going to be and impressing upon him the merits of basic civility toward those who love and care about you...
But today is her day off and she’s determined to keep it for herself. She will waste no more energy on worrying about her selfish brother. It’s a quarter after ten and the only thing she wants right now is coffee!
THE FROG-CROAK SOUND OF DUCT TAPE TEARING JOLTS him awake.
An army moves around him. Men go in and out of the house, shouting at one another to mind plants and to tend to various pieces of equipment arranged throughout the limestone patio. Some climb onto the roof, where they stitch together heavy yellow tarps with rows of alligator clips, while others feed a tube under the tarp and test seals. Overnight, his sedate home has transformed into a midway abuzz with activity.
Cheryl hands him his coffee. “Here. Drink,” she says, her voice stripped of whatever softness it possessed the night before.
“The doll?” he asks, clearing his throat and wiping the sleep from his eyes. His pipe, long extinguished, rests on the hard bubble of his gut. His entire body aches.
“In the car with our suitcases.” She stashes the pipe in its usual place. “They’re just about done. We should get going.” She helps him to his feet. “You’re sweating. I told you to come in last night. Now you don’t even have time to change.”
“I’m fine. Never better. Feel like a million bucks.” He stretches himself like an elm scratching at the sky and stomps his feet to get the blood circulating. He shakes his body like an earthquake, rolls his neck, windmills his arms, and cracks his back. And in one bearish gulp he empties the coffee mug, announcing his satisfaction with a yawp.
The foreman peeks out from beneath the tarp. “Hey, lady. We’re about to close ’er up. If you forgot anything, now’s the time to get it.”
“No. Go ahead,” she calls back.
But before he can duck inside, Thaddeus beckons him. “Just a few questions!”
Thaddeus turns to Cheryl, who busies herself returning the lounge chairs to their original positions, mumbling something about UV and sun bleaching. “Do you have the doll?” he asks again.
She sighs. “In the car. Along with our suitcases.”
The foreman waddles over, tossing a glance at his loitering crew. He checks something on his phone, then looks up at Thaddeus. “I went over all of this with your wife. What do you need?”
For a long time Thaddeus doesn’t speak, only stares at the yard.
“Hey, guy, you got a question or what?” The foreman squints in the early-morning sun. He’s a large man, and already a tributary of sweat marks the valley of his spine. He smells of mulch and high-en-durance deodorant. “Yours ain’t the only house we got today. Ain’t even the only one we got in this neighborhood. You’d be surprised what bad shape a lot of these old houses are in.”
Thaddeus purses his lips. “How long until we can use the pool?”
He shrugs. “Should be fine now, unless it’s broke. We only do the inside. Inside.” He points at the house for emphasis. “Look, I left a pamphlet with your wife—”
“This pool,” Thaddeus says. He wraps an arm around the foreman’s shoulders and drags him along the perimeter. “The contractor—a good-looking lady-contractor, couldn’t have been more than twenty-five—she wanted to charge twenty thousand for it. Do you know what I told her?” He grins, awaiting a response.
“Look, we really need to get started here—”
“I said, ‘No way, Josephina!’ Ha!” He taps the foreman’s chest. “I could do the job myself for half that if I knew about construction.”
“Yeah? Good for you. Like I said, I gave your wife the rundown. Just avoid goin’ inside and you’ll be good—”
“‘Materials alone are going to run twelve grand.’ That’s what she told me.” Thaddeus narrows his eyes. “Okay, so I told her I could go as high as fourteen thousand. Hey, two grand’s just a weekend in Vegas anyway, right? But it wasn’t enough. ‘I have my crew to think about,’ she said. We went back and forth for twenty minutes. I don’t have to tell you about negotiating.” He gives the foreman a knowing nod. “Finally I said, ‘Fifteen thousand. That’s my final offer,’ and showed her the door. And what do you think she did?”
The foreman glances back to his crew and motions for them to seal the house.
“She said, ‘You drive a hard bargain.’ But she took the job. I liked her style, so I said, ‘What the hell, with the five grand I’m saving I’ll start a scholarship to help more girls like you go to trade school.’ I can’t help it; I’m a feminist. When the job was done I gave her an extra two hundred bucks for her trouble. No big deal.”
The foreman slips away, and moments later a quiet hiss signals that the gas has begun to fill the house.
“Let’s go,” Cheryl says.
But the limp tent sputtering to life transfixes Thaddeus. It morphs and undulates like a lava flow. Forms rise in the fabric only to collapse as the gas reaches toward equilibrium. “It’s just the wind,” Cheryl says, but he ignores her. His home is turmoil. Right now poison pours over Cheryl’s clothes and into Stevie’s old room. Next will be the garage, or would that have been first? Ultimately, the order matters little to him. Gas will eventually coil around everything like a cat setting down for a nap: his law books in the attic, the photograph in the family room of Stevie leaning over the rail at Niagara Falls pretending to slip, the Hawaiian leis from a family vacation he can’t quite remember, entire drawers full of odd knickknacks and fading memorabilia that attest to a life well lived, tangible proof of memories made even if the memories themselves rise more sluggishly and infrequently than they used to—all of it, ultimately, choking on gas. But how many of the termites?
He stays awhile longer, watching the tent. Then with a cough he turns to Cheryl. “They’ll do a great job,” he says. He knows that they’ll go above and beyond because he took the time to build a rapport with the man in charge. And in business, as in life, it’s the relationships that matter. “A fine job,” he says. “No problem.”
Cheryl looks down at her nails and taps her foot. “Can we go now?”
“Whatever you want, heart of my heart.”
Taking her hand, he kisses her on the knuckles, but the static charge has barely left her skin before, wide-eyed, she yanks her hand away.
“I may have accidentally touched the poison,” she whispers, half apologizing.
Orlando feels like an extension of Apopka. Or maybe it’s the other way around. A mall looms in the distance, and before that a multiplex cradled by a handful of shops. But mostly the streets are wide and residential. If a difference exists between the neighboring cities at all it’s in the way faux-Spanish architecture dresses up the vernacular of simple midcentury bungalows in Orlando to a greater degree than it does in Apopka. Thaddeus is having a hard time navigating it. It’s been years since he’s been in the suburbs beyond downtown.
“Lot of new construction,” he says.
“Uh-huh,” Cheryl says. “You’re going to want to make a left at the light. It’s the one with the waterfall.”
He maneuvers into a turning lane, dutifully engages his directional signal, and waits. Traffic roils from the horizon like salmon on run. In Apopka traffic’s not so bad, or maybe it is and he’s simply accustomed to it. (The streets by their house, at least, are familiar.) An oasis pools in the middle distance. A final car swims through a long yellow light, then Thaddeus proceeds, on Cheryl’s direction, passing smoothly through a portal of blue tile and lacquered calligraphy spelling out the name PALM FALLS WEST. At the end of a long drive flanked by hedges and iron lattices stands a security kiosk, built with unassuming white concrete that could just as easily be calcified runoff from the eponymous waterfall.