The Beginner's Goodbye

4

Nandina lived in the house we’d grown up in, a brown-shingled foursquare north of Wyndhurst. Even in the rain, it was only a five-minute drive. I almost wished it were longer. When I got there I parked out front, but then I stayed in the car a minute, debating how I should word this. I didn’t want to confess the true state of my house, because Nandina had been nagging me for weeks now to get started on the repairs. But if I just showed up with no explanation and asked for my old room back, she would think I was having a nervous breakdown or something. She would turn all motherly and there-there. She would be thrilled.

Well. As sometimes happens, she surprised me. She opened the front door when I rang and she sized up the situation — my slicked hair, damp clothes, the flecks of white plaster clinging to my trouser cuffs — and then she said, “Come in and stand on the mat while I fetch a towel.”

“I’ve got — got a little water in my front hall,” I told her.

She was heading toward the kitchen now, but she called back, “Take your shoes off and leave them there.”

“I was thinking maybe, just for tonight—”

But she had disappeared. I stood dripping on the mat, breathing in the smells of my childhood — Johnson’s paste wax and musty wallpaper. Even in the daytime the house was dark, with its small, oddly placed windows and heavy fabrics, and tonight it looked so dim that I kept feeling the need to blink to clear my vision.

“Your shoes, Aaron. Take off your shoes,” Nandina said, returning. She had a faded dishtowel with her. She waited while I shucked my shoes off and removed my brace, and then she handed me the towel. It was one of those calendar towels our mother used to hang above the kitchen table. 1975, it said. I mopped my face and then my hair. Nandina said, “Where’s your cane?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you leave it in the car?”

“Maybe.”

“Did you bring any clothes with you?”

“No.”

She stepped a bit closer, although she knew better than to offer an arm, and we made our way into the living room. She smelled of shampoo. She was wearing a gingham housecoat. (My sister was one of the last remaining women in America who changed into a housecoat at the end of every workday.) She waited for me to get settled on the couch, and then she said, “I’m going to see if you have any slippers here.”

I probably did. I had plenty of other stuff. Our mother had never cleared my room out after I left home.

While Nandina was upstairs, I slumped back on the couch and gazed up at the ceiling. It was a really solid ceiling, the old-fashioned, cream plaster kind with a medallion in the center, not so much as a hairline crack anywhere in view.

I thought about the car my college roommate used to drive, a rusty heap of a Chevy that kept sputtering out for no reason. One day it died altogether, and he got out and unscrewed the license plate and walked away from it; never looked back. I wished I could do that with my house. I wouldn’t miss a single thing about it. Let it vanish from the face of the earth. It wouldn’t bother me in the least.

Nandina came back with a pair of corduroy moccasins that I’d completely forgotten. Then she brought me my brace, which I strapped on before I fitted my feet into the moccasins. “Now,” Nandina said. “Have you had supper?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Aaron,” she said.

“What?”

“Tell the truth, now.”

“I’ve had half a dozen raw oysters, a crab cake, garlic mashed potatoes, a Green Goddess salad, a seven-apple tart à la mode, and two glasses of wine.”

“Goodness,” Nandina said.

I tried not to look smug.

“And what, exactly,” she asked, “is the current state of your house?”

“Ah.” I considered. “Well, at the moment my hall ceiling seems to have taken on a bit of water.”

“I see.”

“It could happen to anyone,” I told her. “It rained all last night, remember, and all today.”

Nandina said, “It seems to me—”

“But we can t-t-talk about that to-tomorrow,” I told her. “Meanwhile, I am beat. Are there sheets on my old bed?”

“Of course.”

Yes, of course; why did I bother asking? I stood up and made a big show of yawning and stretching. “Guess I’ll toddle off, then,” I said. “Thanks for taking me in on such short notice. I promise I won’t be in your hair more than a night or two.”

“Aaron! You can stay here forever. You don’t need to give me notice.”

It shows how defeated I felt just then that the thought of staying forever seemed almost tempting.

My room was upstairs, at the rear of the house, next to Nandina’s. (Which had been hers since childhood, although it would have made more sense if she’d taken over our parents’ larger, brighter room after they died.) It was exactly as I’d left it when I went away to college. My model airplanes still lined the shelves; my vinyl recordings of U2 and Tom Petty were still stacked beneath the stereo. I found a pair of old pajama bottoms in the bureau, and I changed into them and then checked the bookcase for something to read myself to sleep with. But there I had less luck. All I saw were tattered collections of math games and logic puzzles. As a child I’d been good at those, although occasionally, when I ran into a wall (which was almost literally what it felt like — a kind of head-butting), I could become quite violent, throwing things and breaking things. When I cast my mind back to those scenes, I saw myself from outside: my spiky, flailing figure, my hair sticking out in all directions, while my mother stood at arm’s length trying to calm me, trying to grab hold of me, murmuring ineffectual phrases. “Aaron, please. It’s only a pastime. Take a little break and come back to it, why don’t you?”

Where had all that passion gone? I wasn’t like that now, thank heaven.

I used to be obsessed with magic tricks. I practiced them for days on end and then I’d start badgering the grownups. “Pick a card. Any card. Don’t show me. Wait! You showed me what it was!”

And I wanted to make my living as a stand-up comic. I memorized jokes from magazines and then tried them out on relatives. “So, this man is walking down the street to the clock-repair shop, all bent over, with this great big grandfather clock on his back. He’s taking it to be fixed, see. And he meets up with a friend, and the friend says — the friend says—”

But I never could get past that part without totally cracking up. I swear, I thought it was the most hysterical joke I had heard in all my life. “The friend says, ‘Have you ever — have you ever—’ ”

I’d be breathless with laughter, weeping with laughter. My cheeks would be streaming with tears and my stomach would ache, and whichever aunts and uncles were listening would be smiling at me quizzically.

“ ‘Have you ever thought of buying a wristwatch?’ ”

“A what?” they would ask, because by that point I was almost unintelligible. But even repeating it was a struggle, because I’d be rolling on the floor.

That I saw from outside now, too: my gleeful, sputtery self, with my arms wrapped around my rib cage and my whole body screwed up in an agony of hilarity.

It was no wonder I’d never had children. They would have made me too sad.

