A Blossom In The Weeds - Part Two

To Read Part One, Click Here

Ellie surveyed the overcrowded living room with her fists on her hips.

Alright. We’re doing this. 

No more procrastination. No more excuses. Time to dig in.

Her eyes passed over her aunt’s house, the house she’d agreed to make her own: the heaps of clothes and blankets spilling up and over the top of the couch, the stacked pillars of newspapers and magazines, the plastic tubs full of wrapping paper and craft notions bricking up every available gap between the bulky, old-fashioned furniture, and everywhere, everywhere, a film of gray dust.

For real. Let’s go.

She felt a giddy swell of inertia rise up against her, like she was a small skiff trying to fight its way out to sea past a treacherous bar. As hard as she pushed herself to move forward, an equal will pushed her back, whispering, Give up, run away.

She knew this feeling well. Like she was split exactly in two, one half cringing and the other exasperated. She felt it lately every time she looked at her piano.

It was strange and disappointing, how something that had once been an intimate friend now felt so remote and obtuse. She didn’t know how it had happened. She’d always turned to her keyboard for solace, for company, to assemble and examine the puzzle pieces of her heart. But somewhere in the last five years, they’d just drifted apart. When she tried to start the conversation, it was a chore. The music was stopped up; there was a stubborn invisible wall dividing them, and she couldn’t get through.  Eventually, she had left the keyboard to sulk in the corner, radiating resentment whenever she passed it. 

But this is completely different, she told herself sternly. This wasn’t some nebulous emotional hedge-maze, this was a concrete challenge that needed a concrete solution. This was her Mom’s territory, and it called for Mom’s style of problem solving.

Okay, then. What would Mom do?

Simple. Attack it like a wolverine.

She felt the waves slackening; she had to leap at the opening.

She tore into the plastic bags full of cleaning supplies she’d bought the day before and located a pair of yellow rubber gloves. She wrestled them out of the packaging and tugged them on, feeling like Batman putting on his suit. She unfurled a roll of utility-strength gray garbage bags and whipped one open with a few aggressive flaps.

No thought, she advised herself. Thought is the enemy. You won’t perfect this. Just action.

Magazines first, then. She grabbed them in fistfuls and began stuffing.

There was immediate satisfaction in movement. This was right. She felt powerful, grabbing armfuls of damp newspaper, shoveling them into the garbage bag. All kinds of pragmatic certainties came to her. There was so much in this house that could just be thrown out entirely; it was easy. This should have been done years ago. Silly that she hadn’t started sooner. She would finish this room by dinner time, give it a quick vacuum and call Mom to crow about her progress.

The bag filled up surprisingly fast, yet she’d barely cleared about a square foot. She started to lift it to take it out to the dumpster. The plastic stretched till it was see-through, but didn’t give. She’d filled it too full and it was tearing under the weight.

No matter, she quickly told herself, before dismay could raise its ugly head, she’d just keep going. She could figure out how to move the bags later. 

No thought, just action.

She filled a second bag, then another. 

She always liked working once she got going. Mindless work was even better. Filing. Data entry. Raking leaves. Scrubbing floors. Although she’d found herself googling that yesterday, faced with the guest bathroom in all its claustrophobic glory. How to clean tile grout. Actually, she really felt sure that other people were born with an innate knowledge of this stuff-- the same people who were endlessly gardening and baking and putting up gallery walls. The Pinterest people. People who never stopped moving,  thousands of them, like ants following pheromone trails through an endless global tasklist, guided by some greater collective intelligence they couldn’t explain to her. Common Sense. She was supposed to just know. But she couldn’t get the scent. 

No, she was never going to be  good at it, but this kind of work freed up her mind. She was being productive-- she could measure her output. Five pages of payment data. Six garbage bags of magazines. Meanwhile, her imagination was at loose ends. She could rework the ending of the novel she was reading, if need be. Make sure the hero and heroine end up together. She could turn over her unfinished songs, strain to listen for the next few bars, the change or the chorus that was coming to her through the ether. 

Except lately the music had stopped speaking to her.

