It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [72]
As the door rolled up, it revealed a hulking shape with a tarp draped over it. I held my breath, and as her son pulled the tarp off, I gasped. A harp strummed somewhere, and a chorus of angels sang that one note that they do when something incredible happens and changes everything forever.
It did not look like the stove in the eBay photo; it looked better. It looked incredible. There was a chrome griddle in the center, a periscope window on the backsplash to see down into the oven without opening the door, a Grillevator, a warming oven, and it was all in absolutely pristine condition for a stove that came off the assembly line in 1954. When I opened the oven door, it was so clean it was almost impossible to believe that anyone had ever cooked in it. The chrome on it gleamed, the white enamel shone, and I swear the corners of the oven doors curled up and smiled at me.
“I really don’t want to sell it, but I have to,” Tina repeated. “We sold the piano last week. This is the last thing I have left from the house I had with my husband. He was killed by a drunk driver on New Year’s Day several years ago, and this is like saying a final goodbye.”
And then she looked at me and started to cry.
Oh boy.
“I’m sorry,” I said, as her son hugged her and they both relived the pain of that New Year’s Day. She patted his head. And then he began to sob, too.
“We moved up here because my husband’s brother said he would be a father figure to my sons,” she continued, as tears streamed down her face. “But that didn’t happen. It turns out he’s … he’s not the man we thought he was.”
Oh, Jesus, I said to myself, as I released the grip on my wallet. I thought the worst thing that could happen at the storage unit was that I’d be lured into a trap, lose my life in a valiant struggle, get divvied up like a chicken, and be left to rot in the dark, but a weeping widow clutching her fatherless son as they remembered the fun family stove time was a little bit beyond my established skill set.
And that’s when I looked at my husband, and it looked like he super wanted to punch me in the face with that stove.
“I’m going to cook on it a lot,” I mouthed to him.
As far as Tina & Son were concerned, I didn’t know what to do. If it was an act, it was a good one; it had the same amounts of embarrassment, despair, agony, and vulnerability as Courtney Love’s Behind the Music episode. But it seemed real to me, and honestly, if this was a ploy, wouldn’t there be easier things to sell than old appliances? It’s not like there’s a band of antique stove bandits who will wait until you go on vacation to bust down your door to steal an heirloom that requires a dolly, a ramp, and a can of Easy-Off.
So, believing that what I was seeing was true, and despite the fact that I am an inappropriate hugger who has trouble assessing when the time is right, I kind of reached out and tried to comfort this person—whom I had only known since the storage-place front door—and I wasn’t sure what my hand was going to do once it made a landing. At the last second, my palm sort of curled up like a claw, and then I found I was rubbing the back of my pointer finger up and down a square-inch area of her arm three times, albeit awkwardly. That really was as much as I could do, given the prep time, atmosphere, and the fact that I was getting kind of hungry.
To jolt us back into the reality of why I drove fifty miles and dragged my husband—who was now wishing he knew how to turn on a wood chipper—with me, I spoke to Tina quietly but very, very compassionately, and I mean so compassionately it was almost a whisper, it was gentle, very soft, like