Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [149]
“Yes. No,” she called through the screen door. “But that’s no business of yours.”
“My name’s Augenblick,” the man said, just before he got into his car. “Edward Augenblick. Everyone calls me Ted. And I won’t bother you again. I left a business card in the living room, though, if you’re curious about this house.” He turned one last time toward her front screen door, behind which she was now standing. “I’m not dangerous,” he said, holding his apple. “And the other thing is, I know you.”
The car started—it purred expensively, making a sound like a diesel sedan, but Melinda had never known one brand of car from another, they were all just assemblages of metal to her, and he, this semi-handsome person who said he was Edward Augenblick, whoever that was, and the car, the two of them, the human machine and the actual machine, proceeded down the block in a low chuckling putter, turned right, and disappeared.
Picking up the baby, she went out to gather up her trowel and the birdlike metallic weeder. She would leave the weeds where they were, for now. Doing another sort of chore might conceivably restore her calm.
After taking the tools back to the garage, she surveyed her father’s things scattered on the garage’s left-hand side, which now served mostly as a shed. You could get a car in there on the right-hand side if you were very careful. Cast-off fishing poles, broken flashlights, back issues of American Record Guide and Fanfare, operas and chamber music on worn-out vinyl, and more lawn and garden implements that gave off a smell of soil and fertilizer—everything her father didn’t have the heart to throw away had been dumped here into a memory pile in the space where the other car, her mother’s, used to be. Melinda put her gardening implements on a tool shelf next to a can of motor oil for the lawn mower, and she bowed her head. When she did, the baby grabbed at her hair.
She wasn’t desperate. The almost-handsome stranger had got that particular detail wrong. A man given to generalizations might launch into nonsense about desperation, seeing a single mom with a baby boy, the two of them living in her father’s house, temporarily. Eric pulled hard at her bangs. She was trembling. Her hands shook. The visitation felt like … like what? Like a little big thing—a micro-rape.
She had grown up in this house; he hadn’t. It was that simple.
As if taking an inventory to restore herself, she thought of the tasks she had to perform: her property taxes would come due very soon and she would have to pay them on her own house across town, where she would be residing this very minute if her father weren’t in recovery from his stroke. She imagined it: her Arts and Crafts home stood empty (of her and of Eric) on its beautiful wooded lot, with a decorative rose arbor in the backyard, climbing in spite of her, in her absence. She missed the orderly clean lines of her own house and its nursery and its mostly empty spaces and what it required of her.
“Desperate”—the nerve of the guy.
Over there, at her own house, she would not be susceptible to the visitations of strangers. Over there, she would be within walking distance of the local college where she taught Spanish literature of the nineteenth century—her specialty being the novels of Pérez Galdós. Over there, she was on leave just now, during her father’s convalescence, while she lived here, the house of her childhood.
Looking at her father’s ragtag accumulations in the garage, she