“Sure thing,” she said and was grateful to get to work.
After she was finished and she’d removed the bib from around his neck, he stood up and reached in his pocket for his wallet. “You can just pay the receptionist,” Elsbeth said.
“Well, I’d like to tip you,” he said, handing her a five. “And this is my card. I’m hoping I might take you out for coffee and ask you some questions.”
Elsbeth opened her eyes wide. She didn’t wear her wedding band to work because she was so afraid of losing it in one of the sinks, but she was also pretty sure she hadn’t done anything to give this guy any ideas. She could feel her skin grow hot, the tips of her ears burning. She self-consciously pulled her hair over her hot ears. “Some questions about what?” she asked.
“About Two Rivers, actually. I was born here.”
“So?” she said. “Lots of people were born here and don’t ask to take me out to coffee to talk about it.”
“I mean
here,
” he said, gesturing across the street. “My father lived upstairs in that building. And his wife’s father owned this shop. I think that might be her right there,” he said, walking to the photo of the girl, Betsy Parker, on the wall.
“No kidding! But you don’t look ...” She felt herself blush again.
“I’m kind of adopted,” he said. “I’m a journalist, but I’m working on a memoir. I’m here doing some research. It’s a long story, but pretty great actually. I’ll tell it to you if you meet me for coffee.”
She glanced at the card in her hand: W
ILDER
M
ONTGOMERY,
R
EPORTER,
T
HE
T
AMPA
T
RIBUNE.
Her hands trembled.
“You’re the owner, right? Babette?” He gestured to the glowing neon sign.
She felt herself nodding despite herself. “Babette,” she said. Babette, the real Babette, was on her annual trip to visit her brother in Colorado.
“I’m staying over at the Econo Lodge,” he said. “The one near the interstate?”
She looked at the business card again. “You live in Florida,” she said, her heart beating hard in her chest.
He smiled again, his eyes blue, blue, blue. “That’s right. The Sunshine State.”
O
n Tuesday afternoon, Kurt stared at the stack of bills on his desk in the shop. When he first took over the shop for Pop, he’d been on top of everything. He paid the business’s bills as they came in, actually feeling a sense of accomplishment each time he signed his name to one of the long business checks in the ledger he kept in the bottom drawer. Now his throat grew thick and his legs itched whenever he pulled the monstrous book out. The custom checks that had once seemed official and professional now just struck him as oversized and pretentious.
Kurt’s phone buzzed in his pocket. The shock of it was like a Taser. He’d just hung up with Elsbeth and wasn’t expecting a call.
“Pop?” he said.
“I need you to come by.”
“Jesus, what for, Pop?”
“Now don’t get your tit in a wringer,” he said. “I just need some help making sense of these papers.”
“What papers, Pop?”
“Love letters from some lady at the county.”
“Oh shit, Pop.”
From what he could gather, Irene Killjoy, the lady from the county, had come at the crack of dawn that morning with papers. Not a condemnation sign, yet, thank God, but a letter signed by every neighbor within a mile radius of Jude’s house, except for Maury Vorhies, who had apparently refused to sign. Theresa Bouchard had spearheaded the campaign and gone to the county, letters in hand. The cleaned-up yard and porch had apparently gone unnoticed, but the raccoons under the porch and the possible rat infestation had not. Neither had the three inoperable, unregistered vehicles in the yard nor the exposed electrical panel where the siding had rotted away. And as a result of the complaints, the county had sent out inspectors, who had quickly come up with a list of thirty-five health and fire code violations.
Kurt dialed the number Pop had read to him and listened as Miss Killjoy primly answered the phone.
“It’s uninhabitable,” she said to Kurt. “It poses a serious danger to public safety.”
“It’s a private residence,” Kurt said. “It’s not a danger to anyone except for my father.”
“Then you certainly must at least be concerned about his health and welfare.”
Kurt felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach. “Of course I am
concerned
. Jesus Christ,” he said.
“
Mr. Kennedy, please
. The reality is your father’s home is in violation of multiple building codes, including the presence of numerous fire hazards,” she said. “At this point, it’s become a risk not only to your father but to the public as well.”
“We’ll get it cleaned up, but I need some time. I’m trying to run a business,” Kurt said. He looked around at the sad shop, at that awful checkbook ledger.
“Listen, I understand your plight, Mr. Kennedy. And we only want what is best for your father. We can certainly send in some of the residents at the detention center, if you’d like. We frequently use opportunities like this for the inmates to fulfill their community service requirements.”
The hair on Kurt’s arms bristled. “You’re going to send
prisoners
into my father’s home? What kind of harebrained plan is that?”
There was silence at the other end of the line.
“Sir, we’ll be sending the inspectors out again in thirty days. If these violations are not corrected, the county is going to take matters into its own hands. I would really consider this as an option.”
Kurt considered the list of violations Pop had read off to him. He closed his eyes and imagined the inside of his father’s house. It would take an army to get the place emptied out, cleaned up, and brought up to code in thirty days. He wondered if there were any legal loopholes they might find. Like he had money for a lawyer, and calling Billy again would just about kill him.
He tried to think about who he could ask for help. There were Nick and Marty; they’d practically been like brothers to Kurt when he was growing up. They’d both lay down their lives for him if he asked them to. But neither of them knew about Pop, about how bad things had gotten. He’d be so ashamed for them to see the kind of squalor Pop was living in. There were a couple of guys Pop went hunting with, a few men from his old bowling league, but cleaning up some old man’s crap was hardly on the list of favors Kurt felt comfortable asking for. He didn’t want to involve Elsbeth, so that left him and Trevor. And, hopefully, Maury, who, at least, had been a contractor before he retired. If Beal could watch the shop for a bit, they could get in there and clean. He could get a Dumpster in, though the rental alone would set him back $500 or more. And never mind the problem of what to do with Pop. They would never get that shit hole cleaned out with Pop monitoring their every move. He’d practically thrown a tantrum over a box of his mother’s old
Ladies’ Home Journals
that were rotting out on the porch.
