The Clear-Out

by Deborah Ellis

  DEBORAH ELLIS

  The Clear-Out

  Grass Roots Press

  Copyright © 2013 Deborah Ellis

  First published in 2013 by Grass Roots Press

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  Grass Roots Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

  Grass Roots Press would also like to thank ABC Life Literacy Canada for their support. Good Reads® is used under licence from ABC Life Literacy Canada.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication (Print)

  Ellis, Deborah, 1960-, author

  The clear-out / Deborah Ellis.

  (Good reads)

  ISBN 978-1-77153-003-3 (pbk.)

  1. Readers for new literates. I. Title. II. Series: Good reads series (Edmonton, Alta.

  PS8559.L5494C54 2013 428.6’2 C2013-902654-1

  To my father

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  Duncan came home from playing golf to find that his wife had lost her mind.

  He came into the house through the back door. He took his shoes off and dropped them on the mat. His wife, Tess, tidied up all the shoes ten times a day.

  As Duncan entered the kitchen, he looked at the chalkboard on the wall for messages. One of his golf buddies had called to pull out of their game the next day. Duncan thought about making some phone calls to find another player. First, though, he checked the kitchen clock. It was almost time for Wide World of Golf to start on TV.

  “How did I live for all those years without the Golf Channel?” he often said. He thought it again now as he reached into the fridge for a can of beer. With his foot, he pushed the cat, Mr. Snuffles, out of his way.

  Duncan went into the living room and right to the sofa. He could sit, pick up the remote, and take a swig of beer, all in one smooth move. He put his feet up on the coffee table, clicked the TV on, and turned the volume up. Another perfect day.

  And then he saw the dining room.

  Or what used to be the dining room.

  The dining room had doorways into both the kitchen and the living room. When he sat on the sofa, Duncan could usually see the dining room table. He could also see the big china cabinet. In it, Tess kept their good china and their wedding gifts from nearly forty years ago. She kept all the little glass animals he had given her over the years in the china cabinet, too.

  But today, Duncan couldn’t see any of it.

  Today, he was looking at a dark wall that blocked the doorway.

  “Tess!” he called out. He had to shout to make himself heard over the sound of the TV.

  His wife didn’t answer.

  “Tess!” He turned the TV down. He knew his wife was in the house. Where else would she be? But she didn’t answer.

  Duncan swore, put his beer down on a coaster on the table, and got up off the sofa.

  “Tess!”

  To get into the dining room, he had to go back through the kitchen. He couldn’t believe what he saw.

  The dining room table was gone. The china cabinet doors were open. There was nothing inside the cupboard. No china. No wedding gifts, still wrapped in plastic. No little glass animals.

  Duncan was gripped with a sudden fear: they had been robbed. Thugs had burst in and stolen almost everything from their dining room. But, in that case, what had they done with his wife? “Tess! Tess!”

  His voice took on a new panic. Where was his wife?

  “There’s no need to shout.”

  He spun around to see Tess coming up the basement stairs into the kitchen. She carried a large cardboard box.

  “Where were you? I was calling.”

  “As you can see, I was in the basement.”

  “You didn’t answer me.”

  “I am answering you now.”

  He didn’t like her tone. It was calm. She was not the least bit upset that he was upset.

  “What have you done to the dining room? Give me that.” He put his hands out to take the cardboard box from her. “You shouldn’t be carrying things up the stairs. You could have fallen, and then what would you have done?”

  “Gotten back up, I expect.”

  Tess did not give the box to Duncan. She just went past him into the dining room.

  “You’ve made an awful mess,” Duncan said. “I hope you don’t expect me to put everything back the way it was!”

  Tess did not answer him. She set the box down and stretched her back.

  She smiled.

  But she was smiling at the mess. Not at him.

  “I’m making a library,” she finally said.

  “A library? Don’t be foolish. There’s a library downtown.”

  “I want my own.”

  “Well, I want my dining room back.”

  All she said to that was, “You’re missing Wide World of Golf.”

  He was, too, and that did not improve his mood.

  “The table is downstairs,” she said. “The china and everything else is packed away safely, and it’s all downstairs, too.”

  “You couldn’t take that big table downstairs.”

  “It came apart. I took the legs off.”

  “You took the legs off?”

  “With a screwdriver.”

  Duncan open and closed his mouth like a fish. “You better not have used my tools! They’re not toys, you know!”

  “And I am not Bobby, so don’t talk to me as if I was seven years old.”

  Bobby, their son, now fully grown, had finally left their house when he was twenty-eight. He had been living in their basement. When he left, Duncan turned the basement into his work-out space.

  “Is that what this is?” Duncan asked. “The nest is empty, so you don’t know what to do with yourself?”

