Читать книгу Under One Roof: How a Tough Old Woman in a Little Old House Changed My Life - Barry Martin - Страница 7

There’s a lot of sitting-around time at the beginning of a project, especially one like this that begins with tearing down buildings to make way for the new construction. There were two buildings on the other end of the lot from where Edith’s house stood that we had to get rid of. I’d given the crew their assignments, and now the best thing for me to do was stay the heck out of their way and let them do their jobs. So I found myself wandering from my trailer over to Edith’s front gate, not forty feet away. Now that I’d figured out what pushed her buttons – or thought I’d figured it out, anyway – I started approaching her a little differently. I only went over when I saw her outside, when it didn’t seem like I was checking up on her. And I kept it casual, chatting about the weather and the transients and whatnot. Pretty soon we were hanging on the fence like any neighbors, poking fun at the way teenagers dress these days, what we recalled about Ballard years ago, trying to remember the names of who ran which store, that sort of thing.

As we talked, day by day, little bits of her past would seep into the conversation. Once we were talking about something we’d heard on the radio, another dumb government botch-up. “It’s not just here, believe me. When I worked for the British government, let me tell you, there were some royal mess-ups there as well.” A van turned off the overpass and drove by with its muffler roaring; I had to wait for it to pass before I could ask, “You worked for the British government, Edith?”

“Yes,” she said, without missing a beat. “It’s how I wound up in the concentration camp in Dachau.”

Well, that threw me for a loop. I wanted to ask her about it, but before I could say any more, I saw that her eyes were moist, that tears were starting to form. I had this overwhelming feeling like I wanted to hug her, but of course I didn’t. I realized why I was feeling it, though. Because in that moment, looking at Edith, I felt like I was back in the presence of someone I loved as much as I’ve ever loved anyone: my great-grandma Mimi.

I flashed back on the time when I graduated from eighth grade, and my sister was graduating from high school. My dad rented a 35-foot cabin cruiser. The whole family, including my great-grandmother, went on the boat and cruised through the Canadian San Juan Islands for a week. That trip made a real impression on me. I loved watching my dad steer that boat. He was so smooth and confident and in control, it made me feel really safe on the water. I still carry that with me.

And I loved having all that time with Great-grandma Mimi. I could sit and listen to her tell stories all day. Great-grandma Mimi came to Washington State in a covered wagon. A covered wagon! I could just see her – in a kid’s mind, of course, your great-grandmother is always an old lady – but I’d try to picture her as a young woman, and as she’d tell me her stories, I’d imagine what it must have been like at those moments of her life – when she first heard a radio, when she first got a telephone. She was there when the automobile was invented, when men went off to the First World War, and when they came home. And there I was, just a kid cruising on the open sea between beautiful islands, the cool Canadian breezes giving you a little chill, even on a summer’s morning, the sun gleaming off pristine green waters, and my great-grandmother Mimi touching my cheek and telling me what it was like the first time she heard a phonograph.

A few years back, I was talking with my kids about the moon landing. It was the fortieth anniversary or something like that, and it was all over the TV, and they were asking me about it, and I told them to try to imagine what it was like for my great-grandmother that day. She came to Washington State in a covered wagon, and now she was watching a man walk on the moon. That’s really something. I know people talk about all the technological advances we have today, with computers and all, but to me it’s nothing compared with what my great-grandmother lived through. The changes she saw unfolding around her.

I looked over at Edith. She had turned her back to me; to gain her composure, I thought. But then I noticed a little dog in her yard, and Edith was walking toward it.

It was a cute dog, one of those Lhasa Apsos, only about seventeen years old, missing most of its teeth, and blind as a bat. It was a stubborn little dog, too. There was a cart out in the front yard, and the dog was walking along and, because it was so blind, it bonked into the cart. Instead of going around it, the dog just walked forward and bonked its head on the cart again, over and over. It would be a while before I figured out that the dog had got its stubborn streak from its owner.

“What’s your dog’s name, Edith?”

“Oh, that’s Mimi,” she said. “Mimi’s been with me forever.”

“You’re kidding! That’s was my great-grandma’s name. Mimi.”

Edith smiled. She seemed to take some kind of special pleasure in that coincidence.