They had thirty days.
Thirty days
.
He thought about the piles and piles of papers and trash, the mountains of debris teetering on all the flat surfaces of his father’s house, and wondered if he was fooling himself. What he needed to do was to call Billy. There had to be a way to get an extension on the county’s deadline, and Billy was the only lawyer he knew. But asking Billy to help with Pop would be like asking the pope to perform an abortion. Billy had left Two Rivers and never looked back. And the last time Billy and Pop had been in the same room, Pop had nearly killed him.
Kurt crouched down under the counter and opened the safe. After he spun the knob, listening to the tick, tick of the lock, he leaned his forehead against the cool metal. The thin envelope marked
Emergency
seemed to mock him. He’d been saving cash, just a bit here and there for years now, since Trevor was born. Five dollars here and there, every now and then a ten spot. He never counted it; vowed never to dip into it. It was his entire life savings. It was not to be touched. The currents in his legs were angry, but he stayed crouching, clutching the envelope, allowing the pain to travel up his legs, across his stomach, and into his shoulders. He held the envelope in his hands, shook his head, and shoved it back in the safe. By the time he finally stood up again, he felt like the wind had been knocked out of him.
He wrote
Family Emergency
in Magic Marker on a piece of paper, taped it to the front door of the shop with a piece of electrical tape, and then called for Trevor, who was somewhere deep inside a maze of mufflers and engines. He could see his white shock of hair above the sea of metal.
“Time to go to Pop’s,” he said, and Trevor slowly emerged from the labyrinth of parts.
“Do I have to?”
“Just get in,” he said, exasperated, and threw open the truck’s passenger door.
He knew right away as he turned down the road to Pop’s house that something wasn’t right. He felt it in the way the leaves hung too far over the dirt road, as if they were closing in, as if the truck might simply be swallowed by the foliage. It was as though he were driving into the mouth of an angry green beast. The electrical storm inside his body was quieted now, but the air outside was tight. He could smell rain. The forecast had said there was a storm coming that might last the next two or three days. The sky looked brooding,
angry
.
When they pulled into Pop’s driveway, he could see that all the work they’d done just weeks ago was for nothing. There were overflowing bins of trash all along the drive, a swarm of flies hovering over one open bag that spilled rotten food and papers onto the ground. The warming weather and the increased sunshine made whatever was in those piles start to stink, like something dying.
The porch steps were littered with coffee cans and empty glass jars, and the front door was almost completely obscured by furniture Kurt didn’t recognize: a big oak dresser and roll-top desk. Goddamn Maury. Another swap meet trip he’d failed to mention to Kurt. Maury had become Pop’s unofficial chauffeur to the weekend swap meets Kurt had pleaded with him to stay away from. Kurt could feel anger rumbling inside him, and the sky rumbled too as if in sympathy. He got out of the truck and slammed the door shut. He motioned for Trevor to stay in the cab.
He walked up the steps to the house and tried to push the enormous dresser out of the way, but it wouldn’t budge. He cautiously opened a drawer.
Bricks
. A dozen bricks. He opened the next drawer and the next. Pop was building a fucking fortress of used furniture around his house.
Kurt managed to squeeze through the space between the bureau and the door and banged hard. “Pop!” he said, knocking. “Pop!” he hollered again and felt something between sickness and fear run through his body: a hollow free-falling feeling.
He tried the door. It was unlocked, but still the door wouldn’t budge even with the turn of the knob. “Pop!” he said again, feeling panicky. Thunder growled this time, and a stray sliver of cold rain hit his face.
“Goddamn it, Pop! It’s me. Open the door!” He looked to the window to the right of the door. On the other side of the glass was the living room, but the shades were drawn, the drapes pressed into the window by whatever junk was on the other side. He knocked again and then pushed the door hard with his shoulder, feeling something give. A little. He pushed again, harder this time, and winced with the pain in his shoulder. He pushed his hip into it and finally, he was able to get the door open enough to slip inside. He looked back at Trevor in the truck. The window was rolled down, and Trevor was aiming the camera at him.
“Put the goddamned camera away,” he said. “And stay there.”
He slipped through the crack he’d made but was faced with a wall of cigarette smoke and cardboard. Everywhere he looked there were cardboard boxes stacked like strange totems, like a child’s fort. Irene Killjoy was right; a forgotten cigarette and this place would go up in flames in seconds. How could he have not noticed before how dangerous this all was?
“Pop,” he said again and pushed blindly through the rubble of his father’s life, feeling like he was sinking into quicksand.
He found Pop sitting at the kitchen table, though there wasn’t an inch of space on its surface. The papers from the county were in front of him. His eyes were filmy and unfocused. He was shirtless, the scar from an old surgery red and angry at the center of his chest. His entire body was speckled with liver spots, as though someone had flung a fistful of mud at him. Kurt felt the tension in his shoulders give a little, relieved that Pop was here, and alive. Kurt said softly, “Pop?”
Pop looked up but not at Kurt. Instead, he trained his eyes on the ceiling, where the model planes solemnly hovered over him.
“Pop,” Kurt tried again, moving slowly toward him as he might a wounded animal.
His speech was slow, careful. “Your mother and I lived in this house forty years.”
“I know that, Pop.”
“You and Billy were both born in that back bedroom.”
Kurt nodded and reached for Pop’s bare shoulder. His skin was hot to the touch.