CHAPTER 51

Brenda leaned over the funeral candle in the tall blue jar decorated with a Star of David and lit her cigarette off the flame. When the smoke cleared, she glanced back at the mourners and smiled wryly. I flew to California with Fred the next day. I’d go through the house and pack up my things some other time. Brenda said fine, whatever, just let her know when I was coming.

My father died in bleak February and I didn’t come back to Baltimore to get my stuff until June. It was odd that I stalled since I had been so curious about the treasures buried in his books and papers. I expected to relish the searching, sorting, and curating, but I developed a powerful aversion to the task. Something about dealing with the boxes and jam-packed drawers seemed impossible. It seemed like a test of some kind that I wasn’t up to, a sorcerer’s apprentice job—endless and confounding, full of riddles and trapdoors. I stalled until Brenda phoned and said you better get back here before I throw your junk in the garbage.

And that was how I ended up dodging the seventeen-year locusts dive-bombing the carport and spending the night with Brenda in the steamy early June of 1987. I ate her cold chicken, and listened to her talk about the guy she was dating, and I tried to bring the ladder inside to go up into the attic, and then I put the ladder back like she asked, and I waited until she was asleep to search the den, and found the suitcase with the yellow handle, brought it to my makeshift bed on the sofa, and began to read the story my father called Tuckahoe. In the morning, on my way to loading some things into the trunk of the rental car, Brenda threw her menacing weight between me and the door.

I’d been getting the feeling something serious was up, so I had hastily gathered the framed picture of little Clyde in his sailor suit, put it into the daypack slung on my shoulder, grabbed the suitcase with the yellow handle in one hand, and held aloft the three-legged Indian table in the palm of my other hand like a waiter carrying a tray.

“You’re not taking that table,” Brenda said.

“Why not?” I said. I put the suitcase on the floor between my legs and clutched the table with both hands. “You don’t want it. You told me last night it’s a cheap piece of tourist junk.” She grabbed one of the elephant-trunk legs. What was she planning to do? Break it off like a breadstick? I tightened my arms around the table, but she was not letting go. We both knew she would win this battle, at least for the moment. It was the judgment of Solomon—she didn’t care if the cheap piece of junk broke and I did. I let go, and Brenda pressed the ivory inlay Taj Mahal to her chest, pointing the table legs at me like a lion tamer. Then a corner of the framed photograph in my daypack must have caught her eye, because she dropped the table thoughtlessly, like letting go of a gum wrapper. It hit the floor and rocked on its round top while she lunged for the picture. “Wait a minute,” I said. “That’s a picture of my father.” I grabbed onto one end of the boxy frame, and she held fast to the other end. “My father.” We were only inches apart. Beads of perspiration glistened on her upper lip. “Susan doesn’t want it,” I said. “I’m taking it.”

“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” Brenda said through her teeth. “You’re not getting the table and you’re not getting the picture.”

“But you don’t want any of it. You said so.”

“Nevertheless,” said Brenda. “My late husband willed the house and its contents to me.”

Her late husband. I almost laughed. She used the jargony phrase with such ease, more comfortable as a widow than a wife. “He asked if I wanted his books and papers and I told him yes,” I said. I kept possession of the suitcase squeezed between my calves.

Brenda stopped yanking the frame, and I thought she was reconsidering. She looked me gamely in the eye. “I want my money,” she said. She pulled harder.

I hung on. “What?” I was sweating now. The sweat was dripping down my back.

“That money was supposed to go to me,” said Brenda.

“What money?”

“Don’t be coy.”

So she knew about the check that landed in my mother’s mailbox from the credit union.

“The money my mother got?” I said. “I have nothing to do with that.” It dawned on me too late—Brenda planned this tug of war. But I doubted she expected the fury she unleashed in me. This was my childhood house! How could she do this? How could HE have let this happen? I was furious, finally. What was supposed to happen next? Hair pulling? Nails raking bloody tracks? Punching and kicking? She knew she was stronger than I was, I could tell by the smug look on her face. She’d crush me. I didn’t want her slimy skin touching me anyway, so once again I let go. She took possession of the picture, then ducked and swiped the suitcase from between my legs. His manuscript, Ye Olde Picture Booke. “You get nothing,” she said. “Now get the hell out of my house.”

I was shaking, red in the face, crunching cicada shells under my feet as I stormed the driveway to the car. Shells the nymphs shed after living underground for seventeen years. I started the car, threw it into reverse and lurched backward down the driveway clanking into the street. “You won’t get away with this!” I yelled through my tears. I slammed the car into drive and called out some other things, too, like “you fucking bitch!” because I was pissed off finally. Now that it was too late, I was shaking with rage at my father, or at least the vile part of him, the part he excised. Not his balls—it turned out his balls weren’t the vile part of him. The vile part was Brenda, the part of him that thought he was disposable, not even a mother would keep him, the throwaway part of him that thought he belonged in the garbage.