Fellow Mortals

by Dennis Mahoney

  The four of them go inside and when the door shuts, it sounds like the seal of a new refrigerator. There’s no furniture. The carpeting’s clean, the walls are freshly primed, and the living room, despite its emptiness, has a plush, unnatural lack of echo. Nan and Joan continue to the kitchen. Henry and Peg reach the doorway simultaneously, bottlenecked and waiting for each other to proceed. Henry steps aside with an after-you flourish.

  “There’s a lot of light in the morning,” Peg says, but the sun is already high above the house and the Finns are forced to visualize how it looked a few hours earlier. “The oven’s new, replaced last summer. Scratch that,” she says, consulting her notes. “The dishwasher’s new. You could angle a table into the corner for a breakfast nook, and the—”

  Peg’s interrupted by a knocking in the living room. Henry’s hung back and rapped the wall with his knuckles, head tipped in concentration. He notices the women staring from the kitchen.

  “Sounds like quarter-inch drywall. Better hope you don’t snore,” he tells them with a chuckle.

  “Is quarter-inch bad?” Joan asks.

  “It’s not unusual in newer houses,” Peg says. “Let’s look at the bathroom. It’s beautiful tile work,” she notes, referring to the green checkered walls that remind Nan of the hospital where Joan nearly died. The shower looks exposed without a curtain and it’s strange to see the toilet-paper holder hanging empty. Nan tries the sink. The water pressure’s strong; the drain runs clear. She can hear the water trickling in the pipes downstairs.

  “Ask her how old the furnace is,” Henry whispers to Joan, ridiculously loud.

  “Peg?” Joan says. “How old is the furnace?”

  Peg checks her papers, continuing to flip even as she answers. “It’s original. But the house is only twelve years old.”

  “Most furnaces conk out around fifteen years,” Henry says, again to Joan and speaking like he can’t be overheard.

  “This particular model lasts twenty,” Peg replies. “That’s average. With regular maintenance, you shouldn’t have to worry for a long time.”

  “Did the previous owners maintain it?” Nan asks.

  “I couldn’t say. Considering the overall condition of the house, I would assume they did. Here’s my favorite room,” Peg declares, real enthusiasm rising in her voice.

  She leads them into a sunroom that none of them expected. Big enough for two easy chairs and a coffee table, with hardwood floors and recessed shelving on the inner wall, the room faces the yard with floor-to-ceiling windows in dozens of individual panes. A heating stove, elegant and small, stands in the corner. Nan can picture it—summer with her spider plants dangling in the sun, winter with the fire and her chamomile tea. She could buy a little feeder, sit and watch the cardinals. Maybe grow an orchid. Feel the January sun.

  “The sink leaks!” Henry yells from out in the bathroom.

  Peg’s portfolio creaks in her grip. When she turns to walk back, she stumbles on the riser. Nan follows her into the bathroom, where a small pool of water’s spread around the floor.

  “Do you need to be here?” Peg demands.

  “I’m sorry,” Henry says, cornered at the toilet. “I can wait outside…”

  “Henry stays,” Nan says. “He has nothing to apologize for.”

  “Can we talk?” Peg asks.

  “Yes we may,” Nan replies.

  Peg leads the sisters to the middle of the kitchen. Her body language grows more flexible and folksy. “I’m only trying to make this easier for you.”

  “So is Henry,” Nan says. “We need his objectivity.”

  “Objectivity’s essential—that’s my bread and butter—but fault-finding is better left to me, professional inspectors, and most of all you. It’s your home. You have to live here,” she says, as if the paperwork’s already signed and she’ll be handing them a key. “You need to trust your own impressions of a home’s true potential. I once had a couple pass on a dream house because the young woman’s mother objected to cloth wiring. What an outside observer sees as a deal-breaker, we might see as an opportunity. But letting you see the opportunity is impossible if a third party—whose motives aren’t entirely clear—is determined to find problems. There’s no such thing as a perfect house. Not until someone gives it a heart.”

  “What was the hidden opportunity of cloth wiring?”

  “Nan.” Peg sighs, reaching to her elbow. “I’m on your side. I need you to trust that my advice comes from close, often painful experience. If you want the best I have to offer, I can’t allow Mr. Cooper to interfere at every stage.”

