Terry leads the way to the third floor, bustling up the stairs, with Vivian moving more slowly behind her and Molly taking up the rear. The house is large and drafty—much too large, Molly thinks, for an old woman who lives alone. It has fourteen rooms, most of which are shuttered during the winter months. During the Terry-narrated tour on the way to the attic, Molly gets the story: Vivian and her husband owned and ran a department store in Minnesota, and when they sold it twenty years ago, they took a sailing trip up the East Coast to celebrate their retirement. They spied this house, a former ship captain’s estate, from the harbor, and on an impulse decided to buy it. And that was it: they packed up and moved to Maine. Ever since Jim died, eight years ago, Vivian has lived here by herself.
In a clearing at the top of the stairs, Terry, panting a bit, puts her hand on her hip and looks around. “Yikes! Where to start, Vivi?”
Vivian reaches the top step, clutching the banister. She is wearing another cashmere sweater, gray this time, and a silver necklace with an odd little charm on it.
“Well, let’s see.”
Glancing around, Molly can see that the third floor of the house consists of a finished section—two bedrooms tucked under the slope of the roof and an old-fashioned bathroom with a claw-foot tub—and a large, open attic part with a rough-planked floor half covered in patches of ancient linoleum. It has visible rafters with insulation packed between the beams. Though the rafters and floor are dark, the space is surprisingly light. Levered windows nestle in each dormer, providing a clear view of the bay and the marina beyond.
The attic is filled with boxes and furniture packed so tightly it’s hard to move around. In one corner is a long clothes rack covered with a plastic zippered case. Several cedar chests, so large that Molly wonders how they got up here in the first place, are lined up against a wall next to a stack of steamer trunks. Overhead, several bare bulbs glow like tiny moons.
Wandering among the cardboard boxes, Vivian trails her fingertips across the tops of them, peering at their cryptic labels: The store, 1960–. The Nielsens. Valuables. “I suppose this is why people have children, isn’t it?” she muses. “So somebody will care about the stuff they leave behind.”
Molly looks over at Terry, who is shaking her head with grim resignation. It occurs to her that maybe Terry’s reluctance to take on this project has as much to do with avoiding this kind of maudlin moment as avoiding the work itself.
Glancing surreptitiously at her phone, Molly sees it’s 4:15—only fifteen minutes since she arrived. She’s supposed to stay until six today, and then come for two hours four days a week, and four hours every weekend until—well, until she finishes her time or Vivian drops dead, whichever comes first. According to her calculations, it should take about a month. To finish the hours, not to kill Vivian.
Though if the next forty-nine hours and forty-five minutes are this tedious, she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to stand it.
In American History they’ve been studying how the United States was founded on indentured servitude. The teacher, Mr. Reed, said that in the seventeenth century nearly two-thirds of English settlers came over that way, selling years of their freedom for the promise of an eventual better life. Most of them were under the age of twenty-one.
Molly has decided to think of this job as indentured servitude: each hour she works is another hour closer to freedom.
“It’ll be good to clear out this stuff, Vivi,” Terry is saying. “Well, I’m going to get started on the laundry. Call if you need me!” She nods to Molly as if to say All yours! and retreats down the stairs.
Molly knows all about Terry’s work routine. “You’re like me at the gym, hey, Ma?” Jack says, teasing her about it. “One day biceps, next day quads.” Terry rarely deviates from her self-imposed schedule; with a house this size, she says, you have to tackle a different section every day: bedrooms and laundry on Monday, bathrooms and plants on Tuesday, kitchen and shopping on Wednesday, other main rooms on Thursday, cooking for the weekend on Friday.
Molly wades through stacks of boxes sealed with shiny beige tape to get to the window, which she opens a crack. Even up here, at the top of this big old house, she can smell the salty air. “They’re not in any particular order, are they?” she asks Vivian, turning back around. “How long have they been here?”
“I haven’t touched them since we moved in. So that must be—”
“Twenty years.”
Vivian gives her a flinty smile. “You were listening.”
“Were you ever tempted to just toss it all in a Dumpster?”
Vivian purses her lips.
“I didn’t mean—sorry.” Molly winces, realizing she’s pushed a little far.