For the next hour or so, we chatted about nothing. Edith wanted to know all about my family: my son, Willy, who was sixteen, pitching and playing middle infield for the baseball team; and my daughter, Kelsey, a year older, who was into what they call competitive cheerleading. I would never in a million years have heard of competitive cheerleading if my kid hadn’t been into it, but now I was becoming something of an expert. And of course my wife, Evie, the one who holds us all together.

When I mentioned Evie’s name, Edith’s eyes opened wide. “That’s just quite remarkable,” she said. “One of my best friends was named Evelyn. We called her Evie, too. One of my best friends in the world. That was back in England, of course. Those were some days we had, Evelyn and myself.”

It all started to make sense, in a way. I hadn’t put two and two together the first time she mentioned she worked for the British government, but from the way she spoke, not with an accent but with such precise and unusual diction, you could guess that maybe she had lived somewhere else for a long time. “When did you live in England, Edith?” I asked.

“Yes, yes,” she said, not really answering my question. “I haven’t thought about Evelyn in a long time. You know, these kinds of connections are important. People think they aren’t, but they really are.”

It was comforting, in a way, hearing Edith talk like this. A little like being back with Great-grandma Mimi. I didn’t feel right then that I could ask Edith any more about Britain and Germany and all that, but I knew it would come up again. I got a little bit of the thrill of anticipation: I couldn’t wait to hear more of her stories.

I suppose it had been a long time since anyone had hung around Edith’s fence just to pass the time of day. I think maybe when you get old, people make assumptions about you – that you’re crochety, or solitary, or that you don’t want to talk to people – and then those assumptions get in the way. In Edith’s case, I guess she’d given people lots of reasons to make those assumptions – but still, as I got to talking with her, I realized that there was a lot more to her than just that. Maybe it was just like the mall project that was taking shape behind her house: in spending afternoons talking the way we had, we managed to clear away some old obstacles, to break some new ground. It was a nice feeling. Like starting out on a long walk, and knowing you’re headed in the right direction.

Maybe it was because of all that, or maybe not, but about 10:30 one morning, my cell phone rang.

“Hello, Barry? Is that you?” I didn’t know the number, but I recognized the voice right away.

“Morning, Edith. This is Barry. Everything okay?”

“Why yes, Barry, everything is fine. Thank you so much for asking.”

There was a long pause. I had the feeling she was searching for the right words, so I just held tight and waited.

“I would like to ask you something,” she finally said. “I don’t feel comfortable driving today. I was wondering if you might drive me to my hair appointment. I’d certainly understand if it’s too much trouble, of course. I know you’re a very busy man. I certainly don’t want to be a bother.”

I was surprised at the request, because I already had figured out that she valued her independence above just about anything else. Like when I’d go check on her, I had to make it look like I was just happening by, or she’d get angry. Edith seemed like the kind of person who didn’t like you to do things for them – or didn’t want to appear to be asking, anyway. So that’s why the call kind of caught me off guard. Still, it was almost a relief to me, because every time I saw her get in the car to drive, I had the sense that the opportunity for an accident was pretty high.

“Sure thing, Edith. No problem. What time?”

“The appointment is at one thirty,” she said. “Perhaps you could meet me at a quarter after.”

“Not a problem,” I said a second time. “I’ll meet you by the car. See you then.”

“Thank you,” she said, slowly and sincerely. “That’s very kind.”

A few minutes later I told my project manager, Roger, why I’d be gone for a little while that afternoon. No sooner were the words out of my mouth than he started giving me the business. “Hey, so you’re going to be driving Miss Daisy, huh? Well, I’m gonna have to record this moment for posterity.”

At a quarter after one, I was out in front of Edith’s house, standing next to her 1989 blue Chevy Cavalier. It was a sturdy little car, with a dent in the right front fender. She’d inherited it from a friend she had taken care of; she’d helped him through his dying months, and when he passed, he left her all his stuff, including the car.

As I helped Edith into the car, there was Roger, grinning from ear to ear, snapping away with a little digital camera. He was being polite about it, so as not to embarrass Edith, but after I got her into the car and was walking around to the driver’s side, he started in again: “Have fun driving Miss Daisy,” he said under his breath. Funny, I had never seen that movie, and wouldn’t wind up seeing it for a couple of years, but when I did, I couldn’t believe how much of that movie we had lived, Edith and me.

I could have taken my truck, but I just thought it would be hard for her to climb up into the cab. Still, it was a bit odd, getting into her car, she had a kind of straw booster seat on the driver’s side; I guess it was the only way she could see over the steering wheel. I had just about sat down when I hit my head on the inside of the roof, and I had to wiggle myself back out and move that booster seat into the back. Edith looked over and laughed.

