Found (2)
By SoulFire77
- 31 reads
She paid the power bill in person at the office in Asheboro, under the glass, because she wanted it to be a woman's hand that took it and not a slot in a wall. It was not Dessa at the window. It was a heavyset girl with a candy cane pinned to her sweater who stamped the stub and pushed it back through and said, "You're all set, hon."
That night the house came up to sixty-eight for the first time since October and stayed there. Laverne stood in the middle of the front room with her arms down at her sides and let the vent blow on the back of her legs until it cut off.
Aldina came and stood in it too.
"It smells like burning."
"It's just the dust."
"It smells like the school bus."
"That's the dust burning off," Laverne said. "It's supposed to."
The Buick went to Kenny Lackey's on Old 421 because Kenny Lackey did not make you leave it and did not charge for looking. He put it on the lift and came out from under it wiping his hands and told her the alternator was going and the two front tires were down past the wear bars and he could not in good conscience let her drive it out of there like that, and Laverne stood in the bay with her arms crossed and said all right.
Two hundred and six dollars.
She wrote it out on the counter by the register while Kenny's boy ran the receipt. The boy was maybe twenty and had a cold, and he took the check and looked at it and then looked at her, and then looked at it again.
"You got a license on you?"
She gave it to him.
He put it flat on the counter next to the check and moved his finger from one to the other, and stopped.
"This says Laverna."
"I know it."
"Your license says Laverne."
"They typed it wrong when I opened the account," Laverne said. "Ten years ago. Every time I go in there they tell me they'll fix it and they don't fix it. My mother's name's on there too and they spelled hers wrong the other way."
The boy blew his nose. He looked at the check for another second.
"You want your license back?"
"Please."
He stapled the receipt to the invoice and gave her both, and said the alternator would let her know if it wasn't right, and Laverne said she was sure it would.
She was in the car before her hands did anything, and what they did was hold the wheel at the bottom for a minute before she turned the key.
The new tires made the road sound different. Aldina noticed it before they were off Old 421.
"It's quieter."
"That's what you're paying for."
"You paid for quiet?"
"I paid for not sliding into a ditch. The quiet's free."
"That's a bad deal," Aldina said. Laverne laughed, and Aldina got a look on her face like she had accomplished something, and did the voice again. "That's a bad deal."
"You've got one joke."
"It's a good one."
They went past the quarry and the church with the sign. Laverne watched the road and heard herself say, "Saturday we'll go to the mall and see the tree."
Aldina turned her head. "The big one?"
"The big one. And you can get your picture made if the line's not to the door."
"I'm too old for that."
"Then you can watch the little ones do it."
Aldina thought about it the rest of the way home and then said she would get her picture made if it was free, and Laverne said it was not free, and Aldina said then she was too old.
Mrs Tilley's bathroom had a tub with a rolled edge and a soap dish set into the tile and nothing on the wall at all.
"I'm managing," Mrs Tilley said from the doorway. She had her arms folded over her housecoat. "I do the sink."
"I know you do the sink."
"I've always been particular. My mother was particular."
Laverne got down on one knee and put her hand flat on the wall beside the tub, at the height where a bar would go, and pressed. It was plaster over lath and there would be a stud somewhere in it, and a bar was forty dollars at Lowe's and an hour with a drill and a man who knew where to put it.
"You could get out of it fine if there was something to hold."
"I'm not having a hospital bar in my bathroom."
"They make them look like a towel rack now."
"They do not."
"Some of them."
Laverne wrote it up in the car with the door open and one foot on the gravel. There was a line on the sheet for observations and a line under it for recommend and she used both of them. Bathing limited, no tub grab bar, request evaluation. She wrote the date. She put it in the folder with the mileage sheet, and on Friday she gave the folder to the woman at the office who took folders, and the woman put it in a tray with the others.
The heat pump had come back on but the strips underneath ran all day and the meter with it, and the landlord did not answer the number she had for him, and had not since August. There was an ad in the Courier-Tribune classifieds under Heating & Air with no company name, just two first names and a phone.
They came on a Tuesday in a white van with nothing painted on it.
The older one did the talking and the younger one did the work, which was how it usually went. The younger one had the panel off in four minutes and had his light in it and said the reversing valve was hanging up and it wanted a coil cleaning too, and that most of what she was paying for was the strips running underneath because the thing could not make up its mind.
"Can you fix it."
"Today, if you want it."
The older one had gone to the front window and was standing at it with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking out at the road.
"You own the property?"
"I rent it."
"Landlord know it's like this?"
"He knows."
"Huh," the older one said. He looked at her a beat past where he needed to. "Nice and quiet out here."
"It is."
"Bus come down this road?"
"Stops at the end of it."
