Flebberman was taken aback. “You gotta be kiddin’,” he said. “No, I’m serious. Unless the ghosts of Christmas past, present,
and future ganged up on him.”
This seemed to be too much for Flebberman to take in. He sim ply stood there and stared at her, his mouth hanging slightly open, as always.
“He let me go?” he said finally. “Why?”
“He’s been reborn,” said Francie. “Don’t tell him I said that, of course, because he’ll deny it. But that’s what happened. You want to come in? Not packing heat, are you?”
Flebberman blushed. “Naw,” he said.
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OWALSKI
“I never had you figured for a stick-up artist, anyway,” said Francie. “It didn’t seem like your style.”
Flebberman stepped in and scraped his boots on the mat. An other snowfall had come the night before, not much more than a heavy dusting, but this time it had stayed; particles of ice scat tered around the foyer as he shed his boots and entered the living room. The thawing season was over, and things had begun to freeze again. It would be a cold Christmas Eve tonight, and a soli tary one for Francie, but it was the way she wanted it. She had re fused Colt’s offer to spend the holiday with him and his father in the city, and Michael had gone back to Indianapolis to see their parents. Once upon a time, not very long ago, the idea of spending Christmas alone would have terrified her. Now, however, she looked forward to it.
“What can I do for you?” Francie asked.
“I, uh—got somethin’ I wanted to ask ya,” he said.
“Yes, and now that you’re here I’ve remembered I have some thing to show you,” said Francie.
“Yeah? What?” “No, you go first.”
“Well, the, uh, mortal remains—y’know, the fambly—the po lice got ’em now, and they said we could come get ’em back, if we got a reburial permit. Which I got already. I wanted to ask ya— could we—can I, I mean—put them back? Where they belong?”
“Of course we can,” said Francie. “We can do it today, if you like.”
“Not today. I gotta go pick ’em up yet,” Flebberman said. “At the police station. Not lookin’ for’ard to seein’ cops again, but waddaya gonna do. How about day after tomorra?”
“That would be fine. I don’t have much else going on. Now, wait here a minute,” said Francie.
She went upstairs to the master bedroom and retrieved Marly’s diary. Bringing it back downstairs, she said, “I thought you might want to see this. I found it under the stairs.”
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Flebberman took the book in his reddened and callused hands, opening it carefully to the first page. “What is it?” he asked.
“It’s a diary,” Francie said. “What’s really important is who it belonged to.”
“Who?”
“Marly Musgrove.”
Flebberman took the book to the wingback chair and sat down, his snowsuit whiffing and zipping. “Holy Jeez,” he said, staring at it in amazement. “You gotta be kiddin’ me.”
“No. It’s the real thing.” “You found it
where
?”
“Under the stairs,” said Francie. “There’s a secret kind of space, just there.” She pointed to the wall under the main staircase. “You get to it from the closet in the master bedroom. You never knew about it?”
Flebberman shook his head. “No,” he said. “I had no idea nothin’ like that was there.”
“I’ll show it to you. It’s quite something. I found all kinds of things down there.”
“Kinda hard to read,” Flebberman said, turning the pages of the diary one by one. “Funny handwriting. You read it?”
“Yes. All of it.” “Anything good?” “Well—”
Flebberman looked up at her expectantly.
“I’ll let you read it for yourself,” she said. “Take it with you. It’s yours, anyway. It belongs to your family.” And that is how you should find out about what happened to Henry, she thought. You shouldn’t hear it from a stranger—not from me. If Ellen’s spirit— or Henry’s—was still restless, forgiveness had to come from one of their own family, and from no one else.
“Awright,” Flebberman said. “I really—” He fumbled his words, turning red all the way up to his ears. “I don’t know what ta say,” he finished lamely.
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OWALSKI
Francie smiled.
“That was very eloquently put, Mr. Flebberman,” she said. “And the feeling is mutual.”
❚ ❚ ❚
Francie awoke late the next morning and spent most of the day curled up in the wingback chair, fire crackling, notebook open on her lap. She forgot it was Christmas. Most of the time she stared out the window, but occasionally she scribbled a line or two, and then reread what she had written with a small smile of pride. The next day, having made a trip to the state police barracks in Allen town and retrieved, with official permission, the remains of the Musgrove family, she and Flebberman replaced the bones in the gaping hole in the rear of the property. They had been placed in a canvas bag labeled
HUMAN REMAINS
, and Francie watched as Fleb berman carefully maneuvered a bulldozer borrowed from Wayne Steinbach, pushing the pile of half-frozen dirt back over the pa thetic gray bundle that was his ancestors. There was no way to sort out the bones, it being impossible to determine who was who; Flebberman had made the decision to leave them in the bag, and let the few remaining fragments of the Musgroves rest to gether.
“Ain’t like it matters now,” he said. “After all they been through.
Most important thing is, they’re back where they belong.”
Francie agreed. Together they patted the earth into shape with shovels, and then they laid the shattered fragments of the tomb stones on top, piecing them together as best as they could.
“I should at least offer to buy new stones,” said Francie. “It seems like the least I could do, considering my role in all this.”
But Flebberman said, “Naw. Way I see it is, everything’s bound to go back to the earth sooner or later. People shouldn’t interfere, that’s all. It ain’t right to hurry it up, but it ain’t right to slow it down, either. Know what I mean?”
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“I certainly do,” said Francie.
“Everything should just be left alone,” Flebberman said firmly. “Besides, it would just run to more money. And I got legal ex penses comin’ outa my ears now. Which I deserve,” he added, shamefaced.
“How much are your expenses?” Francie asked.