That could change, too, though, she thought, sidling between columns of Sterilite containers to get at the sheaves of grocery coupon fliers jammed haphazardly into a low bookcase under the big picture window. She had six months of busy work to do, if she wanted to make it stretch that long, if she wanted to live on savings for a while and just listen to the inside of her mind. Her keyboard would just about fit in this space once she had it cleared, and she could sit at it looking out into the tree-lined cul-de-sac early in the morning. Maybe if she gave it room to breathe, a pool of sunlight, a few quiet months, maybe the music would come back. 

She jogged a neighboring bureau with her elbow and sent a stack of exercise videos clattering down. The problem with this ‘just action’ nonsense, she realized with a mild wave of frustration, was space. Wherever she opened gaps, other piles of stuff slid in. It was like digging out of a sand dune. The living room was becoming clutter soup.

She felt her phone buzzing in her back pocket. 

When she pulled it out, the screen blazed a warning. Mom’s Cell.

She watched it ring for a minute, debating. 

Well, you can’t hide forever, or she’ll send paramedics to the house. 

She took a deep breath, pulled off a rubber glove and slid her thumb across the screen.

“Hey!”

It was always best to start off bright and professional, no matter what was brewing on the other end of the line.

“Hey.” 

The syllable was heavy with resentment. 

Ellie let silence hang strategically between them for a moment. Then, still upbeat, played dumb.

“You alright?”

“I’m fine. I thought you might be dead in a ditch somewhere.”

They both knew she’d been perfectly safe, ignoring the calls; they both still had to run through the rest of their lines.

“Oh, the reception up here is terrible,” said Ellie, tucking the phone between her shoulder and her ear and making loud work of tossing a few fliers into a garbage bag. “What’s the weather like in Almuñécar?”

Mom ignored the feint completely. 

“I was calling,” she said,  “to see where you were at with the house. Did the dumpster arrive?”

Ellie narrowed her eyes. Straight to business with fourteen unanswered texts to redress? That’s not like you.

Aloud, she said: “Oh, it arrived alright. Bright and early.”

“Uh-huh,” said Mom. “So are you about done with the living room or where are you at?”

Ellie pushed a strand of dark hair out of her eyes with the back of a rubber-gloved hand, suspicions mounting..

“Ah…there’s still a ways to go.”

“But you’ve got started,” Mom said sharply, by her tone, by no means convinced that she had. 

“Yes, I’ve started,” said Ellie righteously, wisely not adding twenty five minutes ago to the end of her sentence. 

“Can you send me a picture?”

Oh, that would not be a good idea.

“What do you want a picture for?” she asked instead. “It’s nowhere near done.”

“Well, how long do you think it will take? I’ll be up till about eleven my time.”

Ellie fell silent again, this time to muffle a mouthful of swearwords. 

“Ellie? Did you hear me?” 

“When’s the last time you were up here, Mom?” Ellie asked, managing to keep a lid on her tone of voice.

“What, Port Hazel? I don’t know. Probably some time after the funeral.”

“So you went inside the house?”

“I let the inspectors do their thing,” said Mom airily. “You know I only had a few days. That whole trip was a nightmare.”

“But you saw the inside of the house?”

Mom knew better than to get trapped into an admission.

“What’s your point, Eliza?”

“My point is, this place is a camera crew away from an episode of Hoarders.” She tried to sound jokey, but it came out sharp.

“It’s not that bad,” Mom scoffed.

“Are you serious? Every room is packed with junk. I have one square foot in the bathtub to shower in, the rest is half-empty shampoo bottles. You’re telling me you didn’t know it looked like this?”

“Okay, Ellie, come on,” said Mom in an aggravatingly patient tone.  “I told you it needed to be cleaned out. Betsy’s always been a packrat, and your grandparents were just as bad. You’ve been to the house before, you know it’s always been cluttered.”

“It wasn’t like this before,” Ellie countered, monitoring the rising pitch of her own voice. “There’s nowhere for me to sleep.”

“You don’t want to do the work, is that what you’re saying?”

“What I’m saying is,” Ellie said deliberately, “I’m the one renting the place, and I’m on a six month lease. I’ll get it done when I get it done. It’s definitely not going to be in the next six hours.”

“I never said that,” Mom replied, all surprise.

