The day had passed with no third black mark. Sarah Anne hit the switch on her way out of the kitchen, throwing Jameson into darkness at her back. He glanced over his shoulder into the dim room, the blue kettle on the stove signaling morning, and he thought of the new day that would come for them tomorrow. They would drink their coffee with milk as slowly as they pleased, with no place to be, and there in his small chair, Ernest would have yogurt and Cheerios, making a show, at least once, of chewing with his front teeth and grinning, which would make them both laugh, and they would forget, yet again, all that happened today.
The hours might have folded away right then with Jameson turning toward the living room, Ernest to be scooped up and slipped into his bed. But the hushed, somnolent house was interrupted by the phone in the kitchen.
Jameson snatched the receiver off the cradle, held it to his ear, and faced the window with his fist on his hip. “What the hell do you want from us?” he said.
“I beg your pardon,” a woman said.
“Oh,” Jameson said.
“I didn’t mean to intrude,” she said with some kind of accent.
“I apologize,” he said. “I thought you were someone else.”
“Well, then. I’m pleased to say that I am just me.”
Jameson smiled, perplexed.
She introduced herself, though he did not catch her name. Ernest was whimpering in the living room, and Sarah Anne was telling him that everything would be OK, while the woman spoke with a soft foreign lilt, her voice plush with a silky cadence that distracted from what she was actually saying. “Jameson, is it?” she said, with a strange bit of laughter that made him wonder if she’d been drinking.
“Yes?”
“You came highly recommended,” she said, now sounding sober and clear. It was then he understood about the call, what it was she wanted, and his body flushed with relief. “Oh,” he said. “Well.” He nearly laughed. And then he did laugh, quietly, at the ceiling. “Can I ask who recommended me? This number, it’s not the one I give out . . .”
“What was his name . . . It will come to me. I phoned him weeks ago and he told me that you’re just the man for this job . . . this particular house . . . my grandparents’ . . .”
“Was it a guy from eastern Washington?”
“I’m not sure where he’s from. He only said that he used to know you some years ago.”
“Oh.” The offer was so unexpected that Jameson moved toward the kitchen table, to the chair near the window, where it was all he could do to sit, grasp a knee, and remain still.
The small light popped on over the stove. Sarah Anne appeared with Ernest, a sight that often gave Jameson a jolt even on the best of days—a child on her hip—the fine wavy texture of his hair from behind, the familiar blond strands.
Jameson rubbed his eyes closed as if a headache were coming on. Perhaps one was. “Was he a customer or a contractor?” What did it matter? He opened his eyes to Sarah Anne’s legs in cutoffs, and the sight filled him with a vague sense of guilt, as if he were doing something wrong, as if he were always doing something wrong, but especially here and now, alone in the dim light talking on the phone to a woman with a beautiful voice, a woman he didn’t know, but who was, in fact, offering him some much-needed work.
“I apologize for the time. The day got away.”
“Not a problem. I was just closing up shop around here.”
“But your number, yes, I located it through information. The guy, whose name will come to me here, he used to be a contractor, hauling scrap now, as I understand, and the number he gave me no longer worked.”
“Yes. Well. Here I am.”
Sarah Anne tried to kiss Ernest on the temple and he leaned away. She bounced him gently and smiled into his eyes as if to say it didn’t matter if he rejected her, because no way in the world would she ever be rejecting him.
“This fellow, I don’t know him personally. Obviously.” The woman caller laughed. “He said you’d be perfect for the house, and of course, I understand that you live on the other side of the state, and, I’m sorry, I don’t want to put you out, but it’s somewhat urgent. I’m afraid I’ve waited so long to get this project going, and anyway, I’m praying you might find the time on such short notice.”
“How short is short?”
“The thing is, I’ve no idea what the work will involve. How long the entire project will take and all that, but I’m guessing several months, as I hear you like to work alone, for one thing, and I’d like to sell the house by fall, so . . . Something like this week. Tomorrow? ”
Jameson couldn’t contain himself.
“Oh. You’re laughing. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“Well,” Jameson said, a little lost in the wonder of his luck. He was lost in so many things at once, like what else she might have been told about him. And what did the other side of the state mean? The coast? Portland? South along the California border? “I’m glad you called,” he said. “I appreciate it. Thank you for going through the trouble.” Before he had a chance to ask where she was calling from, she said, “The house means a great deal to me, and he said you were better suited than anyone. I understand your work is a little unorthodox.”
