The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [288]
“What do you think?” she asked Francis. “Is it some kind of eating disorder? Some comment on something or other?”
“She’s realized we’re monkeys,” he said, curling his fingers and scratching his ribs, puckering his lips.
“It isn’t funny to me, Francis, it’s upsetting. I’ve never known anyone to stash banana peels.”
“How do you know it isn’t Sheldon?”
“Have you ever once known him to bring any food whatsoever into this house? He doesn’t even come in eating a candy bar. I’ve never once seen him with a cup of takeout coffee. He’s so lazy he relies entirely on the groceries I bring home.”
Francis put down his newspaper and looked over the top of his glasses. “Maybe it’s a mating ritual,” he said, but she’d already left the room.
Now Francis stood in the hallway of his aunt’s house, wondering if it would be worth it to take out the ceiling fixture and replace it with something less expensive and less unique before the real-estate agent came back. This required outguessing the people who would eventually tour the house: would they be inclined to like everything, once they’d seen such a splendid light fixture, or would they breeze past, the men concerned about the basement, the women interested in the kitchen? He was contemplating calling Bern to ask her opinion when he saw the Burwell Boys Moving truck turn in to the driveway, sending gravel flying into the peony beds. A hollyhock went flying like a spear. Low-hanging tree limbs snapped off.
Two men wearing chinos and dark-brown T-shirts hopped out. “Mr. Field? How do you do, Mr. Field?” the burlier of the two said. “Moving day, Mr. Field,” the other man said, retrieving a clipboard from the passenger seat. He had a couple of feathers in his shirt pocket. “I’m Jim Montgomery. My partner here is Don O’Rourke.”
“Don,” the partner echoed. “We want to do a good job here, make sure you got no reason to remember us.”
Both men came forward to shake Francis’s hand. Jim plucked a pen from between the feathers in his pocket. “Just need your John Hancock on the line, then we can get started.”
Francis signed their forms, then led the movers inside. “My aunt’s summer house,” he explained, giving them a quick tour. He’d supposed that everyone in the area knew that his aunt was dead, though, of course, he had no reason to suspect that she would have met these particular men.
“Aunt didn’t have tons of furniture,” Jim said. “She an older lady?”
“Ninety,” Francis said.
Don let out a low whistle. “Make it to ninety, then a couple of crooks come in and load everything out.”
Jim crouched to examine a side table, then looked at Francis. “You tagged the pieces we load last?”
“They’re both in the hallway. The pie safe and the hall seat.” The movers had told Bern that they would be unloading these pieces to another moving company, which would transport them to California.
“We’ll get started, then,” Jim said. He turned to Don. “What that remark was about us being crooks, I won’t ask.”
“We took those six-packs of water from behind the 7-Eleven,” Don said. He grinned at Francis. “Go to auctions, get things and distress ’em, bang ’em up and make ’em old.”
Francis nodded, trying to indicate that, whatever they’d done, he did not intend to pass judgment. (It didn’t much matter to him.) His wife had arranged for the moving men, who had been recommended—wasn’t that what she’d said?—by the real-estate agent.
Jim and Don began issuing orders to each other, pulling furniture into the center of the room, moving quickly. Francis turned, pretending to have something to do upstairs. Over his shoulder he noticed something small on the floor and went back to see what it was, as the two men carried the Sheridan sofa out the door. It was Jim’s feather. He put it on the chair cushion, where Jim would be sure to notice it, and returned to the stairs. He went up three steps, four . . . then stopped. Through the window, he