When Dorothy and I were courting, we barely talked about children. I believe Dorothy mentioned once or twice that she wasn’t interested, but you couldn’t call that a real discussion. So now there would be no next generation, because I didn’t picture Nandina pairing off at this late date. The line would end with the two of us.

It was probably just as well, I figured.

“You didn’t realize anything had changed,” my mother told me. “You rode back from the hospital all happy and bouncy and glad to be going home, and you scrambled out of the backseat before either of us could reach for you—”

“I don’t want to hear,” I said.

“—and your leg just crumpled under you and you sat down hard on the sidewalk, but you didn’t cry. You were trying to smile, but only one side of your mouth turned up, and you looked toward the two of us with this confused expression on your face but you were still trying to—”

I said, “Mom! Stop! I don’t want to hear, I told you!”

She could be sort of obtuse, our mother. I know she wanted only the best for me, but still, it seemed to me I spent my childhood trying to fend her off. It was “No!” and “Go away!” and “I can do it myself!” I never headed out the door without her calling after me, “Don’t forget your cane!”

“I don’t need my cane.”

“You do need your cane. Do you remember what happened last week at Memorial Stadium?”

I would set my teeth and draw to a halt, facing the street, until she arrived behind me with my cane.

She died in 1998, just six months after our father. Heart attacks, both of them. Now, when I looked back to all her fluttering and hovering, it didn’t seem so bad. It seemed touching. But I knew that if she were to appear at that moment and ask what I could be thinking, getting into bed in the T-shirt I’d worn all day, I would snap at her once again: “Back off, I tell you! I’m fine!”

I fell asleep almost instantly, the first time I’d done that since Dorothy died. I dreamed that Jimmy Vantage still lived next door, although in fact he’d moved away at the end of seventh grade. We went to Stony Run to look for turtles. But Jimmy walked too fast for me, and I couldn’t keep up. At one point I was actually crawling on the sidewalk and shouting for him to slow down. Which was odd, because in my dreams I tend to be assertively able-bodied. I practically have wings. But in this particular dream I was twisted into knots, hampered and gasping for air, and when I woke up I thought for an instant that I could still feel the grit from the sidewalk on my palms.

Nandina said she knew just whom to call: Top Hat Roofers. They’d been replacing the slates on our parents’ house for as long as she could remember, she said, and she was sure they would understand that this should be given priority. “I’m going to phone them today,” she told me. “And you, meanwhile, should call your insurance agent. Or have you already done that?”

“Um …”

She gave me an ultra-patient look, an “I know you, buster” look. I was not a fan of that look. We were seated at the kitchen table with tea and cornflakes — our family’s traditional breakfast, which I had exchanged years ago for coffee and toast — and she had a memo pad in front of her that she was making notes on. I was not a fan of her memo pads, either. I said, “Forget it. I’ve got everything under control.”

“What do you mean by ‘everything’?”

“I mean the insurance agent, the roof … and it’s going to be way more than just the roof. Shows how much you know about it. I need a general contractor.”

“And you have one?” she asked.

“Of course.”

She looked unconvinced.

I said, “His name is …” Then I started over again, like someone retracing his steps to take a long, running jump. “His name is … Gil Bryan.”

It was the image of the shining skin beneath his eyes that brought it forth, finally. I said, “I’ll just give him a call today to let him know about the hall ceiling.”

“Well,” Nandina said. “All right, I guess.”

She seemed almost disappointed.

We drove downtown in separate cars, at my insistence. I said, “Who knows? We might want to leave at different times.”

“I don’t mind adjusting my schedule.”

“But also,” I said, “I may run by the house after work for a few of my things.”

“You want me to come with you?”

“No.”

In fact, I had no intention of going to my house. I had cased the bureau and the closet in my old room and found more than enough clothes to suit my purposes, provided I wasn’t too picky: stretched-out, kiddie-looking underpants, and jeans that fit fine although they seemed a bit high in the waist, and a button-down oxford shirt that I remembered from eighth grade. You would think oxford shirts would be timeless, but this one was kind of spindly in the collar. Well, never mind. For shaving, I’d made do with a disposable plastic razor I found among Nandina’s backup supplies in the bathroom. I use an electric shaver, as a rule. I made a mental note to buy a new one on my lunch break.

That was the first time I admitted to myself that I couldn’t face the sight of my house: when I realized I was willing to spring for a new electric shaver rather than retrieve my old one from my medicine cabinet.

So, as soon as I reached work, I shut myself in my office and started making phone calls. First I left a message on the answering machine at my insurance company — just the company in general, because I had no recollection as to who my personal agent was, never having had to use him. Then I searched the Internet for gil bryan contractor baltimore. No Gil to be found, but there was a Bryan Bros. General Contracting Co. I tried that number, and this time I reached an actual human being. “Hell-o,” a man said, too loudly.

“Bryan Brothers?”

“Yep.”

“Gil Bryan?”

“Nope.”

“But you have a Gil Bryan.”

“Yep.”

“Could I speak to him, please?”

“He’s out.”

“Could I leave him a message?”

“Let me give you his cell.”

I wrote the number down, but I didn’t try it right away. The conversation with the first guy had worn me out.

How about if I just sold my house? Put it on the market as a “fixer-upper.” (I’ll say!) Paid somebody to pack my belongings so I wouldn’t have to set foot in the place ever again. Surely there were people you could hire to do that. I would rent a little apartment, fully furnished. If anything happened to that one, I’d rent another.

The birdwatching book had gone off to Irene, and I was working on one of our vanity titles: George S. Hogan, Sr.’s My War. In the office, we referred to it as War Thirteen. Why was it that so many men viewed their military service as the defining event of their lives? They could have lived ninety years or more, they could have had several marriages and half a dozen children and outstandingly successful careers, but still, if they chose one experience to sum them up, it would be Vietnam, or Korea, or the Normandy invasion. It was especially hard to fathom in the case of Mr. Hogan, because his own particular war sounded downright dull. My best buddy in the barracks was Cy Helm. He was a really fine fellow. You couldn’t ask for a finer fellow than old Helm I always tell folks.

Apart from inserting a comma after old Helm, I left the text alone. That was our policy with the vanity manuscripts. (Some people didn’t even want the commas added.) I waded through another three pages, and then I rubbed my eyes and stretched and got up to fetch a cup of coffee.