Jameson took a moment to let that sink in. He came close to asking if she cared to elaborate, even opened his mouth before clamping it shut. He didn’t always know how to talk to people, and it seemed to have gotten worse in recent years.
“I guess,” he said. “I don’t know.” But Jameson did know, and anyone who’d ever worked with him knew that stains and scratches spoke to him of smokers and drinkers and lovers and cooks, guiding him toward what needed to be done and where. Maybe she’d been told he began each job by strolling the rooms, resurrecting the lives of those who’d lived hundreds of years before, playing out the patterns and habits that marked their days. Every home filled with stories, and he followed along with the beginning, middle, and end. He would offer the place a new ending, but first he had to pay close attention to the ghostly silhouettes where chests and picture frames had come between sunlight and layers of wallpaper, until he knew where everyone had stood and sat and rocked and ate and thereby loved and despised and mourned and celebrated one another in every room. After that he would know what to do.
“Are you still there?” she asked.
“Sorry. This old wall phone goes in and out. Can you write down my cell in case we get cut off?”
She said she needed to grab a pen, but then she seemed to have not gone anywhere. “Right,” she said. “I’m here.”
He gave her the number, and then he asked how old the house was.
“It’s a 1940 bungalow. A Sears kit my grandfather built.”
“Oh,” Jameson said. “Say that again?”
“. . . I still have the instruction book.”
“A Sears kit?”
“Yes.”
“With the original manual?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, hell. Excuse my language. That’s remarkable. You don’t see them much anymore, especially not west of the Rockies.” Jameson turned to Sarah Anne with a huge grin on his face, and she smiled with a raised eyebrow, a look of curiosity, pleased, he guessed, by what she was gathering was good news.
He shifted his shoulders toward the window and made a point not to let his hopes sail too high. Not yet. Work on a house of that sort could be extensive, complicated—not everyone knew how to build those kits properly, even with step-by-step instructions. The place might be a mismatched disaster, better torn down, and that would mean a waste of a workweek, driving out to wherever she was to tell her there was nothing he could do.
“And just so you know, my grandfather looked after the place quite well before he died a few years ago,” she said, as if reading his mind. “It’s fairly solid in spite of the winters out here.”
“Where is—”
“I mean . . . oh, sorry, you go ahead,” she said.
“No, no, please, you finish.”
“Well . . . I was just saying that so far as I can tell, it was in decent shape up until he and my grandmother passed away. Three years now. I haven’t been over there much since, to be honest.”
“Has it been vacant?” Three years. He could practically smell the run of mice, squirrels, and raccoons. The attic, walls, and subfloors could turn out to be an ecosystem of nests, gnawed hardwoods, coated in fresh and petrified waste.
“I’m afraid so,” she said.
Jameson caught himself midsigh.
“I was out of the country, and then I had my own circumstances—that is to say, my own house to deal with. I used another man. I mean, for my house. A different contractor.”
He smiled. “Sure.”
She let out what sounded like an enormous sigh. “My grandfather built my house, too, a carriage house next door. Another Sears. In 1937. He and my grandmother lived here first, before building the bungalow.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. What do you mean?”
“About it being another Sears.”
“No, not kidding, not about this bit, anyway.”
Jameson wasn’t sure he understood her. He didn’t know if he should laugh. “OK,” he said. “So, that’s where you live now, next door to the house that needs work?” He turned toward Sarah Anne with what had to have been a puzzled expression, and he saw that he’d caught her attention. She was staring right at him, her own puzzled look melting into another warm smile. She mouthed, Work? and he nodded, and she beamed and gave him a thumbs-up.
“Yes,” the woman said, and Jameson wondered if she was what the British called daft.
He turned to the window. “That’s just so unusual. Pretty rare to find these homes at all, let alone two of them together.”
“Oh? I didn’t know they were special to anyone other than my family.”
“Well, I think they are. Not everyone would agree.”
“You’re just the man, then.”
“I believe I may be. I take it this other contractor isn’t someone you can or want to hire again?”
“He moved to Phoenix.”
“Ah. Sunshine.”
“Yes. I hear some people like that sort of thing.”
“God help them.”
