The first thing Dad does is hang the Seurat in our new living room. It’s not a real Seurat, because that would make us millionaires. It’s a poster from a museum. I feel a little better as soon as I see it on the wall above the couch, exactly where it always was at home. I think we both do.
Two summers ago we went to Chicago, where the real painting takes up one entire wall of the Art Institute. What you can’t tell from our poster is that the picture is painted entirely with dots. Tiny little dots. Close up, they just look like blobs of paint. But if you stand back, you see that they make this whole nice park scene, with people walking around in old-fashioned clothes. There’s even a monkey on a leash. Mom says that our Seurat poster reminds her to look at the big picture. Like when it hurts to think about selling the house, she tells herself how that bad feeling is just one dot in the giant Seurat painting of our lives.
When I was little, I thought my parents were calling our poster the “Sir Ott,” which is how you pronounce Seurat, the name of the artist from France who painted the picture. And I still think of the poster that way—like it’s this guy, Sir Ott, who has always lived with us.
In my head, Sir Ott has a kind of personality. Very polite. Very quiet. He watches a lot of television.
Seurat’s first name? It was Georges.
Here’s a piece of advice you will probably never use: If you want to name your son after Georges Seurat, you could call him George, without the S. Just to make his life easier.
After Sir Ott is up on the wall (and perfectly level), Dad and I start with the kitchen stuff, unwrapping dishes and glasses. It’s amazing how much work it is to move just twelve blocks.
I’m tossing all the silverware into a drawer until I remember that Dad will probably have a heart attack because he can’t stand to see things all jumbled up like that, and so I stop and do it right—forks with forks, tablespoons separate from teaspoons.
We make a good team, and soon we have about ten giant plastic bags stuffed with the crumpled-up newspaper everything was wrapped in.
“Let me show you the basement,” Dad says. “That’s where the garbage and recycling go.” Because the garbage is my job.
At our house, doing the garbage meant wheeling two big plastic bins out to the curb. I could take both at once, steering them in two directions around the crack on the broken concrete path and bringing them back together again on the other side. It’s not as easy as it sounds. It’s a big crack: I tripped over it when I was five and chipped my front tooth. I imagine the new owners of our house hitting that crack on trash day, their cans tipping and their garbage going everywhere.
Dad and I toss the bags of newspaper into the hall, making a small mountain. When the elevator opens, there’s a guy in it, standing next to two big suitcases. He’s wearing a baseball cap with a fish on it.
Dad tells him we’ll take the next one. “Don’t want to drown you,” he says, pointing at our massive pile of recycling.
“I appreciate it!” the man calls as the door is closing.
Dad and I watch the beat-up metal arrow on the wall above the elevator move from 3, to 2, then L, for lobby. Dad loves old stuff like that, like the big yellow chandelier downstairs and the tiled hallway floors that will never, ever be clean again. He calls it “faded elegance.” That’s sort of his job now—he’s officially still an architect, but ever since he got laid off last year, he mostly helps people make their new houses look old. Which I think is a little crazy, considering that there are plenty of old houses they could just buy in the first place.
Dad’s getting fired has a lot to do with why we sold our house. Mom says it was partly a blessing in disguise because Dad’s always talked about starting his own business, and now he’s finally done it. So far he only has three customers. Or clients, as he calls them.
The basement has bumpy gray walls and a few lightbulbs hanging down from the ceiling on neon-yellow cords. There’s a line of garbage cans against the far wall. Dad and I stack the bags of paper in the recycling area.
Next to the last garbage can, there are two doors. One of them says SUPERINTENDENT. There’s a pad taped to it, with a stubby pencil hanging from a string, and a Post-it that says: DATE YOUR WORK REQUESTS.
The second door has something stuck to it too—a piece of loose-leaf paper with words scrawled on it:
Spy Club Meeting—TODAY!
I can’t tell how old the paper is, but it’s a little curly around the edges.
Dad is studying it. “What a ridiculous sign.”
“I know—dumb.”
“I mean, how are we supposed to attend the meeting if they don’t announce the time?”
“Ha, ha.”
“I’m serious.” Dad takes the pencil-on-a-string from the superintendent’s door and stretches it over to the Spy Club notice. It doesn’t quite reach, so he has to write along the very edge of the paper:
WHAT TIME?
When Dad gets an idea into his head, it’s no use trying to stop him. So I just watch him do it. Dad writes with these perfectly even block letters. They teach you that at architecture school.
“Can we go now?”
Upstairs, Dad has me flatten a stack of empty boxes while he puts the books on the bookshelves. I catch myself thinking about that Spy Club sign, and how some kid might get excited that someone is actually coming. But that sheet of paper has probably been stuck up there for months. Years, even.
“I should probably take some of these boxes downstairs,” I say.
“Want me to come?” Dad is looking at the bookshelves, deep in thought, deciding exactly which book should go where. Once, Mom came home from work and discovered that he had turned all the books around so that the bindings were against the wall and the pages faced out. He said it was calming not to have all those words floating around and “creating static.” Mom made him turn them back. She said that it was too hard to find a book when she couldn’t read the titles. Then she poured herself a big glass of wine.
“I can handle the basement,” I tell Dad. “You finish the books.”
Downstairs, I prop the boxes against the wall and glance over at the Spy Club notice.
Under Dad’s WHAT TIME? something is written in orange marker:
1:30?
Great. Now Dad has gone and raised the hopes of some kid in the building. I stand there for a minute, then stretch the stubby-pencil string over to the paper the way Dad did.
OK, I write.
When I get back upstairs, Dad has a book in each hand and he’s just staring, like his life depends on which one he picks. He’s surrounded by five boxes, all still full of books. He’ll never be done.
“The blue one,” I tell him.
He nods and puts it on the shelf. “I was leaning toward the blue.” He stands back. “What do you think so far?”
“Looks good. And it’s less echoey in here now.”
“You want to call Mom at the hospital? We can fill her in, tell her how it’s going.”
“Maybe later.” I don’t like the way Mom’s voice sounds at the hospital. Tired.
“I need lunch,” Dad says. “DeMarco’s?”
I say yes to pizza. “But can we make it quick?” I ask. “I have a meeting downstairs at one-thirty, thanks to you.”
Dad stares at me for a second and then bursts out laughing. “Seriously? The Spy Club? I was sure that sign was ten years old!”
But of course he loves that I’m going through with it.
“What if it’s a seven-year-old or something?” I complain on the way to DeMarco’s.
“Only one way to find out,” Dad says cheerfully. As if he isn’t to blame for the whole situation.