“I guess you’re just a little bit bigger than me,” she said.

“Yeah, well, getting a little wider every year, too,” I said.

On the way to the hairdresser’s, Edith and I started talking about how much we liked Ballard. It still says Seattle on the map, but Ballard’s always been a world unto itself. It used to be more of an industrial enclave, although one with a real neighborhood feel; the industry and the residents fit together like a hand and a soft old glove. It had become kind of seedy and run-down over the last couple of years, but it still had the feeling of a community of people who cared about one another. The old Ballard crowd seemed to have known one another for a million years, Edith included. And run-down though the neighborhood might be, they were pretty united against the yuppie paradise that they thought Ballard was becoming, now that the development had begun.

I guess I could see their point, in a way, although I had to admit that the development was helping put food on my table, so I couldn’t complain too much.

We drove under the ramp of the bridge that goes over the ship canal, which connects Puget Sound to Lake Washington. The bridge itself connects Ballard to Seattle proper, and it’s central to everything that happened. At some point, people started realizing what a great place this would be to live – right on the water and, thanks to that bridge, such an easy commute to downtown. Only the folks who already lived here didn’t see it that way. They saw this all as an invasion. Edith and I were driving past a few of the new condos that were going up, the ones that all the Old Ballard folks were all upset about.

For a while, the condos were popping up like popcorn. At one point, in fact, they put a moratorium on residential construction and set aside five thousand acres for industrial use, because all of the industry was getting pushed out and everybody was up in arms about losing the heart and soul of Old Ballard. Most of the condos that had gone up so far were actually a little ways to the south, and I was surprised, at first, that the developers were putting up a shopping mall here on Edith’s block, because I didn’t think there were enough people to warrant it. But when I heard about all the new condos that were planned, the project seemed more like a no-brainer.

On the opposite side of the canal was the spot where they park the boats for the TV show Deadliest Catch. You couldn’t quite see it from where we were driving, but I’d passed it earlier and seen a tour group forming on the dock. I mentioned it to Edith, and commented on how much Ballard had changed since the last time I’d been here, which had been a while ago. I’d come down to go to the locks and walk around, and there was a construction supply place I used to go to every once in a while. We were just down the road from that place now. I asked Edith if all of the change that was coming to Ballard bothered her the way it did some people.

“No, it doesn’t really matter,” Edith said. “Change is change. You know, that building you’re going to build, twenty years from now they’ll tear that down, too. They tore down the Kingdome, just twenty-five years after they built it, you know. They still owed twenty million dollars on it. That’s just progress, Barry. That’s just how things go.”

“Well, that’s pretty philosophical of you, Edith,” I said.

“Not philosophical at all,” she said. “Realistic. World of difference between the two. Things are what they are.”

I wondered what it was in her life that made her so accepting of change, and at the same time so stubborn about it when she wanted to be.

As we drove, I mentioned that I heard they were thinking of tearing down the Denny’s that had been a fixture in the town since the sixties. I’d been driving past that Denny’s every morning on my way to work.

“Well, the plans are all messed up,” Edith said. “Some folks are trying to get historical status for it. You know those big, sweeping beams it has in the front? Some famous architect from Seattle designed it.”

“Can’t believe they’re going to take it down,” I said.

“I don’t know why everyone was so up in arms,” Edith said. “Historical status for a Denny’s? It’s ridiculous. Change is change,” she said again. “It happens. You need to learn to live with it.”

Maybe so. But as we turned right up toward Market Street – the first time I’d been over there since before we started the project – I was kind of shocked at how different it was. Not the buildings themselves, but the businesses in them. I could almost see what all the fuss was about. We passed a fancy tea shop, a place that sold high-end stereo equipment, and some very nicely dressed folks wearing expensive sunglasses were drinking coffee outside the India Bistro. Dads and kids with bicycles that had shock absorbers in the front were riding past Shakti Vinyasa Yoga across the street.

“It sure is different,” I said. “I still like it, though. I’ve always liked how everything’s so close together in Ballard.”

“You can get from anywhere to anywhere in about five minutes,” she said, and as if to prove it, she added, “Here we are.”

It had, indeed, taken all of five minutes to get from Edith’s out-of-the-way house to the hair salon in the middle of Market Street.

