The Sweetness of Forgetting (8)

“Gavin’s,” I say softly. His familiar dusty-blue Wrangler is parked beside my old Corolla. My heart sinks.

“Gavin Keyes?” Matt says. “The handyman? What’s he doing here?”

“Annie must have called him,” I say through gritted teeth. My daughter doesn’t know that I still haven’t paid Gavin in full for the work he did around my house over the summer. Not even close. She doesn’t know that one July afternoon on the porch with him, after getting a statement from the bank, I’d broken down in embarrassing tears, and that a month later, when he’d finished his repairs around my house, he’d insisted on letting me pay him in free pastries and coffee from the bakery for the time being. Annie doesn’t know that he’s the only person in town other than Matt who knows what a mess my life is, or that because of that, he’s the last person in the world I want to see right now.

I walk inside, with Matt a few steps behind, carrying my meal from Fratanelli’s. In the kitchen, I find Annie with a stack of towels and Gavin bent over with his head under my sink. I blink when I realize my eyes have gone directly to the thigh of his jeans, to see whether the hole I’d noticed this morning is still there. It is, of course.

“Gavin,” I say, and he starts, pushes back from the sink, and stands up. His eyes dart back and forth between Matt and me, and he scratches his head as Matt moves past him to put my food in the refrigerator.

“Hey,” Gavin says. He glances at Matt again and then back at me. “I came right over when Annie called. I got your water turned off for now. Looks like the pipe that burst is in the wall, behind the dishwasher. I’ll come over and fix it for you the day after tomorrow, if you don’t mind waiting.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I say softly. I make eye contact with him, hoping that he knows what I’m trying to say: that I still can’t pay him.

But he just smiles and goes on as if he hasn’t heard me. “Tomorrow’s packed, but the next day, I’m wide open,” he says. “I just have a small job over at the Foley place in the morning. Besides, this shouldn’t take too long to fix. It’s just a pipe repair, and you should be good as new.” His eyes dart to Matt again and then back to me. “Listen, I’ve got a wet-vac in the Jeep. Let me go grab it, and I’ll help you get some of this water up. We can see if it did any damage once the floors are dry.”

I glance at Annie, who’s still standing there with a huge pile of towels in her hand. “We can clean all this up ourselves,” I tell Gavin. “You don’t have to stay. Right?” I add, looking at Annie and then at Matt.

“I guess,” Annie says with a shrug.

Matt looks away. “Actually, Hope, I’ve got an early morning tomorrow. I’m going to have to head home.”

Gavin snorts and walks outside without saying another word. I ignore him. “Oh,” I say to Matt. “Of course. Thanks for dinner.”

By the time I walk Matt to the door, Gavin’s reentering with his wet-vac.

“I said you didn’t have to do that,” I mumble.

“I know what you said,” Gavin says, without slowing down to look at me. A moment later, as I watch Matt’s shiny Lexus pull away from the curb, I hear Gavin’s vacuum turn on in the kitchen. I close my eyes for a minute, and then I turn and begin walking back toward the one mess in my life that can actually be fixed.



The next evening, Annie’s at Rob’s house again, and as I mop up the remainder of the mess in the kitchen after work, I find myself thinking of Mamie, who always used to know how to fix disasters. It’s been two weeks since I last visited her, I realize. I should be a better granddaughter, I think with a swell of guilt. I should be a better person. Yet one more area in which I seem to be eternally falling short.

With a lump in my throat, I finish mopping, put some lipstick on in the hall mirror, and grab my keys. Annie’s right; I need to go see my grandmother. Visiting Mamie always makes me want to cry, because although the home she’s in is cheerful and friendly, it’s terrible to see her slipping away. It’s like standing on the deck of a boat, watching the waves suck someone under, and knowing that there’s no life preserver to throw in.

Fifteen minutes later, I’m walking through the doors of Mamie’s assisted living facility, a huge home that’s painted buttercream yellow and filled with pictures of flowers and woodland creatures. The top floor is the memory care unit, where visitors are required to enter a pass code on a digital pad at the door.

I walk down the hallway toward Mamie’s room, which sits at the far end of the west wing. The residents’ rooms are all private and apartment-style, although they eat all their meals in the dining room, and staff members all have master keys so that they can check on residents and give them their daily medications. Mamie’s on an antidepressant, two heart medications, and an experimental drug for Alzheimer’s that doesn’t seem to be helping; I meet with the staff doctor once a month to get a status report. He said at our last meeting that her mental faculties have been going sharply downhill in the last few months.

“The worst part is,” he’d said, looking over his glasses at me, “she’s lucid enough to know it. This is one of the hardest stages to watch; she knows her memory will be all but gone soon, which is very unsettling and sad for patients in this state.”