Anne Tyler - The Beginner's Goodbye

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?”