The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [9]
He had seen her getting her newspaper and shown up a few minutes later with a bouquet of mauve-colored tulips. “From bulbs his wife planted!” my mother repeatedly pointed out. I remember being charmed by his offer, so charmed I had been tempted to rush over to his house after he’d been spurned to see if, perhaps with only a shift in generation, his offer might hold.
When he died, my mother gloated in triumph. “I would have had to wipe up his drool for five years and then bury him,” she said. On the day of his funeral, she had blamed her watery eyes on the onions she was cutting up with her ancient hand-sharpened paring knife.
Peter Donnellson’s house had been sold as is by his three daughters, and my mother had braced herself for a teardown. Despite what was obvious—that the area had been going downhill for years—she fretted over the emergence of a Phoenixville nouveau riche. She worried for the roots of her giant maple trees that extended over into Mr. Donnellson’s yard. She worried for the noise and for what she imagined would be the sound of children screaming almost every hour of the day. She had me research soundproofing schemes and considered replacing the windows on that side of the house with cinder blocks. “That will fix their wagon,” she said, and I went, as I often did, to fill the electric kettle with water and listen to its soothing hum.
But Carl Fletcher moved in alone and didn’t change anything. He had a job with the phone company and went to work out in the field early each morning. He came home at the same time every day but Friday. On the weekends he sat in his yard and drank beer. He had the paper with him and a book and always, always, the portable radio that he kept tuned to sports or talk. Occasionally his daughter, Madeline, whom my mother called the “circus freak” because of her tattoos, would visit. My mother complained about the noise of her motorcycle and “all of that flesh spread out in the yard,” but she had never spoken to Carl Fletcher, and he had never bothered to introduce himself. What I knew of my mother’s neighbors at this point was all secondhand, distributed, along with frozen soups or potted jams, by Mrs. Castle when we crossed paths.
As Mr. Fletcher turned his steaks over, I could hear the sizzle of the fat dripping into the fire over the noise of the game. From my kneeling position, one I refused to adopt anymore at Westmore—too hard on the knees—I crawled outside and knelt again at the edge of my mother’s body. I thought of a man I’d read about who felt so devout he dragged a replica of Jesus’s cross from one end of Berlin to the other, wearing only some sort of Gandhi-like diaper and traveling on his quickly bloodied knees.
The small scratch on my mother’s cheek had congealed. Her eyes had purpled in halos around their sockets. I remembered turning her in bed and adjusting strips of sheepskin under her to stave off the inevitable bedsores during the lengthy convalescence that followed the surgery for her colon cancer.
Mr. Fletcher placed the steaks on a plate, took his meat and his radio, and went back inside. He was the sort of man who could be counted on, I realized, never to look up. I saw the coals still orange in his grill.
I would have had to yell “Fire!” for anyone but Mrs. Leverton or Mr. Forrest, who lived down the road, to pay attention. In the years after the final death throes of Phoenixville Steel, the streets nearby had become increasingly desolate. Properties often sat vacant, and from the spare bedroom where my grandfather’s guns had once been kept, I had watched the demolition of a beautiful Victorian two streets away. Once the conical roof fell in, there was nothing to see but ancient dust floating up and out above the house’s less prosperous neighbors.
I had tried to get my mother to move into a retirement home, but she would not budge, and part of me admired her for it. There was an ever-diminishing network of the originals now: Mrs. Leverton behind her, Mr. Forrest five houses down, and the long-suffering widow of Mr. Tolliver.
The one my mother