Everybody in the salon knew Edith, and she seemed to know everybody. She greeted each of them by name. If anyone seemed surprised to see Edith with an escort, they didn’t say, and she didn’t offer any explanation. She just asked them how long they thought she’d be there, and they told her about forty minutes. She asked me where I was going to go.

“Well, everything’s about four minutes from here, Edith, so wherever I am, you all give me a call when you’re five minutes from being done and I’ll be here.” I handed my card to the woman who ran the shop.

“Well, all right then,” Edith said, and tilted her head to regard me with a clear, direct look. “Thank you, Barry.”

It was a little early for lunch, but as long as I was on Market Street, I figured I’d continue down to the Totem House. That’s one of the places that had been there a long time. It has a big, corny totem pole out front, and they sell a great seafood chowder. I picked up an order, and decided to drive down toward the beachfront.

A train was passing over the railroad trestle about a quarter-mile down the road. Just beyond that were the locks; by the flow of the water, it looked to me like they had just been opened. It’s kind of amazing, when you think about it – down here, just west of downtown, is salt water. It’s actually the other end of the canal from Edith’s house, just five minutes away, and that’s fresh water. The locks are what connects them. If they just opened the locks, I figured, a boat should be showing up here pretty quick. I like the locks – they have a viewing window down there, and when the salmon are running you can go in and watch them.

I drove past the marina, past the hundreds and hundreds of sailboats – that’s one thing about Ballard that hasn’t changed: They do love their boats. Just beyond the marina, there were a good hundred people sitting on benches and lying on blankets all over the beach. Nobody was in bathing suits, because it was still too cold, and besides, the water’s about 54 degrees that early in the season, but a beach day is a beach day and everybody was out there with picnic lunches, only no bathing suits. Shirts and pants and beach balls. Kind of a funny scene.

It was just a few minutes after I got back to the trailer that my cell phone rang. Edith was ready to go home, so I jumped back in her car. She was waiting for me at the door of the salon; as I helped her back into the car, I got a big whiff of hairspray, one of those things that just transports you into another time, another era. I guess my mom must have used that kind of hairspray, or something, when I was a kid. It occurred to me that with everything else going on that morning, I hadn’t really taken a moment to consider that here’s this woman, well into her eighties, living a pretty solitary existence, and still going to the trouble of getting her hair done on a regular basis. It says something about her, and about her generation, I guess. For some reason I remembered those pictures you see of men at baseball games, years ago, in shirts and ties and fedoras. There was something a little more proper and formal about the way they went around in the world; it seemed like a measure of respect for each other, and for themselves, I guess, that’s kinda been lost as time goes by.

When we got back to the house, I walked her to the front door. I still had never been inside the house, and I was kind of curious about how she lived in there, all alone all these years, but I wasn’t going to find out this day.

She turned and smiled. “Thank you again, Barry. That was very neighborly of you.”

“Not a problem. Let me know if you need anything else. Say, Edith?”

“Yes, Barry?”

“Your hair looks real nice.”

Over the course of the next few weeks, I had more visits with Edith, always in the front yard. But one morning, she wasn’t out where I expected to find her, so I knocked on her door, and she called from the kitchen for me to come in.

I will never forget that moment I stepped inside. Never. The first thing I saw was the end table. It was the table from my childhood. It was that classic fifties style – a plastic-laminate end table, dyed light tan to look like wood, small and rectangular, with a second shelf, half the size of the lower table, raised above it on two thin wooden side slats. On the higher shelf sat a lamp, and when I saw it I about fainted right then and there. Not only was the table the same, but this was the same exact lamp my family had when I was a kid as well. Same color and everything. It had a pink ceramic base shaped like an inverted vase, with little gold rods protruding from its top, and little gold metal balls on the ends of them. It was topped off with a wide translucent yellow paper shade, rimmed with a spiral metal edging and decorated with little brown palm fronds.

Looking at that table and lamp, this whooshing sensation came over me, like I was being transported back in time. And I was, really. For a second there, I was a kid again, walking into my mother’s house, half expecting to get offered a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or get hollered at for not wiping my feet.

When I got my bearings back, I took a moment to look around. I couldn’t believe how much stuff there was – all the books and records and CDs and figurines and photos – but still how very neat and tidy it all looked. Everything in its place.

