T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

Standing on the brick doorstep, plainly visible through the ancient flowing glass of the front door, is a young woman in shorts, leggings and some sort of athletic jersey, with stringy black hair, terrible posture, and what appears to be a fur muff tucked under one arm. As my widow gets closer and the indefinite becomes concrete, she sees that the young woman’s eyes are heavily made up, and that the muff has become a kitten of indeterminate breed — black, with a white chest and two white socks. Curious, and pursing her lips in the way she used to when she was a young woman herself, my widow swings open the door and stands there blinking and mute, awaiting an explanation.

“Oh, hi,” the young woman says, squeezing the words through an automatic smile, “sorry to disturb you, but I was wondering…” Unaccountably, the young woman trails off, and my widow, whose hearing was compromised by the Velvet Underground and Nico during a period of exuberance in the last century, watches her lips for movement. The young woman studies my widow’s face a moment, then decides to change tack. “I’m your neighbor, Megan Capaldi?” she says finally. “Remember me? From the school-lunch drive last year?”

My widow, dressed in an old flannel shirt over the faded and faintly greasy flannel nightgown, does not, in fact, remember her. She remains noncommittal. Behind her, from the depths of the house, a faint mewling arises.

“I heard that you were a real cat person, and I just thought — well, my daughter April’s cat had kittens, and we’re looking for good homes for them, with people who really care, and this one — we call her Sniggers — is the last one left.”

My widow is smiling, her face transformed into a girl’s, the striations over her lip pulling back to reveal a shining and perfect set of old lady’s teeth — the originals, beautifully preserved. “Yes,” she says, “yes,” before the question has been asked, already reaching out for the kitten with her regal old hands. She holds it to her a moment, then looks up myopically into the young woman’s face. “Thanks for thinking of me,” she says.

The Roof

The roof, made of a composite material guaranteed for life, leaks. My widow is in the bedroom, in bed, crocheting neat four-inch granny squares against some larger need while listening to the murmur of the TV across the room and the crashing impact of yet another storm above her, when the dripping begins. The cats are the first to notice it. One of them, a huge, bloated, square-headed tom with fur like roadkill, shifts position to avoid the cold stinging drops, inadvertently knocking two lesser cats off the west slope of the bed. A jockeying for space ensues, the cats crowding my widow’s crocheting wrists and elbows and leaving a vacant spot at the foot of the bed. Even then, she thinks nothing of it. A voice emanating from the TV cries out, They’re coming — they’re coming through the walls! followed by the usual cacophony of screams, disjointed music and masticatory sounds. The rain beats at the windows.

A long slow hour hisses by. Her feet are cold. When she rubs them together, she discovers that they are also wet. Her first thought is for the cats — have they been up to their tricks again? But no, there is a distinct patter now, as of water falling from a height, and she reaches out her hand to confront the mystery. There follows a determined shuffle through the darkened arena of the house, the close but random inspection of the ceilings with a flashlight (which itself takes half an hour to find), and then the all-night vigil over the stewpot gradually filling itself at the foot of the bed. For a while, she resumes her crocheting, but the steady mesmeric drip of the intruding rain idles her fingers and sweeps her off into a reverie of the past. She’s revisiting other roofs — the attic nook of her girlhood room, the splootching nightmare of her student apartment with the dirty sit-water drooling down the wall into the pan as she heated brown rice and vegetables over the stove, the collapse of the ceiling in our first house after a pipe burst when we were away in Europe — and then she’s in Europe herself, in the rain on the Grand Canal, with me, her first and most significant husband, and before long the stewpot is overflowing and she’s so far away she might as well exist in another dimension.

The roofer, whose name emerged from the morass of the Yellow Pages, arrives some days later during a period of tumultuous weather and stands banging on the front door while rain drools from the corroded copper gutters (which, incidentally, are also guaranteed for life). My widow is ready for him. She’s been up early each day for the past week, exchanging her flannel nightgown for a pair of jeans and a print blouse, over which she wears an old black cardigan decorated with prancing blue reindeer she once gave me for Christmas. She’s combed out her hair and put on a dab of lipstick. Like Megan Capaldi before him, the roofer pounds at the redwood frame of the front door until my widow appears in the vestibule. She fumbles a moment with the glasses that hang from a cord around her neck, and then her face assumes a look of bewilderment: Who is this infant banging at the door?

“Hello!” calls the roofer, rattling the doorknob impatiently as my widow stands there before him on the inside of the glass panel, looking confused. “It’s me — the roofer?” He’s shouting now: “You said you had a leak?”

The roofer’s name is Vargas D’Onofrio, and the minute he pronounces it, it’s already slipped her mind. He has quick, nervous eyes, and his face is sunk into a full beard of tightly wound black hairs threaded with gray. He’s in his early forties, actually, but anyone under seventy looks like a newborn to my widow, and understandably so.

“You’re all wet,” she observes, leading him into the house and up the slow heaving stairs to reveal the location of the leak. She wonders if she should offer to bake him cookies and maybe fix a pouch of that hot chocolate that only needs microwaved water to complete it, and she sees the two of them sitting down at the kitchen table for a nice chat after he’s fixed the roof — but does she have any hot chocolate? Or nuts, shortening, brown sugar? How long has it been since she remembered to buy flour, even? She had a five-pound sack of it in the pantry — she distinctly remembers that — but then wasn’t that the flour the weevils got into? She’s seeing little black bugs, barely the size of three grains of pepper cobbled together, and then she understands that she doesn’t want to chat with this man — or with anybody else, for that matter. She just wants the roof repaired so she can go back to the quiet seep of her old lady’s life.

“Rotten weather,” the roofer breathes, thumping up the stairs in his work boots and trundling on down the upper hallway to the master bedroom, scattering cats as he goes.

My widow has given up on the stewpot and has been sleeping downstairs, in what was once our son’s room. As a result, the antique bed is now soaked through to the springs and oozing water the color of tobacco juice.

“I can patch it,” the roofer says, after stepping out onto the sleeping porch and assaying the roof from the outside, “but you really should have the whole thing replaced once summer comes — and I can do that for you too, and give you a good price. Best price in town, in fact.” The roofer produces a wide bearded closer’s grin that is utterly lost on my widow.

“But that roof,” she says, “was guaranteed for life.”

The roofer just shrugs. “Aren’t they all?” he sighs, and disappears through the door to the sleeping porch. As she pulls the door shut, my widow can smell the keen working scent of the rain loosening the earth around the overgrown flowerbeds and the vaguely fishy odor of wet pavement. The air is alive. She can see her breath in it. She watches the roofer’s legs ride up past the window as he hoists himself up the ladder and into the pall of the rain. And then, as she settles into the armchair in the bedroom, she hears him up there, aloft, his heavy tread, the pounding of nails, and through it all a smell of hot burning tar.