Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [41]
“Poor old Warren. I’m sorry, Aunt.” And he was sorry. Slouched in the chair, levered the cap from a bottle of beer. Thought of Bunny’s murderous dreams that woke them all, the child sweaty, pupils like Billy’s ink bottle. Hoped she wouldn’t rouse Dennis and Beety in the night.
“What did Dennis say about fixing up the place?” Wearily.
“Well,” said the aunt, hanging her coat away, tugging off her boots, “he thinks if he rouses into it with somebody to help him, he could have it so we could get into it—roof over our heads—in two weeks. Believe it or not. With that in mind I tackled the desk clerk and got us the famous bachelor apartment through that door”—pointing at the side wall—”for the rest of the time we’re here plus this room for what we’re paying for this room alone. Look.” She opened the other door, displayed a single bed and a tiny kitchenette. “You can sleep in there. I’ll stay on in here with the girls. At least there’ll be a little more privacy and a little more room. At least we can fix coffee in the morning, something to eat and not have to test our constitutions downstairs. I’ll pick up some food tomorrow.” Got out her whiskey bottle, poured a little.
“Now, as to what young Dennis is going to do to the house. Says if you’ll help him on the weekends it’ll go right along. It’ll be rough, but we can manage. It can’t be any worse than this place. Fixing up the rest of it will take right on into fall. He thinks we’d want to look into a generator, get a gas stove and couple tanks of propane. He can get hold of a fellow’s got a bulldozer to clear a road from the old glove factory to the dooryard. Can do that tomorrow, he says, if we can afford it. I told him we could because we had to. But the first thing is that there’s got to be some pilings set, some kind of dock built so Dennis can get back and forth, bring over the building supplies by boat. There’s a fellow, he says—I forgot his name—used to build wharves all up and down the coast. [92] He’s retired now, but he could take on a small job like this and finish it up in a few days if he had a crowd to do the heavy bits. Be a lot faster, Dennis says, than driving all the way around.”
Quoyle nodded, but his face was dull. The aunt sighed, thought that if she could scrape away her old flesh down to the young bones she would do it herself. She could tackle a new job, master a boat, rebuild the house, get over the loss of a cheating mate. She hauled out a wad of sketches and lists, long columns of arithmetic, spread them over the table. Stubby fingers, the nails cut straight across.
“I wish I could find my calculator,” she said. “Dennis figures everything up, has to add it three times, loses his place. I can’t add at all anymore, seems like. They say if you do sums ten times a day you’ll never get senile. But that argues that bankers should be geniuses, so that’s not right. Thickest heads in the world.” Quoyle hitched his chair around, pretended to take an interest. Man Lukewarm on Ancestral Home Way Out on the Point.
“The biggest problem is putting in the insulation. If we’re living in the house, can’t very well tear out all that old plaster and lath. Take forever and choke you to death. So he had this other idea. What he’d do is put in new studding right over the existing walls in every room, then lay up the insulation and put your wallboard over it. Be like a double house. Especially since I don’t want that vinyl stuff outside. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘that vinyl siding makes a warm house, never has to be painted, you can buy it on time.’ I said I wouldn’t have it on my coffin.”
She drank her whiskey in two swallows, the single ice cube clanking. Quoyle was surprised to