  Henry’s standing in the bathroom, fumbling with his hands, looking like they’re choosing which punishment will suit him.

  “Are you willing to work with me or not?” Peg asks.

  “You work for us,” Joan says.

  Peg’s startled; she’s been dealing with the tiger in the room and never saw the mouse coming at her heel. The sisters stand together, indivisible and firm.

  “Henry stays,” Nan says. “He’s also right. We’d like a house with potential that’s a little less hidden.”

  Peg stares at them in turn and finally at the wall. Nan and Joan look at Henry with a reassuring smile and he swells, growing several inches taller at the sight.

  “Fine,” Peg says. “Fine, that’s fine,” opening her notes and writing something minuscule inside. “It’s just a difficult market in your range right now.”

  “We can make this work,” Nan says, confident it’s true, seeing Peg more distinctly as a real fixer-upper.

  * * *

  “It’s part of the process,” Peg assures them after three more houses fail to wow.

  She says she’ll be in touch, checks her phone, checks her hair, and speeds away to the office, hell-bent on finding them an upkept, gas-heated house with thick walls, snug pipes, a solarium, and real personality. Back at home, Nan takes a nap and Joan shows Henry her puzzle, the giant hedge maze she finished after dawn and hid beneath a tablecloth, hoping to surprise him. It’s taken all week, her earlier frustration growing, piece by piece, into confidence, delight, and finally obsession.

  “I’m gonna glue it up and frame it,” Henry tells her. “You can hang it in your brand-new house.”

  “I’d love another one,” she says, sounding like she’s asking for some liquor in her coffee.

  “I’ll be back in half an hour.”

  “Henry,” Joan says.

  He pauses at the door, worried by her tone.

  “Make it a hard one.”

  “Okey-doke.” Henry grins.

  He’s gone for over an hour, checking two or three shops until he finds a real monster: a thousand-piece snowscape with evergreens and mountains, essentially monochromatic, even the trees powdery white. Joan meets him at the door, expectant as a girl, and smiles at the puzzle with a keen, religious fervor.

  “Snow,” she says, mostly to herself, and then she thanks him with a squeeze and sits at a table she’s prepared in the living room, another part of the home the Finns have gradually taken over.

  Ava greets Henry with a kiss, having made it home from work and prepped chicken for the grill. She smells like seasoning and talc and light summer ale. Something’s new in her today—a playfulness of tongue, a silkiness he doesn’t have a proper explanation for.

  “How’d it go today?” she asks.

  “Peg’s a hard nut,” Henry says. “Nan’s a real nutcracker.”

  “No surprises, then. C’mere,” she says, leading him into the kitchen. She hands him a bottle of beer and Henry takes a sip, trying to guess the cause of her mysterious expression.

  “Sam Bailey called.”

  “What? When?”

  “Twenty minutes ago. We had a whole conversation. Sort of,” she admits. “I got the impression it was a long talk for him.”

  “What’d he want?”

  “He wants to see you,” Ava says. “He says he understands if you don’t want to go, considering what happened when yo
u went the other morning.”

  Henry wipes the bottle on his neck. Jig is up.

  “He knocked me down and started yelling. He didn’t mean it,” Henry says. “He was running and he fell, we tangled up. I guess he lost his head. The guy’s a wreck. It’s like you said, he hasn’t had a regular talk with anyone in weeks, and here comes me of all people. It wasn’t that bad. I didn’t want to scare you.”

  Ava doesn’t like it. He can see it in her shoulders, in the way the sweaty bottle isn’t slipping in her hand.

  “I don’t have to go,” he says, feeling for his keys.

  “No, I think you should.”

  “If it worries you…”

  “He sounded really normal,” Ava tells him. “I’ve been picturing this cold, dark woodsman with an ax. But you can’t go now—you’ll have to go tomorrow. We’re having chicken and for once you’re going to sit with us at dinner.”

  “I always sit—”

  “You’re going to sit with us.”

