The Color of Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Yessir,” I said, laughing. “Thank you. You’ve been a big help.”

  He offered his usual sign-off, “Watch six,” meaning I should guard my rear.

  “What did Rich have to say?” Jean-Paul asked as he tied his ­sneakers.

  “Essentially what you said.”

  “Smart man, our Sergeant Longshore.” He rose to his feet. “So, what is the plan of attack?”

  “Le garage,” I said. “And a trip to the dump.”

  His eyes lit up. “In the pickup?”

  I handed him the keys, which he pocketed. He loved Mike’s big truck and was happy for any opportunity to drive it. For all of his polish, he was still just a boy drawn to planes, trains and automobiles, the bigger the better.

  Opening the garage door was like putting out an OPEN HOUSE sign in the front yard. As Jean-Paul and I tackled fifty years’ worth of accumulated stuff packed into, onto, and around every shelf, cupboard and workbench, the lookie-loos, the curious, and the concerned from one end of the street to the other felt free to drop by to offer advice and comments, or just to chat. My mother would have served coffee.

  There were a couple of invited helpers added to the mix. My former San Francisco housemate, Lyle, and his husband, Roy, arrived carrying a giant box of recyclable trash bags. Lyle, who had always been our resident handyman, started on Dad’s workbench, culling useless and duplicate tools to make one good set. We were leaving those tools that the tenants might need, from wrenches to plungers. The rest were up for grabs.

  My parents were products of the Great Depression. They were loath to throw away anything that might conceivably have some use left in it, especially if it was connected to an electrical cord or an on/off switch. There was, for example, a drawer full of dead batteries that someone, caught up in magical thinking, must have thought could be brought back to life somehow. The batteries were just part of a vast, sometimes oozing, collection of electronic junk. All of it was put into bags and deposited into the bed of the pickup for delivery to a toxic and electronic-waste station.

  Roy, an information technology specialist, went to work on anything computer-related. He removed the hard drives from the dead and outdated computers stacked in a back corner, and consigned the carcasses to the truck. When his corner was cleared, Roy went inside to back up and then wipe Dad’s files from the computer in the den. Roy had built the system shortly before Dad died and thought very highly of its capabilities. We decided that it would stay in the house because visiting faculty might find it useful, if for no other reason than that it was connected to a very good laser printer; visiting faculty might not travel with printers.

  Jean-Paul went into the cupboards and began pulling down boxes of Christmas ornaments, camping and sports gear, and various semi-rejects that someone thought were too precious to toss but not precious enough to store inside the house. He received lots of opinions from the peanut gallery on the driveway: you could sell that on eBay, you should have a garage sale, the high school might want the well-used and thoroughly outdated sports equipment, and the ­library would love twenty years’ worth of National Geographics. Who wouldn’t?

  When a Dumpster arrived—a refuse box in Bay Area-speak—for nontoxic discards, the deliverymen received a great deal of advice about placement on the driveway: Leave room for the pickup to come and go, don’t block the garage door, stay out of the flower borders. Like the rest of the actual working crew, the deliverymen paid scant attention to the kibbitzers and placed the Dumpster where it would be convenient for them to pick up again.

  The noise of the Dumpster delivery attracted Mr. and Mrs. Loper from next door.

  “How long will that thing be there?” George wanted to know. From his tone and expression it was clear that he did not think the big, ugly metal trash box enhanced his neighborhood.

  “They’ll pick it up Monday,” I said, tossing in a pair of very dusty old sleeping bags. “And replace it with an empty. I hope to be finished with all of this by the middle of next week.”

  George followed me into the garage, talking to my back as we walked. “I’ve been keeping my eye out for Nordquist this A.M. He always seems to pop up first thing in the morning, so I began to think he might be sleeping in your backyard. Last night I was out there when you drove up, hoping to catch him before he tucked himself in for the night.”

  “What were you planning to do with the baseball bat?” I asked.

  “Just a little inducement to stay away, if you know what I mean,” he said. “A twelve-bore would put a stop to him.”

