It was not self-pity I felt but anger at Frank, resentment against Mother for coaxing me to agree to Frank cosigning the deed, rage at the idea of my son working with him. I never said, “Poor me.” I was big enough to survive this, but I hated my life on hold, now four months of this in the house with Victor and his banana remarks—“You look bummed, Uncle”—and Amala, who in her placid disposition and her knitting of scarves seemed like a sweet incarnation of Mother, except for the squiggly Sanskrit tattoo on her hand, as she explained, “My mantra, ‘om mani padme hum’—the jewel in the lotus.”
Gabe called one evening, full of life for a change, eager to talk, and I was hopeful we’d turned a corner. But after the chitchat all he said was, “You should really listen to Miss Milgrim, Dad,” and he hung up.
When Miss Milgrim had suggested I pay Frank off, I’d thought, Never. He didn’t deserve anything, and the melancholy fact was that even if I’d agreed to her suggestion I had no money to pay him with. But when I called Miss Milgrim again—from my car, I had just finished grocery shopping—she became more explicit.
“You might consider settling.”
“I’m sure he’d want a lot of money. And, as you know, I have a cash-flow issue.”
She repeated, “Maybe a work-around,” and again mentioned floating a loan, renting the spare room, converting the garage into an efficiency apartment, and I sighed because I didn’t trust myself to reply, fearing I might scream.
After a pause, Miss Milgrim said something that I was to remember for a long time afterward—not just the words, but the circumstances of my hearing it, the way you do when, staring at ordinariness, you hear unexpected words. I was in the parking lot of the Stop and Shop in West Littleford, where I’d worked bagging groceries as a high school student, wearing an apron and wishing I was elsewhere. In Miss Milgrim’s pause, I noticed that I was parked next to a chutelike enclosure made of iron pipes where shoppers pushed their carts when they were done with them—I’d rounded up shopping carts, too, another after-school chore. These carts—designed to be slid one into another, basket fitting basket, saving space—were shoved sideways, higgledy-piggledy, butting up against the pipes and crowding the chute. Some of the shoppers had left trash in the carts, plastic bags, scraps of paper, discarded wrappers. As I watched, a shouting boy shoved a cart like a battering ram into the mass of other carts, smashing them with a clang.
The noise jarred me, and I was still rattled when at the same time I realized that Miss Milgrim had resumed speaking.
“Because you might find it cheaper to settle.”
“Cheaper than what?”
“Than to go on paying my bills.”
Simultaneously, I saw the jumbled shopping carts, the disorder matching the derangement in my head—items designed to nest neatly were banged together and entangled, cluttered with trash.
“That reminds me,” she said. “Have we sent you a new invoice?”
“Not yet.”
I drove home and saw that more furniture had arrived, and in the garage a crate of office equipment. In the following days, a pickleball set, a visit from pest control—a man with a cylinder like a jet pack strapped to his back and a wand in his hand, squirting poison into the baseboard cracks where later carpenter ants tottered, with sawdust in their jaws, or cockroaches lay upside down in death.
Victor supervised, saying, “Dad’s paying me for this,” when he passed me my share of the bills. Was this what Miss Milgrim meant by Might find it cheaper?
In the mail soon after this, I received the invoice from Miss Milgrim, for the sum of $63,243.
I blinked at the sum. The invoice was closely itemized, even to the recent phone call, thirty minutes at the Stop and Shop parking lot, assessed at just over five hundred dollars. And I learned that three other attorneys, “the team,” whose names I was seeing for the first time, were also part of this invoice, covering the work dealing with Frank’s demands, fielding Frank’s letters, summarizing them, and drafting replies for Miss Milgrim to sign.
I called Gabe and mentioned the amount of the invoice.
“That sounds about right, at this juncture,” he said, with a certainty resembling Frank’s. “Lilith Milgrim gets eleven hundred an hour. And there’s the team. Billable hours.”
Later that day, a call from Miss Milgrim, who I guessed had been alerted by Gabe. When I heard her voice I groaned, imagining a meter furiously spinning, displaying higher and higher numbers.
“We’ll have to keep this short,” I said. “I’ll need some time to sort out your bill.”
“As I said, you might consider settling.”
I didn’t say, Where would I get the money? I said, “It’s a little late for that. In the meantime, I can’t afford your services anymore.”
“I’ll instruct Frank that you’ll be dealing with him directly.”