Charles was playing FreeCell on his computer. He was a stocky, rumpled man with a perennially red face, slightly older than the rest of us, and he had his own mysterious schedule that none of us interfered with. Irene seemed to be out of the office, and Peggy was refilling the cream pitcher. “Oh, poor Aaron,” she said when she saw me. “I heard about your ceiling.”

I sent a malevolent glare toward Nandina’s office door.

“Who are you hiring to fix it?” she asked.

“Just this guy.”

“Because I know a good—”

“Never mind; it’s all seen to,” I said.

Then I added, “Thanks anyhow,” because I might have sounded a little abrupt.

Peggy didn’t seem to take offense. She passed me the cream pitcher, handle first, and asked, “How’s Mr. Hogan’s book coming along?”

“He’s got this really fine buddy I’m reading about,” I told her. “Really fine. You know: just a really, really fine buddy.”

Peggy smiled at me. She was one of those people without any sense of irony. (Well, unless you counted her Little Miss Muffet clothing style, which I sometimes suspected you could count.) Still, it seemed I had to go on now that I was wound up. “It could be worse, I suppose,” I said. “It could be My Years with the City Council. That’s my gold standard.”

Then Charles weighed in, from his desk across the room. “I’d vote for The Life of an Estate Lawyer, myself,” he called, without taking his gaze from the computer screen.

“Oh, good point. How could I have overlooked that one?”

“Remember The Beginner’s Book of Kitchen Remodeling?” Peggy asked me.

“Ye-e-es,” I said. It hadn’t stuck in my mind, especially.

“I was thinking you might find that helpful when you’re dealing with your house repairs.”

“Whoa!” I said. “Actually consult one of our books?”

She nodded, solemnly.

“Good heavens,” I said. “Those books are not meant to be used.”

“They’re not?”

“Well, not in any serious way. They’re more like … gestures. Things you give to other people.”

“But in Kitchen Remodeling they talk about what you should settle with the contractor first, before he starts work. I was thinking that would be good to know.”

The “they” she referred to was me, as it happened — me and a retired kitchen designer from Anne Arundel County. So I just said, “Oh. True,” and took my coffee back to my office without the slightest thought of following her suggestion.

“Remind him it’s a buyer’s market before you settle on the price,” Charles called after me. “Buyer’s? Seller’s? Whichever.”

“Okay.”

Mr. Hogan was describing field maneuvers. Smith and Donaldson were positioned on my left about fifty yards away and Merritt and Helm were holed up in the woods to my right but I didn’t have a visual on them because there was a considerable dip in the terrain running some two hundred yards north-northeast along the …

My eyes wandered toward my bookcase. The Beginner’s series lined several shelves — a rainbow of narrow, shiny spines identical in size. I stood up and went to examine them more closely. They were arranged by publication date, earliest to the most recent. Kitchen Remodeling dated from several years back, and it was on the top shelf. I pulled it out.

“Knowing What You Want” was the first chapter. (Where in your present kitchen do you do your slicing and dicing? DO you, in fact, do any slicing and dicing?) “Communicating with Your Contractor” was the second. Almost the entire remainder of the book consisted of what now seemed to me an inordinately detailed plan for setting up an interim kitchen in a spare bathroom.

I took the book to my desk and sat down to read the contractor chapter. Apparently the essential element was control. Do not assume that, having issued your directives, you can lean back and let your contractor run wild. Inform him or her that you will be checking his or her progress at the end of every workday. Insist that he or she submit a timeline, in writing, outlining the steps to be completed by certain fixed dates. Schedule meetings on a weekly basis, at which you will require him or her to present a record of current expenses.

It was Nandina who was to blame for the him-her business, although otherwise she steered clear of the editing side of things. (For starters, she couldn’t spell. She was one of the smartest women I knew, but she couldn’t spell worth a damn.)

I closed the book on an index finger and reached for the telephone. I punched in the number I’d written down for Gil Bryan.

“Hello,” he said.

At least he wasn’t as gruff as the first man. He spoke at a normal level, above the whirr of some power tool in the background.

I said, “Gil Bryan?”

“Yes.”

“This is Aaron Woolcott. I own that house on Rumor Road where the — where the—”

Stupidly, I could not seem to get the words out.

“Where the tree fell,” Gil Bryan said. “Right.”

But even with his help, I wasn’t able to go on. I can’t explain what happened. My eyes filled with tears and I didn’t trust my voice.

“Are you thinking of getting that fixed?” he asked me after a moment.

I swallowed and said, “Yes.”

“I could come by and take a look, if you like.”

“I’m not there,” I said. I cleared my throat.

“Maybe after you get home from work, then?”

“I mean, I’m not ever there. I’m staying with my sister. That rain we’ve had broke through the tarp and the hall ceiling fell in.”

Gil Bryan made a whistling sound through his teeth.

“I was thinking,” I said, “could you stop by my sister’s house around five-thirty and I’d just give you the key so you could go check the place out?”

“Check it out on my own, you’re saying?”

“Yes.”

There was a pause. Then he said, “Well, I could do that, I guess. But it’d be better to have you along.”

I said nothing.

“So, okay,” he said. “I’ll go it alone.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re talking about just the roof? Or the interior, too.”

“Everything. I don’t know. Just take care of it. You decide.”

“Everything? What kind of time frame are you looking for?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “However much time it takes, I guess.”

Then I gave him Nandina’s address, and hung up, and put The Beginner’s Book of Kitchen Remodeling back in its place on the shelf.

· · ·

I’d chosen five-thirty for a reason: Nandina would still be at work. She made it a point of honor, most evenings, to stay longer than anyone else in the office. So she wouldn’t be there to horn in on my first consultation with Gil Bryan. She wouldn’t find out that it was my first consultation.

But my sister has an uncanny sixth sense; I can’t think of any other way to explain it. She knocked on my door at a quarter till five and stuck her head in and said, “I’m going now. See you at home.”

“You’re going now?”

“I might as well. I’m at a good stopping place,” she said. She had her purse slung over her shoulder.

So, by the time I got there, she was already in the kitchen starting dinner preparations. And when the doorbell rang, she arrived in the hall right behind me, wiping her hands on the hem of the apron that covered her housecoat.

Gil Bryan had the dingy, dusty look of a man who’d been at hard labor all day, but the skin beneath his eyes was still shining, and I felt the same sense of trust that I had before. I said, “Come in, Mr. Bryan,” and he said, “Gil.”

