Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [172]
Ellickson watched his neighbor water his petunias. When he glanced at his watch, he saw that several hours had passed. A miracle. He had almost made it through another day. The phone rang.
“How’d it go?” Lester asked. “With the murderer? Did you talk to him?”
“It went pretty well,” Ellickson said. “He’s a little strange, though.”
“Well, he’s a murderer.”
“No,” Ellickson said. “It’s not that. It’s like he’s a master of ceremonies of some TV show that no one’s watching. He told me he’s building a spaceship in his basement. Then he said maybe he was just kidding about the spaceship.”
“A spaceship, huh? I know the feeling,” Lester said. “Did you tell him you’re an alcoholic?”
“Yeah,” Ellickson said. “I did that.”
“Good,” Lester said. “Next time you’re over there, check out the spaceship and then report back to me.”
That night, Ellickson went to his sister’s house for dinner. She lived with her partner, a sizable Russian immigrant woman named Irena, in a ramshackle colonial on the better side of town. He continued to get invitations from them, he believed, because he performed small electrical and plumbing repairs whenever he visited and because he had offered to be the godfather if they ever had children. Also, his sister never asked him about how he was, so he never had to explain.
Kate, his sister, met him at the door, her hand at her forehead and her face flushed. The smoke alarm at the back of the house was shrieking. “We’ve had a little disaster in the kitchen,” Kate told him. “A sort of disaster-ette. I was on the phone to the goddamn airline and they put me on hold and I burned the chicken. Well, come in.” In the back, the smoke detector wailed on and on, and the dog, Ludmilla, was barking straight up at it.
“Where’s Irena?”
“H-h-h-here I am.” Irena’s h-sounds came out of her throat in the Russian manner. They sounded like gargling. She appeared very suddenly from the living room and, in the entryway, took Ellickson’s face in both hands and kissed him on the cheeks, first the left, then the right, as if he were about to go off to a firing squad. Irena’s passion for everything, including Ellickson’s sister and himself as Kate’s brother, was disconcerting. Family feeling was fine, but hers seemed a bit excessive for the American context. She stood an inch taller than Ellickson, and he was terribly fond of her—everything about her was outsized, close to bursting, including her emotions. She had russet hair, large dimpled hands, and her breath always smelled heavily of peppermints, as if she herself were a piece of candy. He could see why Kate and Irena were a couple; anyone could see their complementary mixture of similarities and differences. “We have burned you the chicken,” Irena said happily. “This will be dinner, which you can eat after repairing upstairs, where a faucet leaks.” She pointed toward the second floor. “I have bought faucet washer at hardware store. Tools are already up there. Please do this?”
“Irena,” Ellickson said, “it’s a simple job. I could teach you how.” The smoke alarm was still screaming, and Kate was cursing it.
“I do not agree,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “As human being, I am uninterested in plumbing.” She gave him another kiss, then retreated in her house slippers to the back hallway and lugged in a stepladder. Ellickson watched her climb it and then yank the battery brutally out of the smoke detector, which fell silent. Well, Ellickson thought, why should she be interested in plumbing? She taught mathematics at a local college; her theoretical interests were so complex, having to do with the bending of topological surfaces in different dimensions, that they could not be explained to ordinary people like himself.
After Ellickson had fixed the dripping faucet, Kate and Irena sat