Just Like Home(18)

“You should have seen this place when I showed up,” he said easily, as if they’d been having a completely different conversation, as if she hadn’t rejected his advance at all. “Screen door hanging off the hinges in the back, front steps half-rotted through. I think I showed up just in time. It’s been a real honor, getting to commune with the house. Getting to seek real, meaningful contact—”

“How long until you leave?” She tried to remind herself that a good person, a normal person, would be more hospitable than this but she couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t stand him.

“Few weeks,” he drawled. “But your mom’ll probably let me stay as long as I need. She really understands my project, you know? She gets the love-aspect.” He returned the cigarillo to his mouth, puckering his lips around it slow and deliberate.

Vera almost smiled then, both at how blatantly he was trying to get her to ask about his project and at the notion of Daphne getting the love-aspect. As far as Vera could tell, Daphne had never felt a love-aspect about anything.

She didn’t ask about the project. She knew better than to talk to a Duvall. As a result, the rest of the drive was silent and uncomfortable. The car filled up with oily smoke. James kept clearing his throat, and Vera kept ignoring him. She drove home too quick and too reckless. She hated the relief she felt when she turned onto the street that stretched out in front of the Crowder House.

She wanted to wrap her fingers around that relief and squeeze it until it popped.

But what she wanted didn’t matter. It hadn’t mattered for a long, long time.

“We should head in,” James said after too many seconds had passed since Vera’d turned off the car. “Or, well, you should head in. I want to get some work done before dinner.”

“Right,” Vera said. She didn’t move.

James cleared his throat again. “Okay then. See you in a few hours, Vera Crowder,” he said, lingering on the three r’s in her name. He got out of the car and closed the door carefully, quietly. He paused on the driveway to grind out the stub of the cigarillo under his heel.

Vera stayed in the car, breathing in the stench of cheap, infused tobacco, steeling herself to go into the house the same way she’d steeled herself to go into the store. The Crowder House waited, just as it always had. It waited to breathe in the outside-smell of her, waited to seal up her sounds and her movements, waited to wrap her in plaster and wood and old wiring where she belonged.

Inside the house, inside the old dining room, in the newly-rented hospital bed, Daphne waited, too.





CHAPTER SEVEN


Vera had to do what she came home for. And if that was the case—if she absolutely had to dig into the contents of the house—she might as well start in the kitchen.

She’d hadn’t been in there since her arrival the afternoon before, not wanting to walk through the dining room. Not wanting to see Daphne again, not ready to try to figure out how to help. It was, Vera knew, wrong to leave her dying mother alone for so long. But then again, Daphne had said she had a system. Vera knew that she should have asked more questions about it—was James Duvall the system? Was the system safe? But there was the tempting possibility that maybe that system meant Daphne could be avoided. Maybe it meant she didn’t really need Vera’s help at all. Focus on the house, she’d said. The details are not your business.

And so Vera decided to do the thing she knew, without a doubt, was her business: she decided to work in the kitchen until it was time to eat dinner with her mother. Her mother and that man. She couldn’t quite stand the thought of eating alongside him, but that was a problem for the future. Right now, the kitchen was waiting.

A fat permanent marker, new and dizzyingly pungent, worked to label the gray storage bins: KEEP, TOSS, SELL, DONATE. Vera wrote the words in capital letters, wrote right on the plastic. It felt emphatic, like real forward motion. Some petty, small, childish piece of her wanted Duvall to see the boxes and understand that he was not welcome to stay.

The long loose swing of her hair felt right in this house, but it wouldn’t do for the work ahead. Vera held the marker in her teeth while she coiled her hair into a high bun, twisting it up tight as a fist.

When Francis Crowder had built this kitchen, he’d done so according to his own arcane understanding of what would happen in it. The counters were long and narrow, and the cupboards were high and deep. This configuration had worked well for a man whose cooking experience was largely sandwich-oriented, a man who was tall and long-armed enough to reach into the backs of the highest cupboards. Vera’s mother, however, had always struggled with the too-small surface area of the counters, and Vera herself had never been able to reach into the backs of the cupboards without the assistance of a stepladder. The fire-engine red paint that Francis had inflicted on the walls lent additional urgency to the wrongness of the room.

Now, the front of the refrigerator was covered by a tight layer of heavy plastic wrapping like the film that comes on new electronics, laminating the magnets in place. One of Vera’s old report cards was under that plastic, her C-minus in social studies forever preserved against the ravages of time. She couldn’t remember that report card ever being on the refrigerator before. Daphne must have gotten desperate for artifacts once the requests for residencies started rolling in.

Once Hammett Duvall’s book had been published, everyone wanted a piece of the Crowder House.