All right, it’s official, she needs an attitude adjustment. Why is she so hostile? Vivian hasn’t done anything to her. She should be grateful. Without Vivian she’d be sliding down a dark path toward nowhere good. But it kind of feels nice to nurture her resentment, to foster it. It’s something she can savor and control, this feeling of having been wronged by the world. That she has fulfilled her role as a thieving member of the underclass, now indentured to this genteel midwestern white lady, is too perfect for words.
Deep breath. Smile. As Lori, the court-ordered social worker she meets with biweekly always tells her to do, Molly decides to make a mental list of all the positive things about her situation. Let’s see. One, if she can stick it out, this whole incident will be stricken from her record. Two, she has a place—however tense and tenuous at the moment—to live. Three, if you must spend fifty hours in an uninsulated attic in Maine, spring is probably the best time of year to do it. Four, Vivian is ancient, but she doesn’t appear to be senile.
Five—who knows? Maybe there actually will be something interesting in these boxes.
Bending down, Molly scans the labels around her. “I think we should go through them in chronological order. Let’s see—this one says ‘WWII.’ Is there anything before that?”
“Yes.” Vivian squeezes between two stacks and makes her way toward the cedar chests. “The earliest stuff I have is over here, I think. These crates are too heavy to move, though. So we’ll have to start in this corner. Is that okay with you?”
Molly nods. Downstairs, Terry handed her a cheap serrated knife with a plastic handle, a slippery stack of white plastic garbage bags, and a wire-bound notebook with a pen clipped to it to keep track of “inventory,” as she called it. Now Molly takes the knife and pokes it through the tape of the box Vivian has chosen: 1929–1930. Vivian, sitting on a wooden chest, waits patiently. After opening the flaps, Molly lifts out a mustard-colored coat, and Vivian scowls. “Mercy sake,” she says. “I can’t believe I saved that coat. I always hated it.”
Molly holds the coat up, inspecting it. It’s interesting, actually, sort of a military style with bold black buttons. The gray silk lining is disintegrating. Going through the pockets, she fishes out a folded piece of lined paper, almost worn away at the creases. She unfolds it to reveal a child’s careful cursive in faint pencil, practicing the same sentence over and over again: Upright and do right make all right. Upright and do right make all right. Upright and do right . . .
Vivian takes it from her and spreads the paper open on her knee. “I remember this. Miss Larsen had the most beautiful penmanship.”
“Your teacher?”
Vivian nods. “Try as I might, I could never form my letters like hers.”
Molly looks at the perfect swoops hitting the broken line in exactly the same spot. “Looks pretty good to me. You should see my scrawl.”
“They barely teach it anymore, I hear.”
“Yeah, everything’s on computer.” Molly is suddenly struck by the fact that Vivian wrote these words on this sheet of paper more than eighty years ago. Upright and do right make all right. “Things have changed a lot since you were my age, huh?”
Vivian cocks her head. “I suppose. Most of it doesn’t affect me much. I still sleep in a bed. Sit in a chair. Wash dishes in a sink.”
Or Terry washes dishes in a sink, to be accurate, Molly thinks.
“I don’t watch much television. You know I don’t have a computer. In a lot of ways my life is just as it was twenty or even forty years ago.”
“That’s kind of sad,” Molly blurts, then immediately regrets it. But Vivian doesn’t seem offended. Making a “who cares?” face, she says, “I don’t think I’ve missed much.”
“Wireless Internet, digital photographs, smartphones, Facebook, YouTube . . .” Molly taps the fingers of one hand. “The entire world has changed in the past decade.”
“Not my world.”
“But you’re missing out on so much.”
Vivian laughs. “I hardly think FaceTube—whatever that is—would improve my quality of life.”
Molly shakes her head. “It’s Facebook. And YouTube.”
“Whatever!” Vivian says breezily. “I don’t care. I like my quiet life.”
“But there’s a balance. Honestly, I don’t know how you can just exist in this—bubble.”
Vivian smiles. “You don’t have trouble speaking your mind, do you?”
So she’s been told. “Why did you keep this coat, if you hated it?” Molly asks, changing the subject.
Vivian picks it up and holds it out in front of her. “That’s a very good question.”
“So should we put it in the Goodwill pile?”
Folding the coat in her lap, Vivian says, “Ah . . . maybe. Let’s see what else is in this box.”