The sun glinted off a metallic etching that was hanging on the wall. There were four of them, not quite gold, not quite silver; all street scenes from Venice. I wondered what the story was behind those.

When Edith came back into the room, I asked her about the etchings, but all she said was, “It’s an interesting story. I’ll have to tell you about it sometime.” A very polite way, I guess, of saying “None of your business.” So we moved on to other topics. She told me her friend Gail had stopped by earlier that day. Turns out Gail was just a kid growing up on the block when Edith first met her. In fact, Edith used to babysit for Gail and her sisters a lot. Gail had gone off to Alaska for a long time but came back a few years ago and now stopped by every now and then, and brought pictures of her and her sisters, all grown up now, and all of their children, all grown up as well.

It was nice to hear that her friend was still coming by after all these years, and, frankly, that Edith had some company besides me.

When I got back to the trailer I was surprised to see how late it had gotten. I’d wasted a good part of the morning with Edith, yakking about everything and nothing. I was finding it easier and easier to talk with her. Driving home that night, I thought about why that might be. What was it that was drawing me to her? You know how your kids spend an overnight at someone’s house, and they come home, and the parents tell you how well-behaved and polite and helpful your kids were, and you think, “Are you talking about my kids?” There’s something about kids, I guess, after a certain age, that they can relate to other people better than they can to their own parents. Maybe you’re too close, or maybe it’s their need to rebel, or something. Well, it never occurred to me that the same thing could still happen to you when you’re all grown up. Somehow, I was already finding it easier to have conversations with Edith than I ever had with my own mom or dad. I guess there were two reasons for that. For one thing, I felt like Edith didn’t take things personally the way my own folks would. I guess that’s just natural. Same with my own kids – no matter what they tell you, you can’t help flashing back on things you’ve done and wondering if whatever problems they have are your fault in some way. But it was more than that. I also started realizing how much alike we were. Edith didn’t sugarcoat things. She told you right out what she felt. I’m not so different. I see things pretty much in black and white. If something’s not right, it’s wrong. People can do what they should do, or they can not do it, but there usually isn’t much question about what the right thing is. I felt really connected to Edith because, it seemed, she felt the same way. A little later, she would tell me stories of how she took in all these war orphans in England, and when I heard them I thought, What makes a person do something like that? But for her, it was simple: You do what has to be done.

I think I’m a lot like that. I hope I am, anyway. You do what needs to be done and you don’t worry much about why or how you feel about it. You just do it. I think that’s why it was so easy for us to talk. We shared something deep and true: an assumption about how you live your life.

Of course, it wasn’t always easy to talk to Edith. One afternoon I saw these two guys coming down the street. They were quite a sight – both of them in their sixties, but still trying to be hip. Or some circa-1970 version of hip. One of them had a jacket and slacks and tie that looked like they came from three different secondhand stores. The other had gray hair and little round John Lennon glasses, like a refugee from a Woodstock reunion. To top it all off they were struggling along with a big hulking old video camera, and I guess they were going to interview Edith. Or thought they were, anyway. I figured it was about the same thing everybody always wanted to talk to her about – how she was standing up to the horrible developers and all that guff – but when I introduced myself to them and asked them what they were up to, I was surprised by the answer.

“Well, you know she used to be a spy,” the guy with the glasses said, as matter-of-factly as if they said she used to be a telephone operator.

“Well, no, I didn’t know that,” I said. “Did she tell you that?”

“She sure did, man,” he said. “And we have confirmed it through independent research.”

Now, to be honest, these guys didn’t seem to me like they had both oars in the water, so I didn’t put much credence in what they were telling me. I left them to their business and went about mine. Later that afternoon, when I went over to chat with Edith in her front yard – I don’t know if she’d ever talked to the guys or not, but they were gone now – I came right out and asked her about it.

And she came right out and told me to go to hell.

“Mind your own business!” she said. She was pulling some weeds and didn’t even bother to look up. “Why the hell people dwell in the past is beyond me.”

I thought, well, okay, I guess we won’t go there today.

I was still thinking about Edith when I drove up to see my parents that weekend. I usually go up every couple of weeks. It’s a pretty nice drive, once you get over the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which is about halfway to their house. After that the roads get smooth and winding, following a serpentine route along the Hood Canal. You can see the canal and the Olympic Mountains behind them, and I don’t think I’ve ever taken the drive without stopping to take a picture, of the fog rising up, or snow on the high peaks, or the clouds piling up and rolling over the mountains. Or the beaches, all covered with sun-bleached oyster shells. Every time it’s a different view.