“Aaron,” I told him, and we shook hands. (He had a hand like a baseball mitt.) Then I had to add, “This is my sister, Nandina,” because she was still standing there. “Contractor,” I told her curtly, and she said, “Oh,” and backed off and returned to the kitchen.

“Come in and have a seat,” I said to Gil.

“Oh, I’m all dirty. I’ll just take the key and be on my way.”

I fished my key case out of my pocket. As I was unhooking my house key, I asked, “Are you planning on going over there this evening?”

“I figured I would.”

“Because I’m not sure the electricity is working.”

“Huh,” he said. “Okay, I’ll go in the morning. Check it out during daylight. How about I come by here tomorrow, same time, once I know what’s what.”

“Sounds good,” I said. I handed him the key.

“And you want me looking at everything.”

“Everything,” I said. “Make a list.”

“Okay, then,” he said. But I could tell he was baffled by my attitude.

We shook hands again, and he left. Not two seconds later, Nandina popped out of the kitchen. “That didn’t take long,” she said.

“He just needed a key, was all.”

She nodded, apparently satisfied, and returned to her cooking.

But over dinner she asked, “How exactly did you get this contractor’s name?”

“Through Jim Rust,” I told her.

She cocked her head, like someone who thought she’d heard an off-note in a song. She said, “Jim Rust has used his services personally?”

“Yes, of course,” I said, although I didn’t know that for a fact. Then I said, “It’s a done deal, Nandina. Butt out.”

“Well! Sorry,” she said.

We ate the rest of the meal without talking.

· · ·

The following evening, I had Gil to myself. I was waiting at the house for him when he rang the doorbell.

“Hey there,” he said, and I said, “Come on in.”

This time, he had clean clothes on — a chambray shirt and fresh khakis — and he accepted the seat I offered him on the couch. I sat at the other end of it. He was holding a crisp white file folder, I was happy to see. It implied some degree of professionalism. He opened the folder on the coffee table and spread out an array of papers covered in surprisingly small, tidy, uppercase handwriting.

“So, okay, Aaron, here’s what we’ve got,” he said.

I was happy, too, that he used my first name. Workmen who persist in saying “Mr.,” even after you’ve told them not to, always strike me as deliberately off-putting.

“You were right about the electric,” he told me. “There’s been a short in the wires, on account of the water dripping down through the walls to the basement. For that I’m going to bring in Watkins Wattage, but they can’t make it over to take a look till—”

I heard the front door open. Nandina called, “Aaron?”

Damn. She appeared in the living-room entrance.

“Oh!” she said.

Gil stood up. “Evening,” he said.

“Good evening.”

“We’re busy going over some figures,” I told her.

I gave her a look that she couldn’t possibly mistake, and she said, “Oh, all right; don’t let me interrupt,” and backed hastily out of the room.

“You were saying—?” I asked Gil.

He had sat down again, and he was riffling through his papers. “There’s structural damage in the attic,” he said. “That’s the worst of it. Some of the rafters need replacing. Roof, of course, and the insulation’s shot; and so are the hallway and kitchen ceilings and the cabinets on the west wall. Chimney will want rebuilding, too. Chimneys are kind of a big deal, I hate to say. Now, moving on to the sunporch—”

“Can’t we just take that off?” I asked.

“Say what?”

“Take the sunporch off; demolish it. It’s a lost cause, anyhow, and it was only tacked on to begin with. It’s not a part of the main—”

“Would you two like some refreshment?” Nandina asked. She had reappeared, but from the dining room this time.

“No,” I told her.

“Mr. Bryan?”

“Gil,” he said. He had risen once more to his feet. “No, thanks.”

“A cold beer, maybe?”

“No, thanks.”

“Or a glass of wine?”

“Thanks anyway.”

“We don’t have anything harder,” Nandina said. She had ventured a few feet farther into the room; any minute now she would plop herself down in an armchair, as if this were a topic that required deep discussion. “I know it’s still gin-and-tonic weather, but—”

I said, “Nandina.”

“What?”

“That’s okay,” Gil told her. “I don’t drink.”

“Oh.”

“AA,” he said. He straightened his back as he spoke, almost defiantly, but then he raised a hand to feel for his beard in this uncertain sort of manner.

Nandina said, “Oh, I’m sorry!”

“That’s okay.”

I was fully expecting Nandina to segue into the non-alcoholic side of the menu, but before she could, Gil told her, “We were just talking about the sunporch. Aaron here is saying how he wants to take it off.”

“Take it off? Take it off of the house?”

“That’s what he’s been saying.”

“Well, that makes no sense whatsoever,” Nandina told me. “You’ll lower the resale value.”

I said, “What do I care about the resale value?”

“It’s a tiny house as it is. You need that room.”

“Nandina, do you mind? We’re trying to have a private conversation.”

“You’re just mad at the sunporch; that’s what it is.”

“Mad!”

“You’re just … emotional about it, because of what happened there.”

“For God’s sake, Nandina, what business is that of yours?”

“Here’s a thought,” Gil broke in. He spoke in an extra-quiet, reasonable-sounding voice, as if negotiating a treaty. “What if we were to keep the sunporch but change the orientation.”

I said, “Orientation?”

“Like, right now it looks like you had a desk kind of arrangement along that wall of shelving that joins the house, am I right?”

The wall where the TV had hung, the one that killed her. I nodded.

He said, “How about we plan now for your desk to face the front, in the middle of the room. Better anyway, right? You’d be looking out on the front yard. And then we’d run a row of shelves all around the circumference, underneath the windows. Just low shelves, built in. It would be, like, a whole new different setup.”

I said, “Well. I don’t know.”

Although I did see his point.

Which Nandina must have guessed, because she said, “Thank you, Mr. Bryan.”

Then she turned and left us alone, finally, and Gil sat back down on the couch and we went on with his papers.

Mr. Hogan said he’d had an inspiration about his war book. He thought it should include his letters home to his mother. That was fine with me. We were merely his printers. But what I hadn’t realized was that he meant to submit the letters in their original, handwritten form. He set them on my desk one day in early October: a three-inch stack of envelopes bound with a satin ribbon that had probably once been blue. “Now, here is an example,” he said, slipping one envelope free. He hadn’t even sat down yet, although I’d offered him a chair. He was a tiny, stooped, white-haired man with squarish patches of pink in his cheeks that made him look enthusiastic. He drew the letter from the envelope with his crabbed fingers. Even from where I stood, I could see that it was almost illegible: a penciled scrawl, faded to silver, on bumpy onionskin paper.