“You just asked for the picture.”

“I never said a six month lease.”

 Ellie felt the sands shifting under her feet. Mom definitely did say a six month lease, Ellie remembered the conversation distinctly. But it wasn’t on paper yet, and it wasn’t uncommon for these little oral contracts between them to suddenly grow fuzzy when Mom’s priorities changed. Ellie felt a familiar dizzy spiral start in her brain, like a kaleidoscope turning. 

She knew simple questions would help her find the new horizon. She’d already asked the salient question, actually, only Mom had dodged it.

“What do you want the picture for?”

“For the listing!” Mom said, with an implied Duh! “My friend Joan is in real estate out there, you know, and she says the market is really hot right now.”

“But… Mom…”

“You have to jump on these things, Ellie. Joan has a buyer lined up that she’s sure will bite if we move fast.”

The kaleidoscope stopped with a thud.

“You already have a buyer?”

“Joan called me yesterday. She says this couple are wanting to move out of the city-- God knows why they’re looking at Port Hazel, it’s probably the only place they can afford.”

“But I just moved in.”

“And you just told me that it’s unlivable. Isn’t that what you just said?”

“I said…” Ellie trailed off, casting around the crowded living room for support. Only the empty green Lazy Boy seemed sympathetic.

Mom continued briskly. “You’ve had a couple days’ head start, it can’t be that bad. Just move whatever’s left out of frame and send me a picture of the living room and the kitchen and we can at least get the process started. If we get an offer we like, we can probably negotiate the rest of the cleanup. I’m sure they’ll want to gut that place anyway, it’s a relic.”

“You said a six month lease,” Ellie said thickly. “You said a six month lease, and then we’d reassess.”

Mom stuck to her guns, too.

“I don’t know where you got that idea. Maybe I said it could take six months. But that’s not going to work now, is it?” 

“I quit my job,” said Ellie. 

“Uh-huh.” The patient tone was gone. “The job you said you hated? The third job you’ve had in the last five years? That job?”

“You know what,” said Ellie, pinching the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger, “I knew better.”

“What does that mean?”

“I knew you were going to do this. Pull the rug out. You always do. You used me just like you use everyone else. Why did I believe you? I must have been out of my mind!”

She realized she didn’t say any of that out loud when Mom repeated herself, loudly.

“What does that mean, Ellie? If you have something to say, just say it.”

“I’m going to go now,” Ellie said. “Good-bye.”

“No, tell me what you--”

Ellie hung up the phone.

She stood still for a moment, feeling her heartbeat rattling in her chest. Her hands were shaking. She always had this adrenaline dump after the conversation. Where was it when she needed it?

The phone vibrated in her hand. She pressed the power button, hard, until the screen shut down, then she tossed the phone away.

She began to move, almost in a stupor, but she caught her hip against a tub of arts and crafts supplies. This garbage, this stuff was everywhere, hemming her in, suffocating her. She batted at the tub, but it only moved a few inches, so she picked it up and threw it across the room.

The lid came off mid-flight and a rainbow spray of beads arced out behind it like a comet’s tail. 

The tub beneath it was full of napkins and red Solo cups. It travelled further, and took out an old brass floor lamp when it landed.

Her heart was pounding now, whether it was rage or panic, and Ellie knew she had to get out of this house. Neighbors patrolled the front, so that was no escape-- but she had to get outside. She waded through the chaos, throwing, kicking or shoving aside anything that blocked her way, and made blindly for the backyard.

By the time she got the sliding glass doors open, she was desperate for air. As soon as she could draw a full breath, she began to sob like a child.

Ellie sank down into the soft grass and let it all out.   

✦

The crisis passed, like a storm, like it always did. Salt-trails dried on her skin, making her face feel tight. Or maybe that was the headache trying to brew up in her temples. But she knew she was alright, she was calm again. She felt sleepy and hollow and small, like a tattered dandelion puff in the soft June breeze.

She knew she had wanted to stay here.

She wasn’t certain till now. Funny how that worked. She had been arguing with herself ever since she arrived. Port Hazel is such a backwater. No-one will leave you alone, everyone is in your business. The house is a disaster. You don’t know what you’re doing. Was it her voice or Mom’s, talking her out of this town? But as soon as the door closed, she realized she had wanted it open.

