A Little Hope(60)

She walks down the basement steps, tearing her stocking on a loose nail that’s been bothering her for months now, only to find that the washing machine has stopped midcycle because her small bathroom rugs were unevenly balanced, and she is so irritated that she kicks the appliance.

“Darn you, you piece of junk.”

The basement has a pleasant coolness to it, and she takes a deep breath to calm herself. She thinks of Ginger’s note again, about Mary Jane telling her to relax, and her head hurts. She gets flashes of thoughts about Luke—they come to her this way (sharp, quick, vivid) almost every day: Luke gone eight months. Wrecking beautiful Betsy. His sweet, tired face that day in December, just a few days before he died. It’s good to have you back here, she said. Did she hug him when he came into the house, his last time home? Did she?

They found all sorts of things in his system—alcohol, painkillers, you name it. She refused to look at the autopsy report. She still sees Luke on the stepladder with the Christmas star. Does this look right, Mom? he said. Yes, dear, fine. Fine.

She rubs her temples.

These old cars weren’t made for that kind of impact. Somewhere in the paperwork it said Betsy couldn’t even be towed. She wonders if he ever wore Von’s sunglasses when he drove. He would have looked so handsome.

I’m trying to wake up. I’m trying, Mom.

She busies herself, reaching inside the washer to align the rugs a bit better and pushing the button again, hearing the machine kick back on and make its satisfying whirring noise. She likes when things are happening, when something is being worked on. She hugs her arms by her waist and doesn’t want to leave this basement.

When the children were still young, she and Von had toyed with the idea of making it more of a finished room. They had moved the old living room furniture they were replacing down here—the brown sofa with its floral print and the two blue La-Z-Boy recliners she and Von would sit in after dinner, along with the low wooden coffee table with the claw feet and the television built into the cabinet that Von said still worked “perfectly good.” When they had new carpeting put in, she asked the installers if they could bind a section of the old carpet when they were hauling it out, which she placed in the center of the basement.

It was never a musty, typical basement because their house was built into a hill, so it had a wall of windows and a nice door that led right out into the backyard. Against the back of the house sat the wrought-iron bench that Von used to rest on after he mowed the lawn. He would take out a pack of cigarettes and look at the enormous view of the green lawns of Wharton, shake his head, and say, “I tell you what. If this don’t beat all.”

For a while after Von died, she kept the lawnmower in the corner of the basement where the furnace and water heater sit in their closet, pestering Luke to help her out and cut the grass, but he wasn’t reliable, and sometimes he cut the grass too close so he wouldn’t have to cut it so often. It was around this time of year, her angry time, that she dragged the lawnmower out to the yard, parked it by the curb, and put a sign on it that said FREE and hired a lawn service. “You’re no muss, no fuss,” Von would have said. Luke was still living at home then. She felt glad that the worry was gone about the grass getting cut, but also felt as though she was taking something from both Von and Luke.

She walks over to the television now and presses the power button to see what happens, and lo and behold, one of the morning talk shows comes on. This delights her for a second because something has survived from the cable line Von split himself and ran down the wall in the groove of the wood paneling. “We can sit down here and neck all night,” he said, laughing.

“You are a silly man,” she said.

She lets the television play, even though she notices the dust on the screen, and is distressed by Luke’s drum set and two guitars over in the corner. She glares at them. She asked him time and again to get rid of them. He hadn’t touched them in so long (thankfully, because the noise would vibrate the whole house, and the cymbals that he clanged every so often would jar her teeth). But how many times did she ask, “Can we relocate these things?” and he’d just laugh her off and say, “Mom, one day I’m going to surprise you, and I’ll have a whole band down here singing your name.”

“I would throttle you,” she said. “Now take out a classified ad. I will be glad to foot the bill, dear.”

The drum set with its big bass drum and its extending appendages of other drums looks like some kind of sea monster. She is disgusted that it’s here, still alive, and Luke is not.

Why did Luke leave it behind when he moved out? She should have hired Wally, the big guy Von used to have blacktop the driveway and haul cement bags, to load up the drum set years ago. She should have had him bring it right over to Luke’s apartment and leave it in the hallway. Now she’s stuck with it. Did he know that seeing it would torture her later? Did he care? Did Luke ever care what he did and what effect it had?

If Von had lived longer, if she had told him to cut it out with the smoking years and years ago, she thinks he could have helped Luke. Wouldn’t he have said, No more, kid. You gotta straighten this monkey business out? Wouldn’t he have given him the toughness he needed, grabbing his arm, telling him, if it had gotten that bad, that he was taking him to rehab? Or maybe Von would have said, Rehab? I’ll show you rehab, and would have dealt with Luke by taking away his keys and making him move home. You want to act like a baby, well then babies live with Mom and Pop.