I said, “You’d have to get them typed, of course.”

“Here I’m telling her all about what they give us to eat. I’m telling how I miss her fried shad and her shad roe.”

“Mr. Hogan? Are you planning to have these typed?”

“I’m saying how I haven’t had real biscuits since I left home.”

“Who typed your original manuscript?” I asked him. It had arrived looking quite presentable, which wasn’t something we could take for granted in our business. (And we didn’t have even a hope of any sort of electronic submission.)

“That was my daughter-in-law did those,” he told me.

“Could your daughter-in-law type these letters, too?”

“I don’t want to ask her.”

No point inquiring why, I supposed. People’s goodwill wears out. It happens. I walked over to open my office door. “Peggy?” I called. “Could you bring in that list of professional typists?”

“Right away.”

“Is this something I would have to pay for?” Mr. Hogan asked me.

“Well, yes.”

“Because I’m not made of money, you know.”

“I doubt it would be that expensive.”

“I’ve already spent my life savings on this.”

Peggy walked in, holding a sheet of paper. She seemed to be wearing a crinoline underneath her skirt. I didn’t know you could even buy crinolines anymore. She asked, “How’s the arthritis today, Mr. Hogan?”

“He says I’m going to have to get these letters typed,” Mr. Hogan told her.

“Oh, well,” Peggy said, “I’ve got a nice long list here of people who can help you with that.”

“I don’t think I can afford it.”

Peggy glanced down at her list, as if she might find some solution there.

“These are letters I wrote to my mother,” Mr. Hogan said, offering forth the one letter in both hands. “I thought they might add a little something to my story.”

“Oh, letters from the front are always good,” Peggy told him.

“Mine are more like, from Florida.”

“Still,” Peggy said.

“I write about how I miss her cooking. Her shad and her shad roe.”

“I love shad roe,” Peggy said.

I said, “Well, in any event—”

“I’m living on a fixed income,” Mr. Hogan said. He was peering intently into Peggy’s eyes, and the letter he held was trembling.

Peggy said, “I’ll tell you what, Mr. Hogan. Why don’t I just type them.”

As if I hadn’t seen that one coming.

“Would you charge me?” Mr. Hogan asked.

“Oh, no,” she said. “It won’t be any trouble.”

“Well, thank you,” he told her. A little too easily, in my opinion.

I said, “That’s very nice of you, Peggy,” but in a severe tone, as if I were reproving her.

It was wasted on both of them, though. Peggy merely dimpled at me, and Mr. Hogan was busy fitting his letter back in its envelope.

I always worried our older clients might feel insulted by Peggy. Her honeyed voice and her overly respectful manner could have been viewed as, let’s say, patronizing. Condescending. I would have found her condescending. But no one else seemed to. Mr. Hogan placed his stack of letters in her hand quite happily, and then he said to me, with a combative lift of his chin, “I was sure it would all work out!”

Somehow, I had turned into the heavy. It wasn’t the first time.

When Mr. Hogan had gone, I told Peggy, “I certainly hope you know what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

“Oh, yes,” she said blandly.

Then she offered to fetch me a cup of coffee, even though it was mid-afternoon. I never drank coffee in the afternoon, as she very well knew. She was just changing the subject.

If it hadn’t been for Peggy, Dorothy would have found her Triscuits exactly where she had left them. I thought about that, sometimes. I turned it over in my mind: could I say that, if not for Peggy, Dorothy would still be alive? But it didn’t really compute. Often, Dorothy had taken her six Triscuits to the sunporch with her. Most likely it would not have changed a thing if she had found them.

So I couldn’t really hold that against Peggy. Although I seemed to hold something against her, these days. She was just so, what was it, so sweetie-sweet. And Irene was doing her best to avoid me, as if grief might be contagious, and Charles couldn’t even meet my eyes. Oh, I was sick to death of my officemates.

Maybe I should take a vacation. But how would I fill my time, then? I didn’t even have any hobbies.

“I should start volunteering or something,” I told Peggy. “Sign on with some sort of charity. Except that I can’t think of anything specific I could do.”

Peggy seemed about to say something, but then she must have changed her mind.

My insurance agent’s name turned out to be Concepción. How could I have forgotten that? She had more dealings with Gil than with me. I gave her Gil’s cell-phone number and the two of them grew thick as thieves, conferring by e-mail and in person and faxing documents back and forth. Gil’s file folder metamorphosed into a three-inch-thick, color-tabbed notebook stuffed with estimates, receipts, diagrams, and lists. He brought it over most evenings after supper and sat on the couch to lay papers the length of the coffee table, explaining his progress in a degree of detail that would have more than satisfied The Beginner’s Book of Kitchen Remodeling. Already the damaged rafters had been replaced and the roof was nearly finished. He was aiming to beat the weather, he said. He would tackle the interior later, after it grew too cold to work outside. He had hired two extra carpenters and so far things were on schedule, as I would see for myself if I ever came to check it all out.

I said, “Maybe one of these days.”

He looked at me for a moment. I thought he was going to start pressing me the way other people did (my sister, to be exact), but all he said, finally, was, “Okay.”

“I mean, of course I’ll stop in at some point.”

“Sure,” he said. “Meantime, I’ll just keep on coming by here. It’s no trouble.”

Whom did he remind me of then? Oh, of course: Peggy. Peggy with Mr. Hogan, so let-me-help-you and tactful. He and Peggy would make a good couple, in fact. I had to grin at the picture of it: Peggy in her china-shepherdess crinoline, hand in hand with grizzly-bear Gil.

“Hey,” I said. “Gil. Do you have a wife?”

He said, “Aw, no,” in the bashful, head-ducking manner of someone deflecting a compliment.

“You’ve never been married?”

“Nope.” He rubbed his beard. “I had a kind of misspent youth,” he allowed after a moment. “Dropped out of college, got in with the wrong crowd … I guess I missed the window for getting married.”

“Well, you certainly seem to have straightened yourself out.”

“Believe me,” he said, “if it wasn’t for my cousin, I’d still be falling off of some barstool. My cousin Abner; he took me into his business. Saved my life, really.”