  “Oh, I know what to do with myself,” Tess replied. “Filling my days will not be a problem for me.”

  She walked by him and went down the basement stairs. Duncan heard her pick up another box and climb back up. She put the box with the others, then faced him.

  “It’s simple,” she said. “Bobby has, at long last, started his life. You have golf and all your sports things. My parents have passed away. I have retired from my job, and I get money from my pension. I have a decision to make. What do I want to do with the rest of my life? And this is it. I want to read. And I want a room to read in.”

  “A whole room? That’s just foolish. You don’t need a whole room to read in. Read in a chair. There’s the entire living room out there.”

  “And you keep the television on. In here, I can still hear it, but at least I won’t have to see it. It would be nice, as a favour to me, if you would move the TV into your sports room.”

  “Move the TV? This is my house. I like the TV where it is.” The sports room was Bobby’s childhood bedroom. Duncan now used it for his collection of sports things—baseball bobble-head dolls, hockey cards, golf trophies. A man had to have a place to display his things.

  Tess just shrugged. S
he reached behind a pile of books and brought out a box of ear plugs.

  “I thought you would say that,” she said.

  “What about the dining room?” Duncan asked. “What about family dinners? What about Christmas?”

  “Christmas is just one day. We can eat in the kitchen. All around the world, people manage to get their families together without a formal dining room.”

  “I don’t know what’s come over you,” Duncan said.

  “That’s all right,” said Tess. “You’re missing your show.”

  Duncan stood in the doorway and watched his wife. She smiled and hummed as she put the books on the shelves of the cabinet. Tess had wanted to put the books out years ago. But Duncan insisted that there wasn’t room, and books made a house look too cluttered. Now they were being put into the cabinet that used to hold their wedding gifts.

  Even worse, Tess had lined up tall bookshelves across the doorway that had opened to the living room. She had closed the space off. He was going to ask where she had gotten the shelves. Then he remembered seeing them, boxed up, behind the furnace. He had thought they belonged to their son.

  Duncan didn’t know that Tess knew how to put up shelves.

  “It’s good to know that you could put our wedding gifts in the basement without even thinking about it,” he said. “It’s good to know how you really feel about our marriage.”

  “Those gifts are just things,” Tess said. She did not look up from her books.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Tess got more books and more bookshelves.

  She bought a La-Z-Boy chair and put a little table and a good reading lamp beside it. She made the room her own.

  The cat, Mr. Snuffles, sat by her feet, purring as she read.

  Duncan fought back.

  He did not like looking at the wall made of bookshelves. He did not like having a wife who did not answer when he called.

  He tried to move the television into Tess’s library.

  Tess put her foot down.

  “I want one room in this house that is mine,” she said. “I’ve cleaned this house and earned money to help pay for it. I deserve a space in it that is mine. If you want this space, then I will take over your sports room. If you won’t let me have that, then I will take over your work-out room. And if you won’t let me have that, then I will take my pension and my savings and leave. I’ll move to my own apartment with my books.”

  “One of these days,” Duncan said, “I’ll get rid of all these books and put my dining room back.”

  “You can do that,” Tess said, “but you had better be ready for what happens next.”

  He never tried it.

  Tess did allow Duncan to move another chair into the room. He would sit in there with her sometimes.

  But he was not used to sitting without a TV in front of him, and he had never liked reading.

  When he tried to talk to her, she put her book down and let him talk. But he knew she was just waiting for him to be done so she could go back to her reading.

  Duncan hated the books. He hated them for what they were doing to his wife.

  Before she retired, Tess worked as a secretary in a law office. Her clothes were always pressed and her hair was always done.

  Once she got her library, all that changed. She got her hair cut very short. When Duncan asked her why, she told him, “I don’t want to be bothered with my hair.”

  He told her he didn’t like it short. Tess said he would get used to it.

  She also stopped wearing makeup.

  “How I look is not important to me anymore,” she said.

  Tess gave away all her small purses and started carrying a shoulder bag big enough to hold a book. She always had a book with her. She would read her book whenever she felt like it, no matter what else was going on around her.

  Tess even took one of her books to the annual clubhouse dinner at the golf course. Duncan had gone to the bar for a while to chat with his golf buddies. When he came back to the table, she was not talking with the other wives. She was reading her book!

  He took the book away from her. In front of everyone. She called a taxi and went home without him.

  Tess and Duncan went on this way. Duncan got used to it. But he never liked it.

  Then, one day, Cancer walked into the house.

  No matter what they did, they could not get it to leave.

  CHAPTER THREE

  After her second operation for cancer, Tess was too weak to go upstairs. Her library became her sick room.