  Henry takes a seat to prove he gets the point. He watches Ava’s jeans while she moves around the kitchen, how her back keeps showing in the gap below her shirt. Her hips seem perfectly designed for his lap, and the bottle warms him up with a nice, sunny fizz. Joan’s busy with her puzzle. Nan’s sleeping in her room. Even Wing is out of sight and they’re together in the kitchen. He’s attentive when she talks, hearing everything she says, and then she’s balancing a tray full of drinks near the screen.

  “Little help?” Ava asks.

  Henry’s up and at the door. He holds it open right beside her, conscious of her eyes and of the keys in his pocket, tempting him to drive off to Sam’s straightaway.

  10

  Henry reaches Arcadia Street at 8:16 a.m., having risen predawn and paced the house until Nan required him to sit, Joan encouraged him to eat, and Ava finally let him go at the reasonable workday hour of eight o’clock. Wing’s alertness has an edge, a memory of danger and a spirit of defense.

  Henry parks and says, “Relax. He invited us today.”

  Sam saunters from the trailer. Henry takes his foot off the clutch without shifting into neutral and the car bucks forward.

  “Damn it,” he says, blushing from the jolt; he hasn’t stalled that badly since he learned how to drive.

  Sam lifts a hand, not quite waving as he walks toward the car. Wing snarls at the sight, lunging for the road as soon as Henry flips up the lock.

  “No,” he says. “Sit. Knock it off, Wing. Sit!”

  He squeezes out and shuts the door, shaken by the fury of the barks. Sam halts where he is, back beyond the walk, but when Henry gets close enough he offers him a hand. Henry shakes it too emphatically and cracks Sam’s knuckles.

  “I guess your dog hates me now,” Sam says.

  Wing grows far more insistent when they turn. He’s impressive with his bare teeth flashing at the glass and yet his voice keeps breaking, like an angry adolescent.

  “He’ll get over it,” Henry says. “You got any junk food?”

  “I have a couple of old donuts.”

  “That’ll work.”

  Sam gets the donuts from the trailer, a pair of stiff crullers in a wax paper bag.

  “Give me the first one,” Henry says. He waggles it back and forth and opens the door the width of one cruller, slipping it in for Wingnut to sniff. “Look what Sam has. That’s for you. Go ahead, good dog. That’s from Sam.”

  Wing takes the donut in a one-two bite and lifts his head, first to Henry, then to Sam’s paper bag.

  “You want me to open the door?” Henry asks.

  Sam nods, firming up his stance as if preparing to kick.

  Wing hops out and tentatively sits, waiting like the world’s most well-behaved dog. Sam holds the cruller down low and doesn’t move.

  “Go ahead.” Henry nods. “There you go. That’s for you.”

  Wing takes it with his ears back and eats it with a snap.

  “Atta boy,” Henry says, and Sam glances up, looking pleased as if it’s him and not the dog being praised.

  Wingnut wags, gentle-eyed now, sniffing Sam’s boot and eventually smiling, much like Henry, with enough easy mirth for Sam to pet his head.

  “You up for a walk?” Sam asks. “Everyone can see us out here.”

  Henry says sure and looks at all the houses, where the windowpanes are glaring in the early-morning sun. They walk across the dirt, off the grass, and into the dark seclusion of trees. Henry wonders why they can’t just talk inside the trailer but he doesn’t want to ask and doesn’t need to know. The back of Sam’s head is maddeningly blank and the hike feels longer than it did the week before. Wing hears a crack and races through the trees, startling a wood thrush and promptly disappearing.

  “Does he ever catch anything?” Sam asks.

  “Nah,” Henry says. “It’d probably scare him to death if he did.”

  They reach the clearing and the pine that Henry felled the other morning. The wide-open light is like a huge breath of air. It’s neater than before—Sam’s been tearing up weeds—and the ground has a quality of careful preparation. There’s a weatherproof chest, far in the back and secured to a tree with a bicycle chain.

  Sam drops his head, shadowing his face, and mutters something brief and difficult to hear. He takes a key from his pocket—he’s subtle about it; Henry would have missed it if the metal hadn’t glinted—and walks toward the chest without a word of explanation. He kneels and pops a padlock, swinging up the lid, and hesitates a minute like he’s having second thoughts.