  “You don’t own a twelve-bore,” his wife, Karen, admonished; she had followed us in. “Or any other firearm, for that matter. I won’t allow those things in my house.” She winked at me as she tipped her head toward her husband. “Who knows what a hothead might do if there were a lethal weapon handy at the wrong moment?”

  George paid no attention to her. He went over to “help” Lyle with Dad’s tools.

  “So good to see you, Maggie,” Karen Loper said. She had aged a great deal since I saw her last. Living with George Loper would age anyone in a hurry, but it wasn’t only wrinkles and gray hair that had changed her. She held her left hand protectively and her left foot lagged a bit when she walked; a stroke?

  “Sorry I haven’t dropped by sooner to say hello,” she said, standing to the side while I unloaded the family’s collection of outdated textbooks from shelves. Boxes and dusty boxes of them. “But you’ve had so much to do and I didn’t want to get in your way. I was talking to Sunny last night—”

  “And how is Sunny?” I asked. Her daughter had once been one of my best friends.

  “Oh, she’s fine. I worried when her youngest went off to college last fall. That empty nest nearly killed me, you know. But not Sunny. Since she made partner at the law firm she’s been too busy to notice how empty her house is.”

  “Good for her,” I said. “Say hello for me.”

  “I shall,” she said. “Was that Evie Miller I saw over here the other day?”

  “It was. She’s working with University Housing.”

  “Too bad about her and Tom.”

  “Maggie?” Jean-Paul stood in front of one of the floor-to-ceiling cupboards that lined the back wall and clearly wanted some guidance about what to do with its contents. I was happy he interrupted before Karen got further into her tale of someone else’s woe. While Gracie Nussbaum passed along information, Karen was a notorious and sometimes malicious gossip. I very much did not want to hear about Evie and Tom, whoever he was.

  “Excuse me,” I said to her.

  “Of course.” She patted my shoulder. “I’ll get out of your way.”

  She wandered out to talk to another neighbor on the driveway, and I went to see what Jean-Paul had found.

  Inside the cupboard, among other things, there were two large plastic laundry baskets filled with little developer’s boxes full of old family slides and movies. I groaned.

  “I will leave them to you,” Jean-Paul said, smiling as he moved on to old paint cans, paintbrushes, and household chemicals that needed to go to the toxic waste dump.

  I pulled the laundry baskets down, knelt on the floor beside them and started looking at the notations on the film boxes. There were photos and movies of family trips and school plays, Christmas pageants and birthdays, and roses—many roses—and they needed to be at least looked through. But later. The baskets would have to come home with me to be sorted on some lonely rainy night.

  As I shifted the baskets to the corner of the garage designated for things I was keeping, I noticed a handwritten notation on the end of a slide box: GARDEN-CHRYSLERS, and a date. Dad was proud of his Chrysler Imperial roses, to be sure, but what interested me was the film developer’s date stamp. I began pawing through the basket, looking for more boxes dated around the time that Mrs. Bartolini died.

  “What the hell is wrong with you people?” George Loper shouted, waving what looked like a small jeweler’s box perilously close to Lyle’s f
ace. Lyle stood looking back at him in stunned silence.

  I jumped to my feet and saw that Jean-Paul was already rushing toward the tool bench where George was fulminating at poor Lyle.

  “Dammit,” George spat. “A young man gives his life in service to his country, and this is how you people honor him?”

  “George!” Karen snapped, coming back into the garage. As she tried to make haste to intercept her husband, her limp became more pronounced.

  I put myself between George and Lyle, who stood mute, ashen. “What’s the problem here?”

  “This.” He opened the little box and pushed it close to my face. I took it from him so I could see what had upset him so.

  My brother Mark’s Purple Heart. It was given to my parents, along with some other medals and a tightly folded flag, during Mark’s funeral.

  “Where did you find this?” I asked George.

  “In a drawer with a bunch of—” He sputtered, trying to get the next word out. “Crap.”

  “I can’t imagine why you were going through my father’s drawers,” I said quietly, closing the box. “Or why you are so concerned about what he kept in them.”