She laughed, fully, out loud, just a laugh, that’s all it was, and yet it sparked across the line with a clarity so pure it was as if she were suddenly with him in the room. He glanced at Sarah Anne’s back and then the meadow outside, his meadow, she called it, and he realized the laughter reminded him of Sarah Anne from before, in years past, not the tone so much as the energy behind it, and it occurred to him to hang up the phone right then without an explanation to anyone.
He leaned forward. “Whereabouts did you say you live?”
“Right, yes, sorry, it’s a little town on the northern coast,” she said, and Jameson replied, “Oh,” and Ernest said, “Ohhh,” and Jameson knew without looking that Sarah Anne had handed him a vanilla wafer.
The woman continued talking, saying she would pay him more than his going rate if he could finish by September, when the rain made it harder to sell, but his mind wandered, lurched back, and wandered again to the Oregon coast. He thought of Sarah Anne carrying Ernest back into the house today, the red pads of his feet bouncing at her hips, his skinny back heaving from tears.
It was a matter of control, a practiced way he put a halt to the ping-pong pattern of memories, but not before the dead faces of his children in the morgue would appear behind his eyes, and the clutching of Sarah Anne’s arm while rising from nightmares of identifying their bodies, screaming himself awake that they were only seven years old! And again, hobbling to retch in the grass near the children’s tree swings while telling Sarah Anne to please get back in the house.
“Excuse me for just a second,” he said. “I need a moment to see if I can switch some things around.”
“Of course. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. Would you prefer I phone you tomorrow?”
“No, no. I just need a second.”
He closed his eyes and smothered the mouthpiece with his palm. He could feel Sarah Anne watching from behind, or maybe he just wanted to believe she was. He concentrated on the lilt in the woman’s voice, allowing it to drift through his mind without force or intention.
A carriage house.
He replayed her voice in his mind, paying close attention to the slant of her o’s, the slight roll of her r’s, and this single-minded focus opened a door he’d closed long ago on a life he’d known before this one. A life before anything had gone terribly right, in the old sense of the word, and terribly wrong in the new and fuller sense of the tragic.
He pressed the clunky landline against his ear and fell into what felt like the space just before sleep, his awareness not yet lost, his surrender not yet complete. It was then a series of windows flung open at the corners of his mind, and a distant row of vantage points came into view. He slipped his hand off the receiver, said, “Just one more second, if that’s all right,” and she said, “Of course. Take whatever you need.”
Take whatever you need.
He tapped his fist to his forehead. They had no other income. No clue when another job might come along, and there was Ernest to think of.
Take whatever you need.
“Just checking one more thing,” he said, and now he hoped Sarah Anne wasn’t watching while he drifted into his twenty-year-old self, an impractical kid in college studying linguistics, that sheepish explanation he’d given his parents, and their inability to translate understanding the origin of words into a paycheck. “You don’t even talk to people!” his father had said. “It’s the wonder of the thing,” Jameson had said, stopping short at mentioning the joy he found in puzzling out the ways populations arrived in a particular place and time, why some communities spoke to each other in a language vastly different from another found a mile away. He liked knowing how these lines had been drawn. “Like why Finnish is closer to Hungarian than any of the Scandinavian languages nearby,” he’d said, clearing out what little air was left in the room. His father’s eyes glazed over, his mother shook her head, no doubt counting the moment as a black mark on her life. “This is not happening,” his father said, walking away. “Why not just take all the money we saved for college and eat it? Why not set it on fire instead?”
He cupped his mouth, the small grin, feeling younger than his thirty-five years for the first time in ages. In the seconds it took to consider all of this, his mind looped back to the kitchen, to the house, to his life, and he could not find a way to reconcile the jolt of pleasure he felt against the pain of the day.
It was Irish, her accent, in some pidgin form.
“So, three months to restore a 1940 Sears kit on the coast?” he managed to say. He turned in time to see Sarah Anne’s mouth fall open.
“What do you think?” the woman asked. “Is it possible?”
“It is,” he said to his reflection, and he could see Sarah Anne turning and opening the fridge. His mind wandered once more, no further than the last rain three weeks ago: a passing shower when they’d needed heavy rain, the meadow already a dry sea of purple and silver, like fossilized bone in the fading light.
It was going to be all right. They were going to be fine, though Jameson knew he should have told her he couldn’t promise to finish a house in three months without seeing it. But it wouldn’t be the first time he’d faced down rain, mold, and salt—a domino effect of untamable, weathering erosion. Not to mention creatures ready to protect their young against his hands inside the walls. There would be termites fluttering into his face and hair, their translucent wings sticking to his skin. But what the hell. This was his work. And anyway, this was not the third bad thing. Going back would save them. Going back was a second chance to make things right.
