Anne Tyler - The Beginner's Goodbye

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.