  He had more to say, but I didn’t want to hear it. Looking into his eyes, watching his red and angry face, wondering if he would explode like a character in a cartoon, I said, “We can manage from here, Mr. Loper. Thanks for dropping by.”

  Karen was at his elbow. “Honestly, George.”

  He spun on his heel and stormed out.

  “He’s a veteran,” Karen said, attempting to apologize for him, or to explain something about him, but gave it up with a shake of her head and walked out behind him. The other neighbors in the drive, perhaps sharing chagrin for being snoopy, drifted away.

  “Sorry, Lyle,” I said. I heard my voice break. I knew he was upset, even though he said he wasn’t. But he went inside to check on Roy’s progress just the same. Jean-Paul took me in his arms and I buried my face against his shoulder, taking a minute to catch my breath. Like my mom, I wear grief for my big brother close to the surface, and George had no business scratching at it.

  “Some work crew.” I knew the voice; my Uncle Max had arrived. “Everyone standing around snogging when there’s work to be done.”

  I looked up over Jean-Paul’s shoulder. Uncle Max stood there with his arms akimbo and a grin on his face, a welcome sight. I asked, “Where did you come from?”

  “I’m told I was born in Duluth,” he said, ever the smart-ass. “But I was too young to remember. So, what was all that fuss and feathers I walked in on?”

  “Snoopy neighbor. Not to worry.”

  “Says you.” He tapped Jean-Paul’s shoulder as if he were cutting in on a dance floor. “You have a monopoly on the lady’s hugs now, Bernard?”

  “A lovely thought,” Jean-Paul said, releasing me.

  Uncle Max enveloped me in a bear hug and smooched my cheek. Holding me at arm’s length, he said, “I got an interesting call early this morning. Very, very early.”

  “Did you?” I said, pulling free.

  “From Paris. Canal Plus wanted to talk deal. Something about backing your Normandy film project.” He gave Jean-Paul a pointed glance. “Anyone here know anything about that?”

  I turned to Jean-Paul. “Does anyone?”

  He responded with a shrug and a moue with a guilty grin behind it. “Perhaps someone spoke with an acquaintance.”

  “I thought so,” Max said, mimicking Jean-Paul’s shrug. “They made a decent offer. Problem is, there’s this network that thinks the project is already theirs.”

  “But?” I said and waited.

  “But the network needs to shit or get off the pot,” Max said. “There are two sides to the contract, you and them, and you both have performance obligations. You have done your part. Now it’s their turn. If the guys with the checkbook don’t come across with funding by early next week, they are in breach and you are free to take the project elsewhere.”

  “That is good, yes?” Jean-Paul said.

  “Maybe good for you, Kemosabe,” Max said, pointedly. “But, Maggie, only you can decide what’s best for you. I promise that if you walk away with this project, no matter how badly the network is behaving, they will sever your relationship. Permanently. Are you ready for that?”

  “I need to talk with Guido before I do anything,” I said. Guido Patrini had been my film production partner for a long time. The decision absolutely was not mine alone to make.

  “Guido told me he can get himself up here tomorrow,” Max said. “You two can talk it over.”

  That bit of news didn’t quite please Jean-Paul. I suspected he was hoping that we would have more time alone together, to talk. I took his hand and gave it a squeeze.

  Max looked around at the apparent chaos we had made of the garage, stuff piled out of cupboards and in the process of being separated into various zones by category: keep, donate, dump. It looked more chaotic than it was; I could actually see the end.

  “Max,” I said. “There’s work to do. Go up and change your clothes. Jean-Paul and I are in your room. We’ll put Guido in my room and Susan in Mom’s room. So why don’t you take Mark’s room?”

  “Where do you want me to begin?” he asked.

  “Legal and financial records,” I said. “There’s a stack of labeled boxes in Dad’s den. I was going to take them home to go through, but you can save me the portage.”

  “Where’s the shredder?” he asked.

  “In the den, next to the records.”