“How about your brother?” I asked.

“What brother?”

“Isn’t it Bryan Brothers General Contracting?”

“Well, yeah. But that’s only because ‘Bryan Cousins’ wouldn’t work.”

“It wouldn’t?”

“Think about it. Everybody’d call up on the phone: ‘Could I speak to Mr. Cousins, please?’ ”

I laughed.

“No, I don’t have any brothers,” he said. “Just a bunch of sisters, always on my tail.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. “Sisters.”

“Say,” he said, as if seizing his chance. “Pardon me for mentioning this, but I’ve been wondering if you’d want to do something about your things.”

“My things,” I said.

“Your papers and such and your personal things that you left behind in your house. Your mail, even. Any time I walk in, there’s mail all over your front-hall floor. It’s no bother to me, bringing it over, but did you know you could just get online and notify the Post Office to start delivering here?”

“You’re right,” I said. “I’ll do that.”

“And then your kitchen items. Your dishes in the cupboards. Once we start to work inside, you’ll want to box all that up and move it to the bedroom or someplace.”

“I’ll see to it,” I told him.

“Your sister took the stuff from the fridge already, but there’s other things, cereals and canned goods and things.”

“My sister’s been there?”

“Just to get the stuff from the fridge.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“I guess she didn’t want to bother you with it.”

I looked down at the sheet of expenses I was holding. I said, “I realize I must seem sort of unreasonable about going back to the house. It’s just that I think I’d feel, maybe, overwhelmed or something.”

He said, “Well. I get that.”

“To tell the truth, I don’t know if I’ll ever want to go there.”

“Oh, wait till you see how we fix it up,” he told me. “I was thinking we might put a lighter shade of floorboard in the front hall. I mean, assuming you approved it.”

“But even so,” I said. “Even with lighter floorboards.”

He waited, patiently, with his eyes fixed on mine.

“Hey!” I said. “You wouldn’t want to buy the place, would you? Buy it for, like, an investment? Once you get it fixed up you could make a tidy profit, I bet.”

Then I gave a sort of laugh, in case he laughed himself. But he didn’t. He said, “I don’t have the money.”

“Oh.”

“Look,” he said. “Don’t worry about your stuff. I’ll just have my guys box it up, as long as you don’t mind them messing with it.”

“Of course I don’t mind,” I told him. “I probably wouldn’t miss it if they took it all to the dump.”

“Oh, they won’t do that. Then, anything we find that we think you might need here, I’ll just bring it over in the truck the next time I come.”

“Well, thanks,” I said.

I cleared my throat.

I said, “One other thing …”

He waited.

I said, “Do you think you could bring me some clothes?”

“Clothes.”

“Just whatever’s in my closet, and the bureau across from my bed?”

“Huh,” he said.

I gestured toward what I was wearing. So far I had been making do with the clothes I’d found in my old room, but there was no denying that I was dressed a bit too youthfully. “You could just throw it all in your truck bed,” I said. “I’m not asking you to pack it up or anything.”

“Well,” he said, “we can handle that.”

“Thank you,” I said.

· · ·

I knew I should have felt grateful to Nandina for making that fridge trip. (Even though I had no doubt there’d been an investigative element to it.) Oh, whenever I took the trouble to notice, I could see that I was surrounded by people who were doing their best to look out for me. It wasn’t only Nandina. Charles brought me foil-wrapped loaves of his wife’s banana bread, heavy as bricks. Irene left fliers on my desk for life-threatening adventures designed to take my mind off myself — hang-gliding and rock-climbing and coral-reef-diving. My ex-neighbors called frequently with dinner invitations, and when I made excuses they said, “O-ka-ay …,” in this reluctant drawl that implied they were letting me off the hook this time, but not forever. And Luke had turned our supper at the restaurant into an almost-weekly event, while Nate had reinstated our racquetball games at the gym.

But I wasn’t all that good at gracious acceptance. Oh, especially not with Nandina. With Nandina I was constantly on the defensive, bristling at every intrusion and batting away her most well-meant remarks. Not that she didn’t deserve some of this. The things she came up with! Once, for instance, she said, “At least you’re not going to have to make any big domestic adjustments. I mean, seeing as how Dorothy never cooked your meals for you or anything.”

(“No,” was my rejoinder to that, “we had a very equitable marriage. We treated each other like two competent adults.”)

Or another time, when I undertook to do the laundry for the two of us: “No doubt Dorothy found it sufficient to split the wash into just whites and colors,” she told me in a forbearing tone, “but as a rule we divide the colors, then, into pales and darks.”

I didn’t let on that Dorothy would more likely have thrown all three categories into one washer load and let it go at that.

More and more often I could hear my sister thinking, It’s too bad his wife had to die, but was she really worth quite this much grief? Does he have to go on and on about it?

“You assume people won’t notice if you skip a day’s shaving or wear the same clothes all week,” she said, “but they do. Betsy Hardy told me she crossed the street the other day when she saw you coming, because she thought you wouldn’t want to be caught looking the way you did. I said, ‘Well, you were sweet to be so considerate, Betsy, but frankly, I don’t believe he’d even care.’ ”

“Betsy Hardy? I didn’t see her.”

“She saw you, is my point,” Nandina said. “I thought you were planning to fetch some better-looking clothes from your house.”

“Oh, Gil’s going to bring those over.”

“What: you mean you’d let him go through your belongings?”

“Well, yes.”

She gave me a narrow-eyed look. “When Jim Rust recommended Gil,” she said, “did he give you any clue to his background? Did he tell you what his history is? Where he’s from? Is he a Baltimore person?”

“He’s fine, Nandina. Take my word for it.”

“I was just curious, is all.”

“He never should have let you know that he was in AA.”

“I don’t have anything against AA.”

“It’s better than not being in AA if he ought to be,” I pointed out.

“Well, of course it is. You think AA is why I asked about his background? I’m completely sympathetic to his being in AA! Why, every time he comes over I offer him fruit juice or lemonade.”

“True,” I said.

But I knew that was only because she’d caught him once with a can of Coke. Nandina had a real thing about soft drinks. She didn’t just dislike them; she viewed them with moral outrage. If there were a twelve-step program for cola drinkers, I bet she would have sent them a hefty contribution.

