her along a narrow sidewalk and into her house where he’s told to have a seat at the kitchen table.
Before he can decide how much trouble he’s in, he’s given a new race and nationality. The old woman has him down for a Cuban, one who understands English. She lets him know that while she’s in sympathy with the need to escape the wickedness of Castro’s communism, he should not expect a free ride here in the US-of-A.
He couldn’t agree more and is about to say so when she explains that as a temporary employee for the Edelweiss Garden Center, certain things are required of him if he intends to work in this neighborhood. No cursing, spitting, or urinating in pubic is allowed and he’s expected to show up clean in mind, clothes, and body.
He says as little as possible to hide his lack of foreign accent because the cover she’s made up for him is better than anything he could invent on short notice.
While cooking something on the stove, she jaws on about how useless it would be for him or for any of his cronies to case and rob the houses they service because immigrant laborers are always prime suspects.
He ought to feel insulted by this dig and he ought to be thinking about how to slip out of here now that she’s not looking. But like she’s read his mind or has eyes in the back of her head, she turns around just as he’s tensing to make a run for it.
“You can wash your hands right here at the sink,” she says.
Again he goes along with her because the smell of whatever she’s cooking is getting to him. So is the smell of the coffee she’s making.
The coffee, when she pours him a cup, is better than anything he’s had in weeks. In months, even. Then she serves him smooth, thin pancakes that are folded into pockets filled with soft, sweetish cheese and spread with sourish cherry jam. These too are better than anything he’s had in weeks if he discounts the Los Angeles breakfast. He nods a yes when she offers him two more of these pancakes and another yes when she asks if he wants powdered sugar sprinkled on top.
He’s fairly sure Cubans talk the same as Mexicans, so he mumbles a “si” when she asks if they understand each other and if he’s willing to abide by the Old Quarry Court rules. Then, as though reminding him he’s not completely out of the woods, she goes to a doorway leading to a darkened room and calls out in her high voice, “Milty, breakfast is ready.”
Milty, whoever he is, doesn’t answer. That doesn’t say he’s not there, though, and hasn’t been all along. Not one to push this weird brand of luck, Hoop mumbles an imitation “gracias” and moves toward the outside door. The old woman comes along, trailing him all the way to the curb where she stops short at the back end of the Jimmy. She takes a gander at the Michigan license plate and decides that he’s a laid-off autoworker. Again, he couldn’t have come up with a better story, so he doesn’t deny it when he climbs into the cab and starts the engine.
He eases away from the curb and moves slow around the circular part of the street watchful for the house at the head of the circle. No amount of wondering will explain the strange workings of the old woman so he doesn’t even try.
At number 13, he cuts his eyes to the lawyerwoman’s house and grounds without noticing anything not drunk in yesterday, completes the circle and funnels out of Old Quarry Court,
On the next street, he finds an out-of-the-way place to park and hunkers down behind the wheel to puzzle over this latest twist of fate.
The fancy pancakes and cherry jam sit like stones in his belly as he tries to decide if anything happened back there that he should worry about—and if so, what.
The fresh, full-flavored coffee rises like gall in his throat before he chooses the old woman’s study of the Michigan license plate as the only weak point and probably not worth worrying about because his name was never asked, his ID was never examined, and his early-morning appearance there was never questioned. To the old woman he’s just another drifter of Cuban background, just another laid-off autoworker.
He feels a lot better with that out of the way, enough better that he’s ready to link up with Holbrook Road and follow wherever it leads.
There’s no one around to mistake him for a yard worker when Hoop pulls into Edelweiss Hardware and Garden Center and drives around back. He parks next to the same pay telephone that gave him Laurel Chandler’s home address. After he’s fed in enough coins to last through being put on hold if that should happen, he fishes the page torn from a homebuyer’s magazine out of his pocket and dials the number for the place advertising rental storage units at convenient locations throughout Central New Jersey.
The guy who answers says there’s only one unit available on short notice and it’s on Route 22 in Union, New Jersey, wherever that is. Wherever it is, he’ll find it. He found Glen Abbey and Old Quarry Court, didn’t he?
An hour into the Saturday-morning household chores, Laurel stops pretending her siblings’ bedrooms need anything more than a light once-over. They haven’t been occupied in weeks and chances are they’ll remain that way for the foreseeable future.
She bypasses her former bedroom altogether. She doesn’t even open the door. If dust bunnies are breeding in the corners, more power to them.
The bedroom she now calls her own—her parents’ former bedroom—can stand some attention. Routine dusting reveals the need for furniture polishing, which in turn reveals the need for maintenance to the built-in bookcases and to the carved cherrywood fireplace façade in particular. Did the bookcases always sag like that? How long has the fireplace mantle been so loose from the chimneypiece that she can practically see into the garage attic on the other side?
“Has the floor always squeaked like this?” she wonders aloud as she moves to the other end of the room to clean window glass.
More scales fall from her eyes as she begins this new task and registers the true condition of the eight-foot bay. Each and every little windowpane needs recaulking and the mullions need hours and hours of painstaking scraping and repainting. These examples speak volubly for the condition of the rest of the house, if she’s willing to listen.
Rather than waste any more elbow grease on this job, she might better compile a list of the areas requiring repair or replacement and allow that list to help determine what to do with the property. But wouldn’t that amount to telling David he’s right, that the property is too far gone to warrant renovation, that the value is in the land?
She nevertheless finishes cleaning the undeserving window, then transfers her attention to the bathroom. Under her newly jaundiced eye, this space is now a glaring monument to the fifties that should have been gutted years ago. Despite her sudden disenchantment, she goes at the fixtures and tiles as though it were still possible to polish them to a high luster.
From there on everything encountered is suspect, including the cedar closet where cleaning supplies are stored along with a few half-filled garment bags. Even the hatchway from the cedar closet into the attic above the garage where she knows without looking that a run of electrical wiring should have been brought up to code a decade ago.
At the end of the hallway she tries the door to the back stairs that’s been securely nailed shut since her grandmother took the fatal plunge. The door doesn’t budge, but it does remind her of how long she’s been aware of the ill-fitting grade door into the garage without doing anything about it.
A quick walkthrough of the main floor increases her disenchantment; every room but the kitchen is a period piece and suggestive of an exhibit at the Smithsonian. While still inviting, the dining room and front parlor cannot bear close scrutiny. Nor can the gathering room or the library. From the doorway of her father’s former study, she regards the worn furnishings and for the first time ever, accepts that he will never again sit at his desk and invent quirky ways of showing her and her siblings how much he loves them. It’s a little easier to view the shabbiness of the nearby sewing room because when her mother went away, there were no hopes to keep alive.
On the side porch outside the kitchen, she concedes that the exterior needs work as well. In whatever direction she looks, some element is in need of repair or replacement—even the stone steps leading to the flower gardens.
Beyond those steps, however, nothing looks like an emergency. Granted, the newly hired landscaping service won’t ever maintain the yard the way it was cared for when her mother was in charge, or even when her brothers were in charge, but in just one day a crew has achieved more than Laurel could have in a solid week.
And that would be the point, that would be the obvious reason to hire someone to maintain the house—because she can’t do it herself and because she can’t just give up on it either. And she can’t allow the OQC Architectural Committee, ardent arbiters of good taste and stringent upkeep, to cite her for noncompliance; she owes her parents better than that.