  Jean-Paul and I worked alone together in the garage for the next couple of hours, sorting, dumping. And talking. It was a dusty chore, but there was something oddly romantic about doing it together. I appreciated that he stuck with me without ever grumbling or suggesting a break, kept a sense of humor about it all. By the time we had emptied the cupboards along the back wall and dispatched their contents, this is what I knew: The two of us also had some very serious decisions to make, together.

  Lyle came out of the house carrying a big box filled with household chemicals. As he deposited the box in the truck, he announced, “Lunch is ready.”

  “I wondered what you were up to,” I said. I closed the garage door and we followed him inside.

  “You can thank Roy.” Looking over his shoulder at us, Lyle said, “Wash those hands.”

  “Bossy as ever,” I said, laughing.

  Years ago, when I was a fledgling divorcée and Casey was in elementary school, we lived in a wonderful old house in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco; I was still working for PBS. Lyle was our across-the-alley neighbor, someone we waved to when we took out the trash or backed out the car, or ran into each other in the market. When an earthquake reduced his house to rubble and left ours habitable, though damaged, we took him in. For a month, we thought. But contractors and repairmen were hard to come by for a long time after the quake, so he just continued on with us, one month after another, until there was no pretense any longer that one day he would go home, even when the quake repairs were long finished. The three of us lived together like a family until he met Roy and I met Mike, and Casey and I moved down to LA. We still considered Lyle to be family.

  “What’s for eats?” I asked when, freshly scrubbed, Jean-Paul and I joined the others in the kitchen.

  “Homegrown tomato-basil bisque and grilled cheese sandwiches,” Roy said proudly. “First thing, before I got to work on anything else, I went right out and picked the Romas from the garden to get them stewing. There are so many tomatoes out there that we could open a stand out front.”

  “Or you could pick them all and take them home so Lyle can make his famous marinara sauce,” I said. “There should be enough to last you all winter.”

  Lyle’s face collapsed. I thought he was going to cry.

  “Now what?” I said, spoon poised above my bowl.

  “You’re leaving me again, aren’t you?”

  “Where’d you get that idea?”

  “The d
opey look on your face.”

  “For heaven’s sake.” I reached around for a box of tissues and handed it to him. “Get a grip.”

  “Lyle,” Jean-Paul said, catching his eye. “Have you ever visited France? You will love it.”

  I thought it was time to shift to a new topic. I turned to Uncle Max and asked, “Why would Dad keep Mark’s Purple Heart in his workbench?”

  Max considered the question for a moment before he offered, “He loved to putter in the garage and your mom never went out there. Maybe he wanted to put it somewhere Betsy wouldn’t happen upon it and get upset. Or, maybe he wanted to keep it where he could take it out and look at it from time to time privately. You know, keep it close.”

  “‘Al’s out in the garage making sawdust,’ Betsy always said.” Lyle was smiling again.

  “So she did.” I ate my soup, thinking about Mom moving into the noisy, happy sphere of the Tejeda family. A good move, I thought as I returned Lyle’s smile. A very good move.

  Jean-Paul cleared his throat. I looked over at him, expecting him to say something, but after glancing from me to Max, he didn’t.

  “Yes?” I said.

  He considered for a moment before he retrieved the medal box from the counter where he set it when we came inside for lunch.

  “I was curious,” he said, unpinning the medal from the velvet lining it was attached to. “I had never seen a Purple Heart before.”

  He laid the medal on my palm, and holding my hand in his, he turned the medal over and showed me the back. Below FOR NATIONAL MERIT the recipient’s name was engraved.

  “Max,” I said, handing it to him. “This isn’t Mark’s Purple Heart. It’s Dad’s.”

  “I’ll be damned,” he said, running a finger over the letters. “I forgot he earned one.”

  “Korea,” I explained to the others. “Dad took shrapnel in his shoulder, his leg and his butt.”

  “Because of Korea, my brother Al didn’t want Mark to go to Vietnam,” Max said. “He thought he had gone to war so that his son wouldn’t have to.”