Well, but listen to me. I had no business complaining about her. She had taken me in without hesitation when I didn’t have anywhere else to go, and she hadn’t shown the least annoyance at my upsetting her private routine. She was my closest living relative. We shared childhood memories that no one else had been part of.

Often, when we were by ourselves, one of us would start a sentence the way our father used to. “Needles to say …” we would begin — Dad’s habitual little joke, if you could call it that. And the other one would smile.

Or when I was sorting through the porcelain bowl after Gil brought it over — the bowl from my front hall, with its layers of junk mail and take-out menus and random chits of paper. I spread it all on the kitchen table one night while Nandina was fixing supper, and there was Bryan Brothers’ business card. I said, “Gilead!”

“What?”

“That’s Gil’s name: Gilead Bryan. I’d been assuming it was Gilbert.”

Nandina stopped stirring the soup and said, “Gilead. Like the song?”

“Like the song,” I said, and it was another “Needles to say” moment, because how many other people would come up with “There Is a Balm in Gilead”? It was our mother’s favorite hymn, the one she sang when she washed the dishes, only I always thought it was a bomb in Gilead, and when one of our cousins made fun of me for singing it that way, Nandina cracked him over the head with a Monopoly board.

Living in this house again was not half bad, really. In a way it was kind of cozy.

At Christmastime, the company always made a big production out of one of our past titles, The Beginner’s Book of Gifts. We arranged to have it displayed next to cash registers all over town, with a red satin bow tied around each copy. I myself felt the bow was illogical. After all, the book was about gifts; it was not a gift in itself. But Irene was very fond of the bow, which she had dreamed up several years back, and Charles claimed it went over well. Generally we deferred to Charles in matters of public taste. He was the only one of us who led what I thought of as a normal life — married to the same woman since forever, with triplet teenage daughters. He liked to tell little domestic-comedy, Brady Bunch-style anecdotes about the daughters, and the rest of us would hang around listening like a bunch of anthropologists studying foreign customs.

Nandina and I let Christmas pass almost unobserved. We had stopped exchanging gifts years ago, and apart from the balsam wreath that Nandina brought home from the supermarket we made no attempt to decorate. On Christmas Day we went to Aunt Selma’s for dinner, as we had done since our childhood. Even my marriage hadn’t changed that, although Dorothy and I had sworn every year that we would do something different the next time Christmas came around. The food was dismal, and the guest list had shrunk as various relatives died or moved away. This year there were just five at the table: Aunt Selma herself, Nandina and I, and Aunt Selma’s son Roger with his much younger third wife, Ann-Marie. We had not seen Roger and Ann-Marie since the previous Christmas, so there was the issue of Dorothy’s death to be waded through. Roger was one of those people in favor of pretending it hadn’t happened. He was clearly embarrassed that I had had the bad taste to show up, even. But Ann-Marie plunged right in. “I was so, so sorry,” she said, “to hear about Dorothy’s passing.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“And last Christmas, she was looking so well!”

“Yes … she was well.”

“How are you doing, though?” she asked me.

“I’m okay.”

“I mean, really how.”

“I’m doing all right, all things considered.”

“I ask because my girlfriend? — Louise? — she just lost her husband.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He passed away yesterday morning. Leukemia.”

“Yesterday!” Aunt Selma said. “Christmas Eve day?”

“Yes, and you just know she’ll never celebrate a Christmas again that she won’t be reminded of Barry.”

“Also, it must make scheduling the funeral so awkward,” Aunt Selma said.

“But, Aaron?” Ann-Marie asked. “Do you have any words of wisdom I might pass on to her?”

“Words of wisdom,” I said.

“Like, how to handle the grieving process?”

“I wish I did,” I said. “Afraid I can’t be much help.”

“Oh, well. I’ll just tell her you seem to have survived it,” she said.

Roger said, “Honestly, Ann-Marie!” as if surviving a loved one’s death were somehow reprehensible. But the odd thing was, right at that moment I realized that I had survived it. I pictured Ann-Marie’s friend waking up this morning, the first full day of her life without her husband, and I thanked heaven that I was past that stage myself. Even though I still felt a constant ache, I seemed unknowingly to have traveled a little distance away from that first unbearable pain.

I sat up straighter and drew a deep breath, and it was then that I began to believe that I really might make my way through this.

And yet, just two nights later, I had one of those dreamlike thoughts that drift past as you’re falling asleep. Why! I thought. Dorothy hasn’t phoned me lately!

She used to phone from her office during the early days of our marriage, just to say hello and see how my work was going. So the honeymoon was over, it seemed. I felt a little tug of regret, even though I knew it was only to be expected.

But then I came fully awake and I thought, Oh. She’s dead.

And it wasn’t any easier than it had been at the very beginning. I can’t do this, I thought. I don’t know how. They don’t offer any courses in this; I haven’t had any practice.

Really, I had made no progress whatsoever.

True winter arrived in mid-January. There was a snowfall of several inches, and then some weeks of bitter cold. But by that time the exterior work on my house was mostly finished and Gil’s men had moved indoors. He told me they were replastering the ceilings now. “Oh, good,” I said. I didn’t go see for myself. Nandina did, though. She reported it to me afterward; said she had felt that somebody ought to make up for my rudeness. I said, “Rudeness? Who was I rude to?”

“The plasterers, of course,” she said. “Workmen need to know that their work is appreciated. They did an excellent job on those ceilings. Not a flaw to be seen.”

“Well, good.”

“Next you need to choose your hall flooring.”

“Yes, Nandina. Gil showed me the samples. I voted for Maple Syrup.”

“You voted for Warm Honey. But how will you know what Warm Honey looks like in your actual hall, when you’re sitting on the couch in my living room?”

“Okay, you go,” I told her, “since you seem to feel so strongly about it.”

She went. She came back to announce that Warm Honey was all right, she supposed, but in her opinion Butterscotch would work better.

I said, “Fine. Butterscotch it is.”

I expected that to settle things, but somehow she didn’t look satisfied.

In the middle of the slack period between Christmas and Easter, Charles proposed a new marketing ploy. “Gift season’s coming up,” he said. “Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, graduation, June weddings … What do you say we offer a collection of Beginner’s books, slipcased together according to theme. For instance, wedding couples could get The Beginner’s Kitchen Equipment, The Beginner’s Menu Plan, and The Beginner’s Dinner Party. No new publications involved; just existing ones, repackaged in a single color. I see high-gloss white for the wedding couples. Pink for Mother’s Day, maybe. Are you all with me here?”