Flebberman shrugged and leaned on his shovel. “Lawyer, im pound fees, bond money, more legal fees, a fine for stealin’ from the dump—even though it was things that belonged to me—you wouldn’t b’leeve it. I didn’t even know it was against the law to take things outa the dump in the first place. And I gotta pay for the damage to the cop car. Maybe thirty thousand dollars in all. Prob’ly more.”
“And you don’t have the money?”
Flebberman came as close to laughing as Francie had ever seen him. “Nope. I never had that much money in my life. But I got an idea.”
“What’s that?”
“Well,” he said, “I got good credit. That’s one thing. And I can get a loan. You remember that idea I had I was tellin’ you about, the one about havin’ a used car lot?”
“You—you want to open a used car lot? Here?”
“Not here. In town. It just seems like the right time to do it. I ain’t never gonna make enough money to pay back what I owe, not doin’ what I’m doin’. We just been scrapin’ by fer as long as I can remember. But I been thinkin’ about the future, you know, ’specially when it looked like I was gonna be spendin’ the next twenty years in the slammer. I started thinkin’ about all the things I wanted to do and never did. Funny the way bein’ locked up works on yer mind. An’ I thought, Gawd, if I ever get outa here, I’m not gonna waste one more second of my life. I’m gonna do all the things I wanted to do, plus all the things I shoulda done. An’ that car lot was number one on the list. Besides spendin’ more time with my kids, I mean,” he added. “I could make it work. I
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OWALSKI
know I could. I even know where I wanna put it. I ain’t gonna get rich, but I could be doin’ a damn sight better than I have been, and in a few years I could have all my debts paid off and start puttin’ money away fer my kids besides. Waddaya think?”
“Brilliant,” said Francie. “Perfect. Do it. Let nothing stop you.” “Yeah,” said Flebberman. “That’s what I think, too.”
❚ ❚ ❚
He had brought something to show her; it was a photo album, filled with images of Flebberman’s family. Most had been taken in the last fifty years, and there were palm-sized snapshots in both black and white and color. The one she liked best was a large print of an old man in a rocking chair, looking out a window, leaning his chin on a cane.
“Who’s that?” asked Francie.
“That,” Flebberman said, “was old Uncle Lincoln. Really my great-uncle, I think. Story is he survived gettin’ run over by a horse when he was just a baby. He died when I was little. I don’t ’member him.” He paused to think. “That was the same horse that killed Marly,” he said, remembering. “Marly was Lincoln’s grandmother.”
Francie leafed through a few more pages until she came to what looked like a postcard, a very old one. It was a picture of an old- looking city, and underneath it said “Vienna.”
“What about this?” she asked.
“I dunno about that,” Flebberman said. “I’ve always wondered about it. Take it out and see if anything’s written on it.”
“Really? It might tear.”
“Not if you’re careful,” Flebberman said. “Go ahead. I always wondered who sent it, anyway.”
The postcard was pasted into the album. Francie got a sharp knife from the kitchen and gingerly fitted it between the postcard
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405
and the paper backing. With a surgeon’s skill, she worked it back and forth until the postcard came free. On the back, in scrawled handwriting, she read:
May 12, 1919
Dear Ellen,
All is well with me. Hope you are same. I love Vienna & may stay longer. Do not worry.
Fondly,
Hamish
“Oh, yeah,” said Flebberman wonderingly. “I heard about this guy. He’s the one moved ta Yurrip when he was an old man.”
“I read about him learning to walk,” said Francie. “In Marly’s diary.”
“I never did hear what ever happened to ’im after that,” Fleb berman said. “I wonder if he died over there, or if he came back.”
“Maybe you could find out.” “How?”
“The Internet,” Francie said.
“The Internet has my fambly in it?” Flebberman said, dubious. “I dunno.”
“You can get access to records,” Francie said. “You can send e-mails to request information, too. I bet you might be able to find some thing. You could even find out about the name Flavia-Hermann, if you wanted.”
Flebberman pursed his lips. “Wow,” he said.
“We’ll do it when I get my computer hooked up,” Francie said. “I’ll show you how it works.”
“’Preciate it,” said Flebberman. “That, and everythin’ else you done.” He smiled at her shyly, showing his snuff-stained teeth.
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OWALSKI
She walked him to the door and watched as he headed down the driveway toward the road. He turned when he had left her property, and smiled at her.
“You’re a good neighbor,” he said. Francie smiled back.
“Happy New Year, Randy,” she called.
Flebberman pointed his boots toward his house and started walking, moving neither quickly nor slowly, but going at the only pace he had ever known in his life. Francie remained at the door even after he had crested the hill, just looking out across the road at where the great boulder rose up over the embankment. She stared out also at the valley spreading away in all directions, thinking how big it was, and how quiet. The air was as still as the inside of a church, and the cold was slow to touch her, but when it finally crept inside her clothes and she began to shiver, she closed the door again and went back to her chair by the fire, and there she stayed.
WILLIAM KOWALSKI is the author of
Eddie’s Bastard
,
The Adventures of Flash Jackson
, and
Somewhere South of Here
. He lives in Nova Scotia.
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The Good Neighbor
“William Kowalski hasn’t lost his touch for portraying the per sonal. . . . The story is carried by characters the reader cares about and is presented in engaging prose.” —
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“[Kowalski] meticulously brings the strands of his narrative to gether, building toward a credible moving conclusion.”
—
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“Kowalski . . . pulls the reader in, making this book hard to put down. . . . Kowalski succeeds in creating a novel that flows ef fortlessly.” —
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—
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Eddie’s Bastard
“Exuberant. . . . Kowalski is a talented stylist.”
—
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Eddie’s Bastard
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