The traffic was light, so I pulled up to their place in a little over two hours. Their house is in the woods, on the thirteenth green of the Alderbrook golf course. Not a lot of manicured lawns up around there – there’s too much rain. The biggest crop up here is moss.

I’m not sure if being with Edith made me want to see them more. When you spend time with someone who’s a good fifteen years older than your parents, you start imagining them getting old, and I guess you start feeling guilty for not spending more time with them. Maybe it was that, or maybe it was the way my dad had been changing recently that made me feel like I really wanted to go see them more often. Mom and Dad both used to golf a lot, but lately Dad was going less and less. There were other changes as well: he had given up bridge altogether, for example. He’d make excuses about why he was quitting that stuff; they didn’t ring true, but you didn’t want to press him. I mean, if he doesn’t want to talk about it then he doesn’t want to talk about it – but you’d still walk away feeling kind of puzzled and confused.

It probably wasn’t the best day to spend together. My dad and mom were bickering all day – or to be honest, my dad was doing most of the bickering. I don’t know why, but he was picking on my mom over the strangest little things, like the milk wasn’t where it was supposed to be in the refrigerator. Or she’d left the clean laundry in the laundry basket instead of putting it away.

Late that afternoon we sat down in the family room, and I looked out the sliding windows at the thirteenth green. It was vacant right at the moment. Dad stretched back in his leather recliner and started telling me a story about the time he was eighteen and went on a NOAA ship to Alaska, to map the bottom of the ocean, at about the time a volcano was erupting there. Only, he couldn’t think of the word volcano. Suddenly, he started acting angry at me: “Randy, what do you call that thing, for chrissakes?”

I don’t know what freaked me out more: the fact that he was cursing (because he never cursed), the fact that he called me by my brother’s name instead of my own, or the fact that he couldn’t think of a simple word. It was scary, but I just let it go. “A volcano, Dad,” I said. “Right. A volcano,” he responded. “Well, you can imagine how excited I was. Eighteen years old and headed for Alaska! What an adventure.”

As I listened to him spin the tale, my mother came in with a couple of cold glasses of water. As she bent over to put one on the little table next to Dad’s chair, she paused, for just a second, and gave me a look, as though she was trying to tell me something. When I drove home that night, I remembered that look. I wondered what she was worrying about, and whether it was the same thing I was worrying about, too.

Lately, I’d been kind of impatient with my dad. I was just miffed at him. I couldn’t put my finger on why exactly, but as I’d started the project in Ballard, I’d been getting more and more calls from my mom about him. Little things, mostly – the things couples argue about when they’ve been together, like my parents had, for more than fifty years – but it seemed like in the last few months there’d been more arguments than usual, and they’d gotten a little more serious. She noticed that he was flying off the handle more, over nothing, like I’d noticed when I’d been at their house. I’d tell him a story, and he’d mention it a little later, and my mom would correct him because he’d get the story mixed up, and out of nowhere he’d start yelling at her. It would just last a second, and normally you wouldn’t think anything of it, but it was a little different from the way he usually was. My dad was the kind of guy who was always in control of everything.

I wouldn’t show him that I was miffed, of course. I was raised to respect my elders, and that carried through to when I was an adult. I always did what he told me. I didn’t always like it, but I didn’t talk back. It’s just the way we were raised. So even if I was getting pissed off now and again, I didn’t say anything to him about it.

I don’t think any of us is prepared for our parents to start to decline. I know I sure wasn’t. It’s denial, I guess. It’s not that I didn’t know what was happening to my dad. It was that I didn’t want to know.

It was about six weeks after I took Edith to her first hair appointment that she asked me to take her again. I went over early that afternoon, and from the moment she entered the living room, I could tell that she was loaded for bear.

“I just want you to know I didn’t appreciate that call this morning,” she said, her voice full of venom. “You boys just keep hounding me to move, don’t you? Well, I’m not moving, so you might as well stop bothering. Save your breath!”

I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Your friend over there at the company,” she said. She was bundled up in a big brown sweater, and in her anger she seemed more hunched over than usual, like she was a snake all coiled up and ready to spring. “He tried to sound all polite. But I know what he’s up to. I know what you’re all up to. Forget it! I’m not moving. Why should I!”

