Summer/Fall 2016

 

by Timothy Dodd

 

 

I didn’t mind Mother’s weekend palm readings in Shepherdstown too much—it was the talking to plants that always embarrassed me. “Well, hello! You’re enjoying this beautiful sunny day, aren’t you?” The sticky-sweet chat to her peace lilies is still saccharine-stuck in my mind.

“Just find one, Amy. Just one. One man worth appreciating,” she would say. “One that rests comfortably in your hand, stretches all the way across it, from one end of life to the other.” Then she’d hold out her palm to demonstrate, walk two fingers across it like I was six years old instead of twenty-four.

I see her now as I turn the lock and push open the door to an empty apartment. I see the City Paper folded neatly under her arm so the sex-call ads peep out, a stranger’s hot nipple nibbling at her elbow from the backend pages of a city.

It’s the cheapest apartment I could find in Keyser on such quick notice. I hear her say, “Why would anyone waste money on renting?”

I hear Gordon, too, her third husband, and see him in his blue blazer. “Would you rent a child? How about a bed? Your dog? No? Then why would you rent your home?”

I turn on the living room light. I don’t remember the brown carpet and its browner splotches from yesterday. Or the door to the cabinet under the kitchen sink removed and propped up against the wall, the scrambling silverfish and confident cockroaches and pill bugs, the damp, the dump. I just didn’t notice.

But I’m in, so I’m out. Mike can go to hell and his hopeless self-help seminars.

I roll up the blinds in the living room for a view of the slumbering cemetery, its tombstones the little discolored teeth of a corpse. There are worse things. Does the mood of a grave depend on the angle of light? Each morning when I go out to the car I’ll reach over the short fence to rub my palm over the dry chunks of granite, run my finger tips through crevices that spell out the names of Harper, Lee, and Sanford. So what? Right now the idea makes me crave a strawberry.

The cable technician pulls up five minutes after me, right at the outset of his four-hour appointment window. Through the screen door I watch the young man gathering tools from his vehicle. Under a crooked cap his eyes are bright. His mouth is set in a subtle smile that tells me he’s the talkative type. I let him in anyway.

With the usual muddy boots and name-tagged shirt he takes a look at the wiring and says things should be straightforward.

“Right?”

“Sure.”

“Just moving in here?”

“Yeah.”

“First month is free, you know. Trial run for new subscribers.”

“I know.”

“We haven’t serviced this place in five years. Who’s been living here?”

“Don’t know anything about that,” I answer. I just know I might need those television voices to keep me company over the next thirty days.

“You don’t mind living next to the cemetery?”

“No, I don’t. It doesn’t bite.”

“Well it might.”

“Anything might.”

“This place better than where you were before?”

“Yeah. Better than bedbugs.”

The man with the name of Ken patched on his shirt stops clicking his staple gun and looks up. I wonder what dirt is floating around in his inquisitive, brown eyes.

“At your old place?”

“Yeah.”

He looks more closely at my bare arms. Hematophagous scabs, he probably thinks. Kind of right. “Worse than chiggers I hear,” he says.

“Yeah.”

But cimex lectularius isn’t the real reason I moved. Unless you consider him a bedbug. That works. Yeah, the “sucking your blood” connection is easy. But there’s also the crawling on you in the middle of the night for nothing more than a lascivious meal and then hiding in tiny crevices where he can’t be seen the rest of the day. Then the scratching—they work mostly on appendages, but for him I have to scratch my head or between my legs. And it’s impossible to get rid of either of them. You have to move out, and still there’s no guarantee they won’t follow.

“I guess once your family gets moved in things won’t be so bad. Get your furniture and a few plants in here. Pets if you got any.”

I don’t answer. I turn my head and look through the window at the cemetery instead, ignoring whatever else he’s got to say.

My cell phone beeps. It’s Mom. I wait a minute, then listen to her message.

“I haven’t heard from you in a week,” she begins.

I cut it short, stash the phone back in my pocket, and walk closer to the window to look outside again at the death markers lined up like dominoes. People pay a lot to be put there. Pay more than just money.

“All done. You’re all set,” he says ten minutes later, turning on the television to make sure it functions. “Ah, it’s Bounce. Good flick.”

I think how I’ll lay a blanket down in a few hours on the spot where he is kneeling. But for now, once he’s gone, I think I’ll stare some more out the window. Maybe a tick-less doe will wind up its legs and skip across the grass-covered skeletons. Sure, gone in a moment. But not. Me climbing on its back.

I don’t mind the cemetery. The little tombs are polished rocks chiseled from mighty mountains of another place and time, and the tiny letters scribbled on them mean nothing to me.

 

[Check out Timothy’s backporch wisdom here]