I now had to read Frank’s letters, which were officious and verbose and full of Latin legalese, repeating his demands and questioning why I had not paid for the various services and the new furniture and the improvements to the house. And the real estate taxes were coming due. In one letter he informed me that he’d created a maintenance committee and had appointed himself chairman, responsible for carrying out “detailed inspections of the premises.” He called these inspections “fortnightly appraisals” in his memos. Appended to the memos were lists of requests—for duplicate keys, space in the basement for his personal items, outlines of repairs he wished to make, listed as “essential upgrades,” repainting the house, installing solar panels, regilding the weather vane, and more.
His letters were more frequent now, all of them demanding replies. I now understood why Miss Milgrim’s bill had been so high. I pawned my watch and wedding ring in Winterville, and paid a small proportion of her bill, and begged for more time.
One morning the doorbell rang, the man from pest control again, the same jet pack, gas mask, and wand of poison. In spite of the nuisance of his reappearing, I marveled at the efficiency of his squirting poison at the baseboard, and the cockroaches I saw later, lying on their backs, rocking slightly, feebly flexing their legs. Studying them I imagined Frank on his back, his arms and legs upraised, twitching in his death throes.
“Mind if I come in?” he said, lifting his mask.
“I didn’t order this.”
“Your landlord did,” and he showed me the work order with Frank’s name on it. “I’ve already done the exterior. I’m supposed to squirt the closets.”
“Not necessary.”
“Suit yourself.” He handed me a piece of paper. “That’s your invoice.”
More billable hours. I gave the invoice to Victor to pass on to Frank, as I’d done with the other bills, saying that I had no intention of paying it, or funding any of the other proposals.
Frank’s reply was immediate, a lengthy memo explaining that as co-owner of the house and concerned for its upkeep he envisioned “major structural repairs,” which he listed in an appendix to this memo. Without Miss Milgrim to deal with his letters I saw that he had an inexhaustible appetite for tying me up with demands, immersing me in invoices. It was something like being buried at the bottom of umpteen sedimentary sequences, layer upon layer, holding me down.
I was now in serious debt, owing Miss Milgrim, owing Frank, barely able to meet my day-to-day expenses. I had not allowed the “fortnightly appraisals” and inspections to go forward, because I didn’t want to see Frank in the flesh. It was bad enough to have Victor upstairs, and these days his whispered quarrels with Amala did not end in muffled thumps and squawks of pleasure and the twang and boing of bedsprings, but only in silences.
Frank’s intentions could not have been clearer. He wanted the house, he wanted me destroyed. These thoughts woke me in the night and coursed through my brain, heating it, causing it to throb, keeping me agitated, staring at the ceiling, seeing Frank’s face in the stains, hearing his chuckle of satisfaction as he turned aside, the catch of his laughter dying away to a decaying breath, and his insolent shrug.
I stopped appealing to Gabe for help, yet he was on my mind, because I’d left the house to him in my will, as my only asset. In the event of my death he’d be faced with Frank, claiming half ownership, and subjecting Gabe to the same onslaught of letters and demands I’d endured—was still enduring.
After a sleepless night, I got up in the morning, ill with fatigue, my mind clouded. I spent the day trying to devise ways to pay Miss Milgrim and to fend off Frank’s demands, the thousands I owed him for the improvements. The papers were a blur in my glazed eyes and my stupor of weariness. I took to my bed but my anxiety made me wakeful. The ceiling stains became violent images, whirling furies, winged demons, figures locked in combat.
I considered inviting Victor and Amala out for a pizza and, before we left the house, opening a tap on the gas stove, and leaving a candle—one of Amala’s Ayurvedic candles—burning in the parlor, and letting the house explode. I saw it alight, a great rush of flames, the old highly combustible and well-insured wooden house burning, the pleasure I’d feel at this simple solution. But in this case, I’d risk incinerating the neighbors’ houses, their children, their cats and dogs.
I was cornered, I saw no way out, I had no means to leave Littleford, and in a manifestation of paranoia I sensed the house shrinking around me, becoming smaller, imprisoning me in plaster. The human-shaped stains on the ceiling were still embattled, thrashing, two of them, and then one toppled, his limbs upraised—Frank, twitching like a dying cockroach, and I saw that the victorious figure was me, standing over him, as he died.
The thought did not disturb me, the notion of murdering him gave me joy. Kill him.