“What town did you say?”
“Nestucca Beach,” she said, and a weighty knot shot through Jameson’s calf where the bone had once pierced the skin. “I have . . .” he said, massaging his left leg. “I used to live there.”
“Did you?” she said.
Jameson turned to Sarah Anne, as if the sight of her might convey what he needed to know, might afford him some comfort. She hadn’t heard what he said, couldn’t have, not the way she was bouncing Ernest on her hip. They were making faces at each other, their eyes opened wide as if practicing the expression of astonishment.
“Do I know you, then?” he asked. “I must know you.”
Now Sarah Anne turned toward him with straight-faced concern. Ernest looked at Sarah Anne, then Jameson, in the same stark manner. They all turned away at once.
“I don’t think so,” the woman said. “Did you grow up here?”
“No. Just spent a few years out that way. I’ve been gone for a couple. But I thought I knew everyone, or they knew me.”
Sarah Anne was frowning, biting her lower lip. She had heard him, he was sure of it, the way she didn’t look at him or Ernest. She was busying herself at the open fridge, shifting the contents around with one hand.
“I suppose it’s possible,” she said. “Though I doubt it. Your name . . . I would have remembered your name.”
“And your houses, I must know them. I can’t picture where they are.”
“I’ve been away, of course, so there’s that. But the houses, yes, they’re up the hill. Way up. I’ll text you the address.”
“But you? You didn’t grow up there, right? I mean, your accent . . .”
“No, yes, well, I did—for the most part. It’s quite complicated around here. Maybe I’ll know you by face? I hadn’t heard your name before he . . . Oh, it just came to me. Van. The guy who recommended you. Van Hicks.”
“Oh,” Jameson said. “Van. Yeah. I know Van.”
Sarah Anne dropped a bottle of mustard on the floor and the crack startled Ernest.
The woman on the phone offered again to compensate Jameson for more than what he would normally be asking, for coming so far and for getting the house ready in time to sell.
“That’s really not necessary,” he said, feeling his irritation rise at the mention of Van. But what choice did he have other than to take this job?
“Well, then, I’ll have to insist,” she said, and for a moment he was caught inside a funnel of his fractured past, that stream of mourners at the door—“I’ll get it, I’ll get it,” he’d told Sarah Anne with every knock—all those people pushing charity in the form of marionberry pies and casseroles when he had no appetite, their arms pulling him into an embrace even though he was on crutches with a broken leg and the last thing he wanted was to be touched. “The sand from my children’s shoes is still on the tile,” he’d told someone before shutting the door. “In the grout. It sticks to the soles of my feet.”
It wasn’t like him to refuse income. Especially not now. Maybe he’d flung himself around some benevolent corner, like his father, changing with age. Lately the need to make amends in every way seemed to cross his mind more often, and that was saying something.
Sarah Anne was coating a large soft pretzel with mustard, and Jameson suddenly yearned to be the one to offer it to the boy, to be the one who cared for him the most.
If Sarah Anne had any idea what Jameson had just said about the extra money not being necessary, she would have gladly filled him in on the necessary.
“Well, I have to say, it sounds like an interesting project,” Jameson said, hoping his tone didn’t give him away.
Something had come for him, an invitation, or command, to pay attention. This exact moment, the mustard jar in his wife’s hand reflected in the window, his face and shoulders superimposed over hers, this woman on the line—he could feel it was the beginning of an end, a slip from the fractured life he’d managed to hold together for three years, and into another, unmoored.
Sarah Anne was wearing that sweater he loved, and as he was thinking of the honeycomb pattern, the cream-colored Irish wool stretched across her breasts, evoking the smell of her hair and skin, a persuasion had entered the room, an impulse, the first of many to come that would have him acting on the needs of . . . “What did you say your name was?”
“June.”
“Oh. Right. Well. June. It’s just begun. It’s your month.” A dumb joke she’d probably heard all her life, and now he couldn’t take it back, and didn’t know her well enough to cover one joke with another.
“You still there, June?”
“Yes. Was that your phone?”
“No. Yes.”
“Jameson?”
“I’m here,” he said. “I was just saying that the answer to everything is yes.”