“I swear, she started plotting last summer and damned if she didn’t go through with it. She flattered Trey to his face and she ran him down to Pookie behind his back and she curtsied and kowtowed to his mother till I thought I was going to puke.”
“Well, it’s not like he was Pookie’s property,” Junior said.
Then he said, “And anyhow, he’s Merrick’s now.”
And two lines deepened at the corners of his mouth, the way they always did when he had settled some piece of business exactly to his liking.
An outside observer might say that these weren’t stories at all. Somebody buys a house he’s admired when it finally comes on the market. Somebody marries a man who was once engaged to her friend. It happens all the time.
Maybe it was just that the Whitshanks were such a recent family, so short on family history. They didn’t have that many stories to choose from. They had to make the most of what they could get.
Clearly they couldn’t look to Red for stories. Red just went ahead and married Abby Dalton, whom he had known since she was twelve—a Hampden girl, coincidentally, from the neighborhood where the Whitshanks used to live. In fact, he and she lived in Hampden themselves, during the early days of their marriage. (“Why’d we even bother moving,” his father asked him, “if you were going to head back down there the very first chance you got?”) Then after his parents died—killed by a freight train in ’67 when their car stalled on the railroad tracks—Red took over the house on Bouton Road. Certainly Merrick didn’t want it. She and Trey had a much better place of their own, not to mention their Sarasota property, and besides, she said, she had never really liked that house. It didn’t have en suite bathrooms, and when Junior had finally added one to the master bedroom, reconfiguring the giant cedar-lined storeroom back in the 1950s, she’d complained that she was jolted awake every time the toilet flushed. So there Red was, in the house he’d grown up in, where he planned to die one day. Not much of a story in that.
The neighborhood referred to it as “the Whitshank house” now. Junior would have been happy to know that. One of his major annoyances was that from time to time he’d been introduced as “Mr. Whitshank, who lives in the Brill house.”
There was nothing remarkable about the Whitshanks. None of them was famous. None of them could claim exceptional intelligence. And in looks, they were no more than average. Their leanness was the rawboned kind, not the lithe, elastic slenderness of people in magazine ads, and something a little too sharp in their faces suggested that while they themselves were eating just fine, perhaps their forefathers had not. As they aged, they developed sagging folds beneath their eyes, which anyway drooped at the outer corners, giving them a faintly sorrowful expression.
Their family firm was well thought of, but then so were many others, and the low number on their home-improvement license testified to nothing more than mere longevity, so why make such a fuss about it? Staying put: they appeared to view it as a virtue. Three of Red and Abby’s four children lived within twenty minutes of them. Nothing so notable about that!