He nodded the way a man does about the weather, and went back to looking out at the road.
She made coffee because they were going to be under the house and it was thirty-nine degrees. The younger one took his and drank it standing up.
"Ronnie. You want this or not."
The older one came away from the window and took it and held it in both hands the whole time and never drank any of it, and set it down on the porch rail full when they left, and she found it out there the next morning with a skin on it.
They were under the house forty minutes. She heard them the whole time, two men talking under her floor, the sound coming up through the boards flat and without words in it.
A hundred and ninety dollars. She wrote it at the kitchen table and the older one folded it in half without looking at it and put it in his shirt pocket, and had her sign the work order on his clipboard, and tore off the pink copy for her.
The first night after, something shifted its weight under the kitchen at around two.
Aldina asked about it in the morning and Laverne said raccoons, because it was raccoons under half the houses on that road, and Aldina accepted it and ate her cereal.
She paid the two months of back rent standing on the porch, into the landlord's hand, and he counted nothing and said nothing and folded it away and told her the gutters wanted doing in the spring. He was gone in under a minute. Laverne went back inside and stood with her hand still on the door.
The washing machine came on a Thursday from the used appliance place on Fayetteville Street, ninety dollars delivered and hooked up. Two men in the house for twenty minutes, in and out of the back with the dolly, and one of them on his knees behind it with the hoses.
Aldina got home while the box for the new hose was still on the floor.
"We have a washer?"
"We have a washer."
"In the house?"
She could not get over it. She opened it and shut it. She put her head in it. She wanted to know if they could do a load right then and Laverne said they could, and Aldina put in her own things, only her own, the way you do when something is yours, and sat on the floor in front of it with her chin on her knees and watched the whole cycle through the little window.
Laverne stood in the doorway behind her and watched her watch it.
Aldina said the tooth was fine.
She said it on the Sunday when she would not eat the cold half of her sandwich, and again on the Tuesday when she was chewing everything on one side, and both times she said it in the same flat way, and Laverne looked in her mouth on the Tuesday under the kitchen light and could not see anything but a shadow in the back that might have been a shadow.
"Does it hurt now?"
"No."
"Does it hurt when it's cold?"
"It's fine," Aldina said.
The second time, Laverne was awake already.
It was after one and she was at the kitchen table with the checkbook open and the register in front of her, and she had gotten the columns out of line somewhere around the fourth entry and stopped trying to carry the total. The pen was in her hand and had been for a while.
Under the floor, something metal came down on concrete.
It bounced twice.
Laverne sat with her hand flat on the register and did not move for a long time, and then she got up and turned the kitchen light off and stood in the dark by the window until her feet were cold.
Before she went to bed she got the pink copy out of the drawer under the phone and read it under the range hood light. There was a phone number on it, and two first names, and a total. There was no company on it anywhere. She folded it and put it in the pocket of her work coat instead of back in the drawer, and she could not have said why she did that, and she did it anyway.
In the morning Aldina said, "Somebody dropped something metal under the house. It bounced two times."
"Raccoons."
"Raccoons don't have anything to drop."
"They drag things under there. Cans and I don't know what. Bottle caps."
Aldina looked at her.
"It bounced twice," she said again, like the second bounce was the part that mattered, and Laverne said she would call somebody about it, and did not.
Three nights later Aldina came into her room and stood by the bed with her hand on the mattress.
"Somebody's in the yard."
Laverne was up before she was awake.
"Where."
"By the tank. He's smoking. And somebody's drinking coffee."
"You can smell coffee?"
"I can smell coffee," Aldina said.
Laverne went out on the porch in her coat and her bare feet and turned on the light. The bulb put out about twelve feet of yellow and past that the yard went to nothing. She stood there. The propane tank was where it had always been. There was frost coming on the grass at the edge of the light, unbroken, and a car went by out on the gravel a long way off and was gone.
She could smell the cold and the pine and nothing else.
She stood out there until her feet hurt, so that when she came back in she would have been out there long enough.
Aldina was in the hall with her arms crossed over herself.
"There's nobody in the yard. You were dreaming."
"I wasn't asleep."
"You were dreaming and it woke you up. It happens to me too."
Aldina stood there a second longer. Then she said all right, and went back down the hall, and Laverne heard her get into bed.
In the morning Aldina came into the kitchen dressed, with her hair done herself, and got her bowl down.
She did not say anything about the yard.
She ate her cereal and rinsed the bowl and put it in the drainer, and went and got her shoes from beside her bed where she had started keeping them, and put them on sitting on the floor by the door, and tied them both, and waited for her mother by the car.
Next Part:
https://www.abctales.com/story/soulfire77/found-3
- Log in to post comments