She wanted the neighbors coming by with banana bread. She wanted the long chats in the garbage-bag aisle. She wanted to sit under a picnic shelter at someone’s middle school graduation party and to know who was from out of town by their haircut. 

Maybe she had thought she could dig herself in before she ran out of time, make it as difficult and inconvenient as possible to uproot her again. She had needed that six months. But the real estate market is really hot right now. So. That’s that. 

Sunlight prickling her skin was a balm. When her vision cleared, she had been surprised to find the backyard was disheveled, but not in disarray. The cherry tree was crooked, bent over the fence as if leaning on an elbow for a friendly chat, and had probably cast more than its fair share of fluffy pink petals over into the pot-bellied complainant’s yard in the months before Ellie got here. But now it was green and waving pleasantly in the breeze. The grass was a little long, she thought, tousling it between her fingers, but not a jungle. There were flowers, none of whose names she knew, blooming here and there against the fence boards, and a couple plastic chairs stationed in the shade at the far end of the yard, facing one another, as if Betsy had entertained out here once in a while. 

Ellie sighed, a long, deep breath out.

She couldn’t think about the future. It was a gray fog. The past was emptied out, too. She just wanted to sit in this warm bath of sun for now and listen to the birdsong and the sound of distant lawnmowers, and not think about anything at all.

✦

Eventually, she went back into the house. She had no sense of what time it was. No matter. She had nowhere to be. When her eyes adjusted to the low light, she worked her way back to the roll of garbage bags and started where she’d left off.

✦

She got hungry at some point. There was still half a takeout burger in the fridge, along with a lot of other things she’d rather not look too closely at, but the microwave was full of tupperware containers that didn’t have any lids. Ellie just ate the leftover fries cold.

 She’d come across things that didn’t need to go in the dumpster. Floral drapes and men’s polo shirts and tea towels with recipes printed on them. She’d started stuffing them in bags too, and labelling them with a big Sharpie “T,” for thrift store. She didn’t think about how she would get them there, or if she would. She didn’t think about anything. She just kept moving. 

✦

The house was starting to get dark and cool when Ellie found the old orange afghan. It was stuffed into a space between the couch and a cabinet full of VHS tapes with hand-written labels. She shook the blanket out to make sure nothing was living in it and, when duly assured, wrapped it around her shoulders and crouched down to look at the tapes.

Home movies. Garden show, 1996. Gem Faire, 1994. Ellie remembered when Betsey used to bring a giant camcorder around with her wherever she went. Mom, if she was around, was always complaining: First it was Polaroids, now it’s video. Who is ever going to look at this?

One tape was labelled just ELLIE in big, wavering capital letters.

She pulled it out and took it with her to the big, green Lazy Boy.

There were no pathways through the morass of possessions now, just a general layer of garbage bags studded with a few islands of furniture. Ellie hadn’t taken anything out to the dumpster, and she didn’t spend any time thinking about whether or how she would. She just climbed over the top in her afghan-cape, pausing by the TV to reacquaint herself with the ancient mysteries of the VCR. 

Not much to it, really. It was already hooked up. She just turned it on, turned the TV to channel 4 and popped in the tape. 

As it spooled up, she collapsed into the wide open arms of Betsy’s recliner. 

A school auditorium flickered to life on the screen.  A blurry teacher on the distant stage was reading names off of a sheet of paper into a microphone, his voice so distorted by the sound system that he was basically unintelligible. Ellie didn’t recognize anything yet. A small child entered stage right, a girl in a lace bib collar over a dark floral dress, carrying what looked like sheet music.

Betsy’s voice, warm and close to the camera, said, “Oh, this one isn’t my niece, either.”

Ellie’s eyes filled with tears immediately, big, unhurried tears that rolled gently down to her chin and dripped onto the afghan.

It must have been one of her recitals. She couldn’t remember them all clearly, but she could guess the details. Mom is away for work. Betsy came down instead, even though she doesn’t like to drive at night.