  When he turns, Henry flinches in the middle of his chest.

  But it’s nothing but a notebook dangling from his hand, pale blue with a little metal spiral up the side. Sam returns and holds it open to sketches of a small log cabin. He has five or six pages carefully designed—several different views, neatly measured and refined.

  “I need your help,” Sam says.

  “You’re building a house?”

  “You offered…”

  “No, of course!” Henry says, snapping to his wits. “I don’t get it, though. Why a little cabin? This is only one room.”

  “I can’t stay in the trailer,” Sam says. “Not with half the neighborhood knocking on the door.”

  “You want to build it out here?”

  “What.” Sam coughs. “You thought I meant to build it out there? Next to Peg?”

  They picture it and can’t help smiling at the thought: a cabin on the roadside, puffing out smoke. But at least Sam’s trailer has water and electric. Henry tries to sort it out, looking up at Sam as if he’s told him, very gravely, that he plans to raise a unicorn.

  “If you want to be left alone,” Henry says, “why don’t you just get a house away from Arcadia?”

  “Follow me,” Sam says, heading for the trees.

  They hike the woods beyond the clearing, moving slowly in the brush, watching out along the way for thorns and poison ivy. The soil feels rich and fertile underfoot, the kind of ground that you could flip and find a handful of worms, antique coins, centipedes, and bones. Old growth, Henry thinks, mindful of his steps, and then they pass through a grove and there’s a body in the shade.

  Henry stops as if they’ve come upon a white-tailed deer, a figure unexpected but entirely at home. He holds his breath and stares, admiring the sight. It’s a man Sam fashioned from the bottom of an elm—seven feet of trunk, the remainder of the tree chopped away, branches stacked chaotically behind it and the ground soft beige with the shavings and the chips. The man is muscular and broad, powerfully kinetic, chained to a boulder by his elbows and his neck. He has a broad, open face and a long grizzled beard, and his body looks pained, writhing on the rock.

  Henry gazes at the hole in the middle of his chest.

  “That’s … how do you do that?”

  “I used to have to model them in clay before I started,” Sam says, but that’s as far as he’ll explain. He might have answered, Magic.

  There’s a breeze in the u
ppermost branches of the trees—rustling overhead, buds falling at their feet—but the air isn’t moving on the ground around the sculpture and it’s strange, how it feels like they’re standing indoors.

  “I plan on putting suet in the hole to draw the birds.”

  “Ha!” Henry says, wishing Ava were here to see it.

  “So the cabin,” Sam says, “keeps me closer to the work.”

  Henry coughs. Something gummy leaves the bottom of his throat, but he can’t spit it out and has to swallow it again. “I don’t know the first thing about building a cabin.”

  “I only need your strength,” Sam says.

  Henry thinks of Ava’s face when she found him at the fire. All she’d heard at that point was somebody had died, not the way the fire started, not the fact of the cigar. He’d been terrified to tell her and had fought to get it out, blubbering and thinking she would leave him on the spot. But she only drew him closer with her fingers on his back, squeezing hard as if the only real victim were him.

  “We’d start by cutting a path out to the trailer,” Sam says. “I’ll need to get an ATV to bring supplies into the clearing. You’ll help me gather rocks and carry concrete to lay the foundation, but the harder part is dragging all the logs from the woods.”

  Henry could tell her about the path and he could tell her about the sculptures, but the rest of it would have to be a secret. Not a word.

  “If you’re going to stay and help,” Sam says, “we need some rules. First is no more apologizing.”

  “That’s gonna be hard,” Henry says.

  “It’s the only one I really care about.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t want to talk when I’m sculpting.”

  “I wouldn’t talk at all.”

  “No,” Sam says. “It’s fine if we’re doing something together. But I really have to focus when I’m working.”

  Henry nods.

  “I’ll resent you if you treat me like a pity case. That’s it for now. I might think of more,” Sam says. “Is it a deal?”

  All the blood in Henry’s head settles to his feet until the weight is so profound he isn’t sure that he can move. The hole inside the sculpture looks deeper than before, the tension in the chains more tangibly severe. He can feel the seconds passing, very slowly, very quickly, and it’s Ava more than Sam who seems immediately real.