Danny thought it was funny how Tom said that, as if his kids were so old; Buster was only fourteen and Kerry, twelve. She wasn’t even officially a teenager. Really it was Tom who seemed old. Funny that Tom had been Danny’s age when he got married. Danny couldn’t imagine getting married. Danny could barely imagine what tomorrow would look like, maybe toast for breakfast, or cereal from those mini cereal boxes. Danny could commit to cereal, but not the big box, just a mini one.
“See this crack,” said Tom. “It runs all the way across the beam. How it’s widening at the top? That’s bad.”
Gwen went and stood beside Tom. He pointed to the stains that wormed along the plaster and across the beams. Danny paced slowly from the edge of the Ping-Pong table to the short passage that was populated with a slew of slickers and fleeces between the great room and the dining room. He bounced the Ping-Pong ball on his paddle and listened. He felt the house rolling on the waves.
“The place has lasted this long,” Gwen said, and patted Tom’s back. But she stayed there and looked.
“I don’t even know what this would cost to fix.” Tom motioned to a crosspiece on the low ceiling beneath the balcony. “This beam is just cosmetic.” Then he turned around and pointed to the four large beams, two vertical, two horizontal, that ran up the height of the two-story room like masts. “But those are structural.”
From beneath the archway between the great room and the dining room, Danny could see the stain Tom was pointing to. The long yellow plumes spread the length of the vertical beams, and in the center of those plumes, cracks.
“Let’s get someone in here,” said Danny. Engage the pumps, dump the ballast, break out the wax, the duct tape.
He wedged the ball under the paddle on the table and walked over to Gwen and Tom. The three of them stood beneath the center beam, staring straight up. Danny had spent his childhood wishing he could walk on those beams. He thought about cracks in the bones of this house, in the ribs of this room. The balconies around its edge were great arteries, his parents’ bedroom the driving heart.
“The cost would be prohibitive,” said Tom, “replacing the roof, and then the rotten beams.” Tom, so willing to let the place lose gangrenous limbs, to suffocate under its own rot.
“Plus, by now I’m sure Libby is in love with the water stains,” said Gwen. Gwen and Tom snuffled. At least Libby wants to keep the place alive, thought Danny.
Tom left the room and came back with a broom in his hand. He climbed the stairs to the long balcony that ran the length of the room. Holding on to a pillar, he climbed up on the railing.
“I don’t mean to be critical, but whacha doing?” asked Gwen.
In his free hand Tom held the broom, his hand near the bristles.
“Testing,” he said as he stretched the broom up toward the ceiling. “If the leak is squishy that means it’s new, but if it’s dry and crumbly that means it’s old.”
Danny looked over at Gwen. She had told him about the holes she and Libby had found in the roof. He didn’t want to tell Tom another thing.
With the broom handle, Tom clunked and knocked at the portion of the pitched ceiling he could reach, looking like a disgruntled downstairs neighbor.
“Tom, I wouldn’t—” A large flake of plaster dropped to the floor. Tom quickly brought the broom down.
“So what does that tell you?” said Gwen. There was a strange crunching noise. Tom stepped back to the floor from the railing. Another jagged piece of plaster fell, the size of a dinner plate. Danny and Gwen shuffled backward toward the stage. A crack opened in the ceiling, and a continent of plaster lowered at one end like a ramp, showing the lath like bones underneath. Then the continent cracked and fell directly on top of the Ping-Pong table, covering the entire thing. A cloud of dust billowed toward them. Gwen and Danny turned into each other to cover their eyes and mouths.
“Fuck me,” said Gwen. Tom pounded down the stairs.
“You guys okay?” He brushed dust from Gwen’s hair, from Danny’s shoulders.
“How much asbestos do we have in our lungs now?” said Danny.
“Don’t worry, there is nothing fireproof about this place,” said Tom.
From the stage the three of them looked up at the ceiling. Danny could see small lines of light around the lath. The house was shedding its skin from the inside out. Dust was settling over everything, giving the animal heads—bucks, moose, a boar, a fox—a gray tinge, aging them.
“We need to clean this up before Libby gets back,” said Tom. “This will be too much for her.”
“I told her we needed umbrellas,” said Gwen.
Tom ran up the stairs and came back with the broom.
“Could we patch this up and paint over some of that?” Danny waved his hand toward the other water stains. The three of them moved to the bottom of the stairs.
“It needs a bit more than a patch, Dan,” said Tom.
“What’s your real estate golem going to think about this?” said Danny.
“One disaster at a time, Dan.” Tom looked up. “Why Scarlet didn’t do anything about this, I’ll never know.”
“She didn’t have the B.O.B. here to motivate her,” said Gwen. Three years without their father had made Scarlet reluctant to take on much.
Danny thought Tom wanted the place to be a mess, an unsalvageable mess. He wanted it to be the fucking Titanic. Maybe Tom wanted them all to be a mess so that he could swoop in and save them, or at least look that much better standing next to his siblings at funerals, uncles and cousins saying, “You’ve turned out well.”
Gwen had turned out as they expected; Libby too; and Danny, they all seemed to just forget he existed, or that he ever grew past the age of four. “You can’t possibly be in college,” they had said. Funny, they were half right.
“Bibs won’t want a quick fix,” said Gwen, sitting on the dust-covered stairs. “She’ll want a full restoration, a historic preservation, make it the way it was when we were kids. I’m sure if she could, she’d put wallpaper back up in every bedroom.”
Danny stood at the bottom of the stairs. Does this make Tom want to sell it more or less? thought Danny.
“Only Bibs’s room ever had wallpaper,” Tom corrected her. “The rest were always painted.”
“No, the nursery had that diamond pattern of buttercups. You don’t remember that?” Tom stood in front of them, absently sweeping dust into a small pile, creating a little clean patch.
“You’re confusing this place with Archer Avenue; that place was covered in wallpaper.”
“You just forget because you moved out of the nursery first.”
“Maybe it’s just ’cause he’s old.” Danny.
Gwen shook her head sadly, whispered, “Early onset.”
“You two are the ones killing brain cells all the time.” Tom put his fist to his mouth and made a series of sucking, slurping noises.
“Have you ever used a bong?” said Danny.