“My niece is about nine-- she can play by ear already,” Betsy continued in that familiar low, kind, unstoppable monotone, even as the little stranger on stage sat down at a piano and started to bang out a stilted version of Alouette. “I don’t know how old this little one can be, she seems just tiny! Her feet don’t even reach the pedals. How old do you think she is? It must be good to start at this age, I mean it can’t hurt to start young. I never learned an instrument myself, but I knew a lady growing up who…”

Ellie nestled her head down into the soft upholstery like it was Betsy’s plump shoulder and missed her aunt keenly, painfully, from the deepest inner recesses of her body. 

Soon, cocooned in the afghan and Betsy’s murmured monologue, Ellie felt sleep coming over her, the way it steals up on a toddler after a tantrum.

Tomorrow, she thought, half in and half out of rational thought, I’ll lock up and go back down to the city. My old apartment is paid up to the thirtieth. I have a week to figure out where I should go. Maybe the coast. Maybe somewhere else. Just not Port Hazel.

✦

She heard a diesel engine cut out, somewhere close by.

Ellie came up out of a strange dream, deeply confused.

The living room was full of sunlight. The TV displayed only a bright blue screen.

Had she heard a truck?

She tried to move. She was tangled in the afghan, she had it twisted around her in knots. Her neck was stiff and her head felt like it weighed fifty pounds. 

What time is it? 

Ellie groped fruitlessly for her phone. 

A heavy vehicle door slammed outside. That was unmistakable. 

Who is here and what do they want?

She wrested herself free from the afghan and started out across the sea of bags and boxes like an Arctic explorer picking their way through an icefield. 

A heavy hand rapped on the front door.

“I’m coming,” Ellie muttered. “Very slowly.”

There was some excavation required to get the door open. The thunderous knock came again while she shoved and wrestled to clear a space to stand in.

“Coming, coming.”

A massive old man stood on the other side of the door once she got it open, the neighbor from yesterday, this time wearing blue coveralls with the name Paul mercifully stitched above his right shirt pocket. He had carefully backed a long flatbed trailer up into her driveway alongside the dumpster. His mouth was open like he was intending to ask her a question, but Ellie watched his long, red face slowly change expression as he looked at her, with her swollen eyes, her uncombed hair, her rumpled, slept-in clothes. 

The wiry gray eyebrows knitted together and he closed his mouth firmly, as if to say, This is serious. He took a step forward, and Ellie wordlessly moved out of his way so he could come inside the house.

They stood together, unavoidably close, and both silently took stock of her handiwork. 

She’d cleared off the dining room table, the columns of magazines were gone, the kitchen counters were bare, a lot of the bookshelves emptied, contents bagged and tagged. She’d moved on to boxes when she ran out of bags, filled them mindlessly with whatever came to hand. Almost all of it was contained. But all of it was still in the house.

Paul grunted.

He put out a giant hand and tested the weight of the nearest garbage bag. 

“Some of them are quite heavy,” Ellie tried to warn him, but he bent down, scooped it up and hauled it out of the house.

Ellie suddenly felt a bright flash of distress.

What is he doing? What’s going on here?

She watched him through the doorway as he swiftly and expertly pitched it up and over the side of the dumpster and pivoted back to the house.

Is he just going to…?

Yes. He brushed past her and reloaded, this time taking one bag on the shoulder and another in the crook of his arm.

No discussion. This is what was happening.

There was nothing else to do. Ellie dug in her jeans pocket for a hair tie, raked her hair into a knot and pitched in.

Somehow they worked out a system with no conversation. She took the lighter stuff; if she couldn’t get it over her head, she left it at the foot of the dumpster and he flicked it in as if it was weightless. When she got to the dining room’s trove of aluminum cans, he indicated the trailer with his chin. Anything marked with a “T” for thrift store got the same treatment. 

Paul seemed limitlessly strong, and fast for a man his size, like he could do this in his sleep. His pocked face was expressionless. Ellie was waking up enough as she worked to feel more and more embarrassed, but she couldn’t get a read on him, whether he was annoyed, or contemptuous, or what. There was only stern doggedness to him, the same feeling he’d given off the day before, when all he wanted to talk about was crocuses.

