“Yes, I know who they are, Amanda, but wouldn’t they be dead by now?”
“Not the sons, I don’t imagine. The sons were only in their teens when Dad was a little boy. So I said, ‘What if all these years the sons have been pining over this house and wishing they still lived here?’ You remember what one of them said when their mother said they were moving. ‘Aw, Ma?’ he said. Well, you would think I’d suggested lighting a match to the place. ‘What are you thinking?’ Dad asked me. ‘Where did you get such a damn-fool notion as that? Those two spoiled Brill boys are not ever getting their hands on this house. Put it right out of your mind,’ he said. I said, ‘Well, sorry. Gee. My mistake entirely.’ ”
“It’s grief,” Jeannie told her. “He’s just lost the love of his life, bear in mind.”
“Which loss are you talking about—Mom or the house?”
“Well, both, I guess.”
“Huh,” Amanda said. “I never heard before that grief makes people bad-tempered.”
“Some it does and some it doesn’t,” Jeannie said.
They had reached that stage of packing where it seemed they’d created more mess than they had cleared out. Several half-filled cartons sat open around the room—the photos in a carton for Denny, blankets in a carton for Red, a mass of Abby’s sweaters in a carton for Goodwill. With each sweater there had been a debate—“Don’t you want to take this? You would look good in this!”—but after holding it up for a moment, one or the other of them would sigh and let it fall into the carton with the rest. The rug was linty, the floor was strewn with cast-off hangers and dry-cleaner’s bags, and a hard gray light from the stripped windows gave the room a bleak and uncared-for look.
“You should have heard Dad’s reaction when I told him he should maybe leave this bed behind and take a single,” Amanda said.
“Well, I can understand: he wants the bed that he’s used to.”
“You haven’t seen his apartment, though. It’s dinky.”
“It’s going to feel weird to visit him there,” Jeannie said.
“Yes, last night I had this peculiar moment when I was saying goodbye to him. He asked, ‘Don’t you want to take some leftovers with you?’ Mom’s thing to ask! ‘It’ll save you from cooking supper,’ he said, ‘one of the nights this week.’ Oh, Lord, isn’t it strange how life sort of … closes up again over a death.”
“Even the little boys have adjusted,” Jeannie said. “That’s kind of surprising, when you think about it—that children figure out so young that people die.”
“It makes you wonder why we bother accumulating, accumulating, when we know from earliest childhood how it’s all going to end.”
Amanda was looking around at the accumulation as she spoke—at the cartons and the stacked pillows and the tied-up bales of old magazines and the lamps with their shades removed. And that was nothing compared with the clutter elsewhere in the house—the towers of faded books teetering on the desk in the sunroom, the rolled carpets in the dining room, the stemware tinkling on the buffet each time the little boys stampeded past. And out on the front porch, waiting to go to the dump, the miscellaneous items that no one on earth wanted: a three-legged Portacrib, a broken stroller, a high chair missing its tray, and a string-handled shopping bag full of cracked plastic toys with somebody’s small, clumsy pottery house perched on top, painted in kindergarten shades of red and green and yellow.
PART TWO
What a World, What a World
9
IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL, BREEZY, yellow-and-green morning in July of 1959, and Abby Dalton was standing at her front window watching for her ride. She wanted to run out before he could honk his horn. Her mother had a rule that boys should ring the doorbell and step inside the house and hold a polite conversation before they could carry Abby off, but try telling Dane Quinn that! He wasn’t much of a one for small talk.