  The La-Z-Boy went into the living room. In its place was their son’s old single bed. The first-floor bathroom was close by, and so was the kitchen.

  The books now stood in piles on the floor, and the shelves held the things Tess needed to get through the day. Medicines and clean sheets and nightgowns filled several shelves. On one shelf were the adult diapers for when Tess was too weak to walk to the toilet.

  Home care nurses and other help came and went. Duncan hated having strangers in his house. He would turn on the Golf Channel while they looked after Tess. Staring at the TV, he tried not to think about what was happening on the other side of the wall.

  The helpers visited during the day. At night, Duncan slept on the sofa. That way, he could hear Tess if she needed him in the middle of the night.

  Tess’s hair fell out with the cancer treatment. Duncan bought her hats to keep her head warm. Hats with flowers, hats with pompoms, hats in bright colours. He looked for hats everywhere he went. If he found the right hat, it would fix everything. That’s what his heart told him, anyway.

  When Tess felt well enough, she read in bed.

  One night, Duncan stood in the kitchen door and watched her. When her eyes started to close from the effect of the drugs, she shook herself awake and kept reading.

  Are you afraid? he wanted to ask her. Did you have a good life? Do you regret anything? Did I make you happy?

  He wanted to ask her all of those questions. But he couldn’t ask any of them. He was too far out of the habit of talking with his wife.

  “Enough reading for tonight,” he said instead, and he started to take the book from her.

  “But I’m almost finished!”

  “Finish it later,” Duncan said. “You need to rest.”

  Taking the book away from Tess was easy. She had no more strength in her hands. She could not hold on to the book. It slid through her pale, thin fingers.

  “I want to know how the story ends,” Tess said.

  “There is plenty of time for that.” Duncan put the book on one of the piles in the corner of the room.

  “I want my book back,” Tess said from her bed.

  “Forget the book,” Duncan snapped. “Who cares about a book? Talk to me! I am your husband!”

  “I want to know what happens!”

  “Talk to me!” Duncan took hold of her hand. “Be with me!”

  “I want to know . . .”

  Tess started to cough, a thin, kitten-like cough.

  “Do you need some water?” Duncan asked.

  He picked up the jug he kept on the shelf of the china cupboard. It was empty. “I’ll get you some water.”

  He took the jug into the kitchen. He let the water run until it was as cold as it would get. He kicked himself for not keeping water in the fridge. He filled the jug, brought it back into the sick room, and poured his wife a glass.

  He put his hand under Tess’s head to raise her up so she could take a drink.

  That was when he knew that she was gone.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Nothing is quite as empty as a house after a funeral.

  Bobby took apart the bed in the sick room and got rid of the stuff of death. After a few days, Duncan had to insist that his son leave. It had taken Bobby months to find that job in the city. Duncan didn’t want the boy to risk losing it by taking too many days off.

  Besides, there was nothing for Bobby to do. The funeral was over, and the paperwork was done. The good ladies of
the church had delivered their pies and one-dish suppers. The fellows from the golf club had slapped Duncan’s back in sympathy and slipped him some bottles of gin. There was nothing left to do now.

  Duncan took a beer out of the fridge and sat on the sofa. He put his feet on the coffee table and picked up the remote control. Wide World of Golf was on. He turned up the volume.

  “Tess!” he called out.

  Then he started crying.

  Duncan cried for a long time. He cried until his head ached and his shirt front was wet. Then he looked up from his tears to the wall made by the backs of the bookshelves.

  He hated those shelves! He hated those books! He hated what they had done to his wife. They had changed her from a smiling, busy little woman into some strange person. A thing that frowned and thought and tried to understand things that no one had any business trying to understand.

  Well, she was gone now, and he didn’t have to put up with the library any longer. And he wouldn’t. Not one more minute!

  Duncan reached under the kitchen sink, grabbed the box of garbage bags, marched into the dining room. He started filling the bags with books. He grabbed them all and threw them in the bags, stuffing the bags as full as he could without breaking them.

  “Those books are just good for garbage,” he said. He started to take the bags out to the curb but stopped by his car instead. The books weren’t any good to him, but they might be good for someone, and he hated throwing things away.

  Duncan took his golf clubs out of the car’s trunk to make more room. He filled the trunk, then the back seat, and even the front seat. But he got all the bags in.

  He had to back out of his driveway carefully. Five or six skateboarders were spinning around the turning circle in front of his house. Duncan honked his horn to get them to move.

  He drove downtown, to the Good Shepherd Thrift Store.

  “You take books?”

  A man sat behind the counter wearing a badge with “Volunteer” written on it. He turned his head to face the wall of books that ran along the side of the shop.

  “What kind of books?” he asked.