Chapter 7 - The Auction of Illusions
The moving truck arrived on the twenty-eighth of November—three days after a Thanksgiving that neither Christopher nor Diana had come downstairs to share.
It was not a professional moving van from a regional line. It was a fifteen-foot yellow rental truck with a dented rear roll-up door and a missing side mirror, driven by a friend of Christopher’s from his first job—a thin young man named Kevin who kept his eyes fixed on his sneakers whenever I passed through the hall.
For eight hours, they carried the debris of six years out through the front door.
The designer floor lamps with the brushed-nickel bases that Diana had bought on credit; the four sets of luggage that had traveled to Aruba twice while my oil burner was failing; the sixty-inch television that had dominated Arthur’s parlor; the espresso machine that required special Italian pods that cost two dollars apiece.
I sat on the front porch bench, wrapped in my heavy wool coat with Arthur’s plaid scarf tucked around my neck, watching the cargo disappear into the yellow truck.
The neighbors were watching too.
Mrs. Gable, who lived across the street and had known Arthur since grammar school, was sweeping her driveway with a broom that moved slower and slower until she was essentially standing still, leaning on the handle, her eyes tracking every cardboard box Kevin carried down the brick steps.
Diana did not look at Mrs. Gable. She wore her large sunglasses, though the sky was the color of a wet slate shingle, and a long wool coat that dragged near the wet gravel.
At three in the afternoon, Christopher came down the steps carrying the last box.
It was a small, heavy carton taped with gray duct tape. Through the torn corner, I saw the green cloth binding of Arthur’s nineteen sixty-eight edition of The History of the Civil War—the three-volume set that Arthur had read every winter by the living room radiator until the spines split.
Christopher reached the bottom of the steps, hesitated, and stopped.
Kevin had already climbed into the cab of the rental truck and started the engine. The tailpipe sputtered, sending a cloud of white condensation and sulfur into the cold air.
Christopher stood on the walkway, the box pressed against his ribs, his breath rising in small, irregular puffs.
“You’re keeping the house, then,” he said.
It was the first sentence he had spoken to me directly since Sunday morning in the kitchen.
“The house was never yours to leave, Christopher,” I said from the bench.
He looked up at the roof—at the chimney Arthur had repointed with gray mortar the year Christopher broke his collarbone, at the cedar shakes that had turned the silver-gray of old driftwood.
“We found an apartment,” he said.
“Where?”
“Phillipsburg. Near the toll bridge. It’s an old duplex behind the chemical plant. Three rooms.”
“It has a roof,” I said.
“Diana’s father isn't talking to us,” he went on, his voice flat, devoid of anger now, sounding like an old record that had been played with a dull needle. “He says I ruined his business credit by letting the township seize the haulers. Diana… she hasn't said three words to me since Tuesday. She sleeps on the other side of the bed with her back to me.”
I looked at him. His overcoat—the dark wool one he had bought with his first commission check—had a missing button on the left cuff. The thread hung down in a small, tangled loop.
I had five hundred dollars in my purse.
It was five hundred dollars from my savings account—five clean, crisp one-hundred-dollar bills that I had tucked into the zippered pocket before I came out to the porch. I had thought, during the long hours of the night, that I would hand it to him as he walked to the truck. I had told myself that thirty days of cold rice and bus tickets was enough of a lesson, that a mother who lets her son move into a duplex behind a chemical plant with nothing in his pockets was not a mother Arthur would recognize.
My fingers touched the brass zipper of the purse.
Then I looked at the box in his arms.
“Arthur’s books,” I said.
He blinked, looking down at the green cloth binding poking through the gray tape. “What?”
“Put them on the porch, Christopher.”
His jaw tightened. A faint, dying flare of that old petulance flickered in his eyes. “They’re Dad’s. He gave them to me when I was ten.”
“He gave them to you to read, Christopher,” I said quietly. “Not to pack into the back of a rental truck to make yourself feel like a gentleman while you live on someone else’s equity. Put them on the bench.”
We stood there for ten seconds, the diesel truck idling between us, the smell of sulfur and wet pine needles thick in the cold air.
Slowly, his shoulders dropping two inches, Christopher walked up the four brick steps.
He set the box down on the cedar bench beside my knee. The cardboard gave a soft, dry scrape against the wood.
“You’re a cold woman, Martha,” he said, using my Christian name for the first time in his life.
I looked up into his face—into the eyes that were Arthur’s, set into a skull that had forgotten what Arthur was.
“No, Christopher,” I said, and my hand remained still on the closed purse. “I am simply the only person in your life who loved you enough to tell you no before the judge did.”
May you like
He turned, walked down the steps without looking back, climbed into the passenger seat of the yellow truck, and slammed the door.
The truck ground its gears twice, lurched forward into Elmwood Avenue, and disappeared toward the highway, its rear roll-up door rattling over the frost-heaves until the sound died behind the hemlocks.