Nandina said, “Could you not have brought this up in this morning’s meeting, Charles?” It was late afternoon, and we were all in the outer office. Nandina was leaving early again. She had her coat draped over one arm. But Charles tipped comfortably back in his chair and said, “This morning I hadn’t thought of it yet. I thought of it over lunch. That always happens to me when I have a martini at lunch. I really ought to drink more.”

Nandina rolled her eyes, and Irene laughed without looking up from the catalogue she was studying. But I said, “I see your point.”

“It can’t be just any martini, though,” he told me. “I favor the ones at Montague’s. They seem to have special powers.”

“I mean about the boxed sets,” I said. It had been a slow day, and I’d killed some time rearranging the Beginner’s series by title rather than date. All the subjects were fresh in my mind. I said, “For the college graduates, say, we could have Job Application, House Hunt, and Monthly Budget. Maybe Kitchen Equipment in that set as well.”

“Exactly,” Charles said. “And we could easily update any of the older titles that needed it.”

Peggy said, “But a slipcase is so limiting! Someone graduating from college might not be ready to buy a house yet. Or a bride might have bought Monthly Budget back when she first left home.”

“That’s the beauty of it,” Charles told her. “People like complete sets. It fulfills some kind of collector’s instinct. They’ll buy a book all over again if it’s changed color to match the others in a unit. Or they’ll say, ‘I’m sure eventually I’ll be needing to house-hunt.’ ”

“You’re right,” Irene said. She set her catalogue down, one long scarlet fingernail marking her place. She said, “I just bought a brand-new boxed set of Anne of Green Gables, even though I already own most of it in various editions.”

“You read Anne of Green Gables?” I asked her.

Peggy said, “Oh! That’s true! I did the exact same thing with the Winnie-the-Pooh books.”

Somehow, that was easier to visualize than Irene’s curling up with Anne of Green Gables.

Only Nandina seemed unconvinced. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” she said as she headed for the door. “I’m late for an appointment.”

“It’s an idea, though, don’t you think?” Charles called after her. And then to the rest of us, since Nandina was already gone, “Don’t you think?”

“I do,” Irene told him. “It’s actually a brilliant idea.”

“Oh, just Beginner’s Marketing,” he said modestly.

“Beginner’s Flimflam, is more like it,” I told him.

“Hey! You said yourself that you saw my point.”

“Well, yes,” I said.

I was probably a bit jealous. Irene never said any of my ideas were brilliant.

I had one more commitment that day before I could leave: a meeting in my office with a Mr. Dupont, who wanted to publish his travel memoirs. The title of his book was Contents May Have Shifted During Flight, which I found promising, but the manuscript itself — at least as near as I could tell from leafing through it while he sat there — consisted of the usual eat-your-heart-out descriptions of breathtaking mountain views he had seen and delicious native dishes he had eaten. None of my concern, of course. We discussed costs, publication schedule, et cetera, and then I told him I was looking forward to doing business with him, and we stood up and shook hands and he left.

Peggy was the only one remaining in the outer office. She sat with her back to me, typing, and I was about to stop and make some friendly remark about how she shouldn’t work too late when she said, still clicking away, “Don’t forget your cane.”

That irritated me, so I didn’t stop after all. I said, “Got it,” and walked past her to the coat tree, where I had hung my cane that morning.

“Twice last week you went home without it,” she said.

“Yes? And? You admit I somehow managed to hobble back in the next day, even so.”

Behind me, the computer keys went silent. I turned to find her looking at me with her very wide, very blue eyes.

“Oh,” she said. “Are we supposed to pretend you don’t use a cane?”

“No, I … It’s just that in actual fact I actually don’t really need it,” I said. “I could do without it altogether if I had to.”

“Oh.”

I felt sort of bad about barking at her, but by that time she had gone back to her typing and so I just said, “Good night, then.”

“Night,” she said, without looking up.

It hadn’t escaped my notice that I was very snappish these days. I thought about it as I was driving home. At our office meeting that morning, when Nandina brought us to order by tapping her pen against her coffee mug, I had nearly bitten her head off. “For God’s sake, Nan,” I had said, “do you have to act as if this were the Continental Congress?” But Nandina, after all, could give as good as she got. (“Yes, I do have to,” she’d said, “and you know perfectly well that I hate to be called ‘Nan.’ ”) Peggy, on the other hand … A child might have drawn those eyes of hers, with the lashes rayed around them like sunbeams.

I parked in front of Nandina’s and thought, I’m turning into one of those grouches that kids are scared to visit on Halloween.

Nandina’s car was in the driveway, I was sorry to see. I had hoped she wouldn’t be back from her appointment yet. I sighed and heaved myself out from behind the wheel. Maybe I could head straight upstairs to my room — bypass her entirely.

But when I opened the front door, I heard her talking in the kitchen. Evidently her appointment was here at the house; some workman, perhaps. And then the workman answered her and it was Gil. I recognized his voice even if I couldn’t catch the words. Still in my jacket, I went out to the kitchen. “Hello?” I said.

Gil was sitting at the table, with his parka draped over his chair back and the sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled up. Nandina stood at the counter, slicing an orange. “Aaron!” she said, turning. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Hi, Gil,” I said, and he raised one baseball-mitt hand and said, “How you doing, Aaron.”

“Everything okay at the house?” I asked. He didn’t usually come by till later in the evening.

But he said, “Oh, yes,” and then started patting his shirt pockets. “I did bring that lighting estimate,” he said. “Somewhere here …”

“I’m making Gil a drink,” Nandina told me. “Would you care for one?”

“What’s in it?”

“Orange juice, a kiwi, ginger root, a papaya—”

“Wow.”

“—half a cantaloupe, two stalks of celery …”

She had her juice extractor out on the counter — a complicated piece of equipment I hadn’t seen in use since that time a few years back when she was dating a vegan. It had turned out to be a lot of work, as I recalled. Supposedly you could clean the thing in the dishwasher, but that wasn’t very practical, since the various parts constituted an entire load in themselves.

Wait.

When she was dating a …

I looked from her to Gil, who was sitting there placidly waiting for his drink. I looked again at Nandina.

She blushed.

I said, “Oh.”