Ellie soon felt a bit light-headed. She hadn’t eaten breakfast, or really much at all the day before. She wasn’t sure how long she could keep this up-- But then the carpet appeared, carpet, and she didn’t dare disrupt the momentum. 

They worked into a rhythm, like a bucket chain moving toward a burning building, but in reverse. The window of exposed carpet opened, and expanded, and spread. Emptiness was engulfing the house, one square foot at a time.

“Alright,” said Paul, long after they started. They were both sweating, both smudged with dust and breathless. “Trailer’s about full.”

Ellie nodded, followed him out to the truck, and climbed into the cab.

Paul’s truck was spotlessly clean inside; she felt painfully and conspicuously grimy. Paul didn’t seem concerned as he slid in the driver’s side and fired up the engine. He eased the truck and trailer out into the cul-de-sac, navigating  slowly and carefully around the dumpster and the street-parked cars, giving plenty of viewing time to an audience of two slack-jawed neighbor ladies huddled in front of the communal bank of mailboxes.

He didn’t say a word. They glided through the neighborhood and onto Main Street with only the road noise between them. It felt like something monumental and intimate had happened between them, but neither of them had anything to say about it. 

Ellie leaned away from him, trying to make herself small against the passenger side door, and missed her phone acutely. 

He put his blinker on eventually, and she was at first thrilled to see he was turning into a little drive-through taco stand. The dashboard clock was improbably saying it was 10:48 am. She had no sense of how long they had been clearing the house and she was almost inside out with hunger. But as quickly, she realized that she hadn’t brought anything with her from the house.

She immediately confessed, too ashamed of all he had done so far to lead him any further astray.

“I don’t have any money on me.”

He gave her a sidelong glance but otherwise ignored her, leaned out of his window and ordered,

“Two breakfast burritos and two black coffees.”

“Sure thing, Paul,” came the answer.

“I’ll pay you back when we get to the house,” she insisted.

Impatience flickered across that monolithic face-- impatience, there it was, so he could register emotions-- but he didn’t respond. The food came through the drive through window, he pulled the truck and trailer off into a mostly-empty gravel parking lot, and they both ate.

He finished before she was even a quarter into hers. The burritos were enormous and overstuffed. As hungry as she was, it was slow going. Paul took the lid off of his black coffee and let it cool while Ellie negotiated a giant bite with as much dignity as she could.

When her mouth was as full as humanly possible, the old man said,

“School’s hiring.”

Ellie could only chew and stare.

“Grade school,” he clarified. “Always needs teacher’s aides.”

She swallowed but still had to give herself a moment to process what he was saying.

“I don’t have a degree.”

“They’ll train.”

“I’m not staying,” Ellie countered sharply. 

He raised his overgrown eyebrows and she instantly regretted her tone.

“Mom’s selling the house. I’m just here to clean out.”

“Is that what you said yesterday?” He sipped his coffee. “I must’ve heard wrong.”

“No, it’s-- No.” 

She didn’t know what to say, not to a stranger.

He shrugged it off and let her finish her breakfast.

They hit the thrift store first-- not actually a Goodwill, but she got the impression that’s what everyone called it. Then the grocery store to sort the cans. She redeemed her receipt and forced eight dollars on him for the burrito. 

A thought occurred to her as they drove back toward Betsy’s house, now mid afternoon and hot in the truck, even with the AC on.

“What did you come over for today in the first place?”

“It’s Friday,” he said. Then, picking up on her dissatisfied stare, added, “I always mow Betsy’s lawn on Fridays.”

Ellie recalled seeing a lawnmower lashed securely at the back of the trailer. She also remembered the two plastic chairs tucked cozily together in the backyard, the not-dead flowers blooming gamely in the weeds. Another of Betsy’s stories seemed to float up to her from the back of her mind.

“Paul,” she said, testing the name. “You’re not the garbageman. You’re the gardener. Right? The one who brings home stray plants the garden center throws out and nurses them back to health? Did you plant those flowers in her yard?”

He snorted. “Did Betsy tell you that? No, I worked for the city, alright. For thirty years.”

Ellie waited. He shot a sideways glance at her, then looked back to the road.