Now, I’d been nothing but a perfect gentleman to Edith since I met her, but for the first time, I started to get angry. I know a lot of people saw Edith as a symbol of someone standing up for what’s pure and true, or something like that. But that’s not my battle, I thought. Don’t make me the bad guy.

I’d been polite, and helped her out, and was taking her to her hair appointments and whatnot, and now I felt a little – betrayed, I guess.

“Listen up,” I said. I was kind of surprised at how loud my voice was, but you know how it is: once you’re on a roll, it’s hard to stop. “None of this makes any difference to me. I work by the hour. If you stay or if you go, there’s no benefit to me one way or the other. The job is the same number of hours either way. I build to the property line all the way around, no matter what that property line is. So don’t put me in that.”

I felt bad as soon as I let all that out. I mean, what am I doing, going off on some eighty-four-year-old woman? But Edith seemed almost relaxed by what I’d said. She moved forward, from the shadows in the corner, into the beam of light, flecked with dust, that streamed through the window. “All right then,” she said. “Well, I apologize for that. I understand your position. I suppose we should get going now, shall we?” She seemed very calm. I guess she was trying to figure out just how far she could push me, and now that she knew where that line was, she could work from there. It was like we were both pushing right up to the property line. We just had to know what the boundaries were.

We went out to the car, and started up past the bridge. The sun was reflecting off the canal, and I put down the visor. A few fishermen passed in front of us at the stop sign near the Salmon Bay Café. That café’s been there a long time but seemed a lot busier than I remembered it. There was a little traffic jam of people getting into the parking lot for lunch.

I felt like Edith and I had crossed a certain barrier that morning. By letting out our anger over the subject, we made it a little easier to talk about. So as I swung the car onto Market Street, I broached the subject again.

“Now, you know that I don’t care one way or the other if you move, right?”

“Yes, I understand that,” she said.

“Well, then, can I ask you a question?”

“Sure, sure,” she responded.

“Why don’t you want to move?”

She looked out the window.

“Why should I move?” she said, that crotchety tone creeping back into her voice. “Where on Earth would I go? I don’t have any family. There isn’t anywhere for me. This is my home.”

“So it’s not what people think, is it?”

She turned toward me. “It’s never what people think.”

I figured that was the end of it. But later that morning, after I brought her back from the hairdresser’s, she opened up to me one more time.

I’d walked her back into the house just to make sure she’d gotten settled okay, reached down to turn on the lamp on the little side table, and was getting ready to go back to work. Edith was sitting on the couch and looked up at me. She seemed smaller, somehow; curled up quietly on the couch, not hunched or coiled like before.

“Barry, I want to tell you something,” she said, her voice cracking a little bit.

I just turned, and was silent.

“My mother died right here, right on this couch,” she said. The tears were starting to form again. “I came back to America to take care of my mother, and she always said she wanted to die at home, not in some – facility – and she made me promise, and I promised her. She died right here, Barry. And this is where I want to die. Right in my own home, on this couch. I’m not asking you to promise me, but I want you to know. Everybody wants me to move, and they all think it’s best for me. But I know what I need. I need to be right here. This is my home. I want to live here and I want to die here. Do you understand?”

I looked down at this woman in the soft light filtering in through the thin curtains. She seemed so frail and so strong, at the same time. So vulnerable and so impenetrable. So needy, and yet so fiercely independent. I was moved by what she’d told me, and felt strangely protective of her. It was such a simple request, and it seemed so wrong that she should have to even fight for it. Even a Death Row prisoner gets to choose his last meal.

“I think I understand,” I said. “Thanks for telling me that.”

“Well, thank you for listening.” She looked down, then back up at me. “Thank you for everything, Barry. You know what you are? You are a true human being.”

I didn’t know exactly what she meant by that, but I figured it was a good thing.

“Thanks, Edith. See you tomorrow.”

“Yes. I’ll see you tomorrow. Tell your wife I said hello. I’d love to meet her sometime.”

And that was that. I felt, again, like we’d crossed some kind of border, into some new territory. It felt a little frightening and intriguing all at the same time, but more than that, it felt like we had become closer, part of each other’s life in a way we hadn’t been just a few minutes before.

I closed her door quietly and headed back to the construction trailer, trying to clear my mind, to focus on the tasks at hand. Feeling a little guilty for taking so much time off work that morning, but feeling pretty okay about it at the same time, for all that had occurred.