Francis’s aunt had died, and, since he was one of only two surviving relatives and the other, Uncle Lewis, was in an assisted-living facility in California, the emptying of her summer house had fallen to Francis. Uncle Lewis had asked for the pie safe and for the bench in the entryway, nothing else, maybe an Oriental rug, if the colors were still good and it wasn’t very big. Francis had rolled up the small Tabriz, which he tied with string and put in the bottom of the pie safe.
A few days earlier, Sheldon had taken his father aside to ask his advice: should he become engaged to his girlfriend now, or get the first year, or even the first two years, of law school behind him first? Sheldon and Lucy had already discussed marriage, and she seemed in no hurry, but he hadn’t liked her going off to teach English in Japan with no engagement ring on her finger. Francis thought Lucy a nice young woman, pretty, neither shy nor aggressive, but, really, despite the many occasions on which they’d interacted, he could not get much of a sense of her. She’d twice been involved in car accidents in the past year, both times when she was driving, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything—three times would have been more definitive. The biggest clue Francis had got about Lucy had come one morning after she’d spent the night, when she’d come down to breakfast late, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and trailing her underpants in one leg of the jeans. Bernadine had whispered to her, and Lucy had turned bright-red and snatched up the underpants, stuffing them down the front of her jeans. She’d had no sense of humor about it at all. Well, he couldn’t imagine having come downstairs at the Streetmans’ (what would it be—forty-some years ago?) after sleeping with Bern, because no such thing would ever have happened. They would have had him arrested. But this was a different age, and he had no objection to Lucy’s sleeping with Sheldon in their house. They put their cups and saucers in the sink, and were extremely quiet. The TV in Sheldon’s bedroom never went on, as Bern had pointed out.
Bernadine said that she liked Lucy, but Francis thought she might like her only moderately. For a woman who’d wanted a daughter, Bern was quite skeptical of other people’s daughters, though her skepticism about Lucy took the form of mentioning little oddities and quickly adding, “Nothing wrong with that, of course.” One of the things that there was nothing wrong with was Lucy’s inability to cook—her ineptitude extending even to lettuce-washing, to not understanding what a salad spinner was. She recoiled from the blender and the toaster as if they might become animated without her touching them. She drank a lot of tea, so she could boil water. But why did she resist when Bern tried to explain how other things were done in the kitchen?
Then Bern had begun finding banana peels in strange places: thrown behind a flowering bush in the garden, or pushed into a vase. “Fortunately none in the linen closet yet,” Bern said wryly. She had found two or three folded inside empty toilet-paper rolls in the trash; she’d found another buried in the little trash can that held lint from the dryer.
“What do you think?” she asked Francis. “Is it some kind of eating disorder? Some comment on something or other?”
“She’s realized we’re monkeys,” he said, curling his fingers and scratching his ribs, puckering his lips.
“It isn’t funny to me, Francis, it’s upsetting. I’ve never known anyone to stash banana peels.”
“How do you know it isn’t Sheldon?”
“Have you ever once known him to bring any food whatsoever into this house? He doesn’t even come in eating a candy bar. I’ve never once seen him with a cup of takeout coffee. He’s so lazy he relies entirely on the groceries I bring home.”
Francis put down his newspaper and looked over the top of his glasses. “Maybe it’s a mating ritual,” he said, but she’d already left the room.
Now Francis stood in the hallway of his aunt’s house, wondering if it would be worth it to take out the ceiling fixture and replace it with something less expensive and less unique before the real-estate agent came back. This required outguessing the people who would eventually tour the house: would they be inclined to like everything, once they’d seen such a splendid light fixture, or would they breeze past, the men concerned about the basement, the women interested in the kitchen? He was contemplating calling Bern to ask her opinion when he saw the Burwell Boys Moving truck turn in to the driveway, sending gravel flying into the peony beds. A hollyhock went flying like a spear. Low-hanging tree limbs snapped off.
Two men wearing chinos and dark-brown T-shirts hopped out. “Mr. Field? How do you do, Mr. Field?” the burlier of the two said. “Moving day, Mr. Field,” the other man said, retrieving a clipboard from the passenger seat. He had a couple of feathers in his shirt pocket. “I’m Jim Montgomery. My partner here is Don O’Rourke.”