“I put in a few bulbs,” he admitted.

Ellie imagined them sitting together in the shade of a late afternoon, in a clean and blossoming space, the garbageman (retired) in his coveralls, quiet and hulking alongside small, round Betsy, prattling endlessly about everything and nothing.

He must have been thinking about it too.

“She gave me a card,” he said, “when my wife died. Had a poem about crocuses.”

She looked at him, intently. He’d tried to tell her this before.

“‘Patient today, through its gloomiest hour,’” he said slowly, calling it up from memory, “‘We come out the brighter tomorrow.’”

Ellie frowned, trying to work out what it was he wanted her to understand.

His neck turned red with embarrassment, or maybe just the effort of this much conversation. 

“I don’t know,” he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the road. “Something like that.”

They lapsed into silence again, till they reached the house and he maneuvered the trailer back into the driveway.

As they got out of the cab, he said,

“Is that your car across the street? With the keyboard in it?”

Ellie had forgotten about it, but there it was-- the backseat and hatch of her car was packed from floorboards to roof with all her earthly possessions, including the disassembled keyboard, pressed accusingly up against the windows like a badly-behaved child making faces at strangers on the highway.

“It’s fine,” she told Paul. “It’s not even locked. I’m not worried about it in this neighborhood.”

“No.” He shook his head. “That shouldn’t be left outside.”

Excuses drifted through Ellie’s mind, but he was already halfway across the road, and it was in the spirit of the day to just let him have his way.

It only took one trip, between the two of them, to bring the pieces of the keyboard into the house, and he instinctively put it right beneath the picture window where it belonged.

“I should mow,” he announced then, dusting his hands off on his coveralls. “Before it gets too much later.”

“Okay,” Ellie said, because she didn’t know what else to say.

“I haven’t gone round the back since the house changed hands,” he said. “Those daylilies are probably fine, but not everything back there is drought tolerant.”

“Oh!” said Ellie, realizing he was asking permission. “Do whatever you want.”

He nodded and left, and she hadn’t thanked him and she didn’t think he would want her to. 

Ellie stood alone in the house.

The carpet was stained and rutted and covered with debris. Big, ugly furniture stood around everywhere, awkwardly unsure of itself. The kitchen was only partially cleared; she hadn’t set foot in any of the bedrooms. But she was standing in an open room, not a bog of quicksand, a home.

Though not her home.

Rather than think about that, she put the keyboard together. While she was laid on the ground underneath it, using a butter knife to tighten the screws that locked the body into its plastic legs, she spotted and pocketed her discarded cell phone. She dug into her dwindling cleaning supplies and located some furniture polish. It only took a few minutes to wipe the keyboard down, a few more to drag the now-emptied bookshelf out of the way and pull the piano right up to the window. She found a power outlet and reconnected all the relevant cords.

She pulled the bench up and sat down with a sigh, gazing out the picture window into the cul-de-sac. Kids were tumbling around the yard of the house across the street, a small dog ricocheting between them. There was another conference of old women standing by the mailboxes, wearing high-waisted pants and plastic sunglasses and gesturing at each other with glasses of iced tea. She could faintly hear Paul the garbageman’s lawnmower making straight lines through the grass in her backyard.

Ellie took her phone out and pressed the power button.

When it came to life, she quickly flicked through her apps and removed all the new messages from Mom, deleted the voicemails. She opened up a blank text message.

She tapped quickly, before she could change her mind.

I’ll buy the house.

Three dots appeared, instantly. Mom did nothing without her notifications on, day or night. Ellie never had to worry about the time difference.

How.

I have savings. The money Dad left me.

Three dots appeared, then disappeared. Ellie could feel her calculating the possibility on the other side of the world.

Not enough to get a loan.

Ellie knew the rest of the argument. That money was supposed to be for college. You just quit your job. You don’t know anything about mortgages or interest rates or home owner’s insurance. And why Port Hazel? Why?

She tapped:

Give me six months.

Three dots appeared. But Ellie didn’t wait. She put the phone on silent and tucked it into her back pocket and turned the keyboard on.

She put her hands lightly on the keys for a moment, warmly, apologetically. Then she started to play.