Jim studiously avoided all that. “Thanks for buying those clothes for her. What do I owe you?”
“It came to two hundred and eighty-seven bucks. But Devina put it on her credit card, so I think we should consider them gifts.”
“You went shopping with her?”
“You told me to keep her busy, and she likes clothes. Whatever. The sex shit doesn’t work anymore for me—although I have to say, it was amusing as f**k to watch her try to get me up.”
Jim winced. “I’m sorry.”
“What for? I’ve had to do worse down there. Her masturbating for hours was a vacay compared to the other shit. Just think, if I’d had a video camera, I could have Kim Kardashian’d her.”
As they fell into a silence, he knew they were both thinking about that worktable of hers. Eddie was the only one out of the three of them who hadn’t been down there in that capacity. He’d also never been with Devina in the conventional sense, either.
Another reason he should have been the last of them to go.
“So Sissy’s been doing a great job with this place,” Ad murmured.
Jim looked over again. “What do you mean?”
“You know, cleaning it up? Shit’s looking much better since she’s moved in.”
“Last time I saw, she was trying to burn it down.”
“Excuse me?”
“Long story. The transition’s just been rough.”
Ad nodded. “Nothing’s easy in this, is it.”
“So, are you going to tell me where we are? I’m ready to get back to work.”
Ad got up and went to the sink, dousing his cig, the habit still not doing it for him. Turning around, he wondered where to start. “Colin said he could only go part of the way with the intel.”
“Whatever we got, we can run with.”
“That’s what I told him…”
Across town, as the angels commiserated and Jim got his update, Cait was sitting at her desk, brushing a tear from her cheek. Clearing her throat, she prayed she didn’t completely crumble. “I’m sorry, what was that, Mrs. Barten? The connection is bad.”
Untrue. She was having trouble keeping her cell phone against her ear.
“Yes, of course,” she said into the thing. “Yes. Absolutely…”
Even though she never wrote on drawing paper, she slid a fresh sheet over. And even though she never wrote with drawing pencils, she made sure she had all the details down.
“I’m honored.” She wiped away another tear. “Yes, I have some stands—I know exactly what we need. You can count on me. See you then. Yes … God willing.”
As she ended the call, she got up slowly and went into the kitchen. Everything was tidy as always, not even dishes drying in the rack—because she had to put them away before she left the kitchen or she couldn’t sit still at her desk.
She’d had some kind of destination. But abruptly, she found herself walking around on her linoleum, making a tight little circle, eyes lighting on the hand towels that were neatly hanging off the handle of the oven, and the napkins on the table in their rack, and the two place mats she had out even though she always ate alone. If she opened any of the cupboards? Soup cans and boxes of low-fat crackers and jars of pickles were lined up by type. Same in her refrigerator, the skim milk never mixing with the yogurt or the butter or the veggies.
The first line against chaos. And to think she’d always assumed the anal retentiveness would help, a kind of talisman against the whirlpool of life, a way of taming the hard edges of fate.
Wasn’t doing anything for her at the moment. Not about her heading to see G.B. at noontime to tell him she was kind of in a relationship with someone else. Not with the desperate anticipation she had for nightfall.
Certainly not at all with what she was about to do.
“Shit.”
Bracing herself, she went over to the door that led down into the cellar. It took her a moment before she could turn the knob and pull the panels open and reach forward to flick the light switch. As the fixture came on, the rough wooden steps were illuminated, as was the dark gray concrete floor below. The scent that rose to her nose was both earthy from the fifties-era concrete walls, and sweet from her fabric softener sheets.
Long trip down. A kind of forever to reach the bottom.
She didn’t head over to her washing machine and ironing board. She went in the opposite direction, to the sealed plastic tubs that held her Christmas decorations and lights, and her Halloween things, and that sleeping bag she’d only used once or twice.
It was past all that that she kept her artwork on shelves, her tubes of drawings and flat boxes of paintings and so much more ordered chronologically by medium.
The things she had taken out of Sissy’s locker at school were right where she’d put them. Cait had had to move some of her own pastels onto the floor to make room, something she had never felt comfortable doing before—especially not in the spring, when the rains came and leaks happened.
But as important as her things were, Sissy’s were so much more so.
The hands that had made them were gone forever.
It took Cait a couple of trips to carry the folios and the box up to her kitchen table. And after a moment, she thought better about the placement and moved them away from the window. Maybe she should have left them downstairs? It wasn’t like she was going to forget to bring them to the funeral at St. Patrick’s.
Staring at it all, she stepped back in time, reversing the mental DVD of her life until she was once again twelve and living under the same roof with her parents. After her brother had died, she had been the one to pack up his things: Her mother and father had disappeared within days of the burial, going off on the first of all those mission trips, her grandmother moving in to take care of her.
She’d like her grandmother just fine, but it had felt like both she and Charlie had been deserted. And that sense had intensified when her parents had called a week later and said that they were bringing home a preacher who needed a place to stay for a month. In that small house, where else were they going to put the guy but Charlie’s room?
It had seemed an insult to let some stranger sleep in her brother’s bed or use his bureau and his closet, all while his clothes and car magazines and CDs were all over the place.
Using her own allowance money, she’d bought U-Haul boxes, and put everything in the attic … and when she had moved out east, she had taken it with her.
For all their pontificating, her parents had never really talked to her about the loss. Plenty of generic praying advice, yes, and she had to admit, the cynic in her aside, she had done some of that on her own. Still did. But she could have used some more conventional support in the form of talking, hugs, understanding, compassion.