Tom Barbash - Stay Up With Me

I eat my sandwich. It is hot and gooey and as good as anything I can remember eating.

“I’m lonely all the time,” she says. “You think you’re teaching a lesson… ”

She looks so sad I feel the need to cheer her up. “My mother and father are both retired. And they get such a kick out of my coming home,” I say. “My mother makes a big deal out of it and she cooks some terrific meals. Sometimes my brothers come home at the same time. Family is important to me.”

“What do your parents do?”

“Well, my father is a school custodian and my mother is a secretary in the military. She works for the army.”

Neither of these are true. I haven’t seen either of my parents in more than five years, and so I couldn’t say precisely what they do. It doesn’t seem like Mrs. Berner hears me anyhow.

“My mother just finished a tour in Kabul,” I try.

“I wish you’d come by whenever you like and visit us, Randall,” she says.

On the way back from the bathroom this time I take the magnifying glass. I hold it at my side the way I did the perfume bottle as I say my good-byes. Mrs. Berner says nothing about it. She ducks back inside. On the way to my car I swipe the newspaper from the blue plastic box from the road.

That night I meet Eddie at a bar in Saranac Lake. He has two more prospective sellers lined up — another old couple, and a ninety-three-year-old widower. He’s doing chores for the widower, bagging leaves and painting.

“I let him pay me a few dollars and a beer each time so he doesn’t get suspicious or anything. I haven’t even told him I work in real estate.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him I was a social worker on sabbatical.”

Eddie buys the beers and asks the bartender to make out a receipt. He knows the bartender’s name and asks him about fishing on a particular section of the river.

“Caught two today,” the bartender answers. “Walleyes have been hitting, Eddie. But it’s just pan fish. Nothing too big.”

“I can’t even catch a cold lately,” Eddie says.

It seems to me there are very few people Eddie doesn’t know.

“What’s new with the Berners?” he asks me when the bartender is out of earshot.

“Grilled cheese and Virginia ham today. Hamburgers and peach cobbler on Sunday night.”

“Nice. Nice. ”

“I’m following your advice. I’m taking it slow.”

“Good, good. You’re making a friend here. Not a sale. A friend . Remember that. You are helping them get to where they need to go. They can’t survive in that place. When you’re getting close, let me know and I’ll write you out a check you can take over. She’ll cry, I guarantee. She’ll take one look at that ninety-thousand-dollar check and she’ll cry.”

I know that he’s speaking the truth. In two or three meals, Mrs. Berner, Aurelia Berner, will do whatever I tell her because she trusts me and because she’s lonely and wants to keep me as her friend or maybe as a fill-in for the kids who left for California. And I think that if it weren’t me, it would certainly be someone else taking her money. And it isn’t her money anyhow. It would be her money if she knew what her home was worth and she doesn’t, so why should she make a fortune off a house and property she can’t even use anymore?

Each time I visit the Berners I take something else, two of the snow globes, an old copy of Robinson Crusoe, a porcelain doll. I take three more perfume bottles. As we walk in the house I sometimes run my hand over the place where I took an object or two. I wonder where she keeps her cash, the money she probably pays a neighbor kid to do her grocery shopping.

I ask her once if she needs someone to do her grocery shopping.

I pick up a load of groceries for her and when I return with them I tell her they cost twice as much as they did. I want her to question me, to ask for a receipt. Instead she hands me fifty bucks for some cold cuts and fruit, bread, vegetables for a salad, and a few boxes of rice.

Old man Berner marks me some trails he hiked when he could walk and tells me what I’ll see: “Thick red spruce and those nice fir trees in the highlands and lower down the sugar maples we get our syrup from, and beech and yellow birch, and animals, Randall, that you can’t see anywhere else: Indian bats, grouses and loons, worm snakes and bog turtles, and turkey vultures.” He reminds me a little of a turkey vulture, though I don’t tell him that.

After a month or so, Eddie calls me in my room. “Did you get the check I sent?” he asks. My room looks like an antique shop. My place is filled with beautiful items taken from the Berners’ house. I’ve dusted them all. I collected enough money from two things I sold to buy a secondhand TV and an electric razor. Soon I will have a great deal more than that. Eddie will pay me 3 percent of the profits, which could bring me about eight thousand dollars.

“They want out of there, Eddie. They’re ready to sign whatever I bring over.”

“Get her to sign and then give her the check. Make it fair. Ninety thousand just like we talked about. We’re not in the business of ripping people off. We can’t get that reputation.”

It is clear he’s convincing himself here and that he’d want to pay less. If he could get away with it, Eddie would buy their land for twenty-four dollars like the deal Peter Stuyvesant worked out for Manhattan.

The next weeks are freezing cold, the roads iced solid and scary to drive on. The winds whip harshly through whatever I put on. The snows come strong out of nowhere and I am forever scraping ice from my windows, knocking it out from under my boots. On my way home from the Berners’ one night I am stuck in a whiteout, white all around me, and I cannot tell which direction is forward. There aren’t any sounds. My tires are high off the road in a snow cloud. I slow to about five miles an hour and then I cut the engine. I step out of the car and let the snow fall on me and for just a moment I feel like a six-year-old.

When I get back in and start driving again, it takes me two hours to go a distance that should take twenty minutes.

At night I watch TV just to hear the voices. I take long walks and then I turn on the news. There’s a small mention of the man who killed the old couple in Utica. He claims he never meant to kill them. He meant to rob them but the old guy pulled out a knife. The reporter said the knife was the old man’s Swiss Army knife and the blade was smaller than four inches.

On the night of a particularly loud and icy storm, I barricade myself in blankets against the sounds outside. I wear layers of sweaters and shirts. Before I go to sleep my phone rings.

“Randall?”

It’s Mrs. Berner.

“There are two windows I can’t get closed. They’re wide open and the heat’s going right through them. I’m afraid he’ll… I’m afraid Mr. Berner will freeze if we don’t get the windows closed.”

They are hard to close even for me. I pull and pull and then I begin banging on them. I pour steaming water in the openings and then smear butter in the hinges. The cold air washes in against my face. Finally one budges and in another few minutes I’ve got the other closed.

Mrs. Berner gasps. And then she gives me a beautiful smile. We sit in her kitchen and drink hot chocolate, and the sound of old Roury Berner snoring, loud and steady, comforts us both, like the sound of the logs crackling in the wood-burning stove.

Sunday the sun comes out strong. The ground begins to thaw. I eat turkey at the Berners’. Mr. Berner eats a few bites of dinner with us and then heads back to bed.

“I guess we’ve been pressing our good luck,” Mrs. Berner says. “He’s getting worse living here. He’s going downhill.”