Dangerous Women Part 2. Джордж Р. Р. Мартин

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СКАЧАТЬ had a lawn fetish. It was as groomed as Astroturf on a playfield, the gutters as clean as if vacuumed. She scowled to herself. Last night there had been dry leaves whispering as the wind blew, and there had definitely been a large, heavy rotten branch in the street. But the young apple trees in his planting strip were scarcely bigger around than a rake handle. Too small to have grown such a branch, let alone dropped one.

      Sarah went back in her house. She wept for a time, then made a cup of tea and felt relieved that she hadn’t called Alex about it. She catalogued the work she could do: laundry, deadheading the roses, taking in the last of the green tomatoes and making chutney of them. She went upstairs and took a nap.

      After three weeks the neighborhood quit gossiping about Linda. Her face still smiled from a “missing” poster at Safeway next to the pharmacy counter. Sarah ran into Maureen there, picking up pills for Hugh, and they got Starbucks and wondered what had become of Linda. They talked about the old days, soccer games and tux rentals for proms and the time Linda had hot-wired Hugh’s truck when no one could find the keys and Alex had needed stitches right away. They laughed a lot and wept a little, and worked their way back to the present. Maureen shared her news. Hugh was “holding his own” and Maureen said it as if being able to sit up in bed was all he really wanted to do. Maureen invited her to come pick the apples off their backyard tree. “I don’t have time to do anything with them, and there are more than we can eat. I hate to see them just fall and rot.”

      It had felt good to have coffee and a conversation, and it made Sarah realize how long it had been since she had socialized. She thought about it the next morning as she sorted the mail on her table. A power bill, a brochure on long-term-care insurance, an AARP paper, and two brochures from retirement homes. She set the bill to one side and stacked the rest to recycle with the morning paper. She found a basket and was just leaving to raid Maureen’s apple tree when Alex came in. He sat down at her table and she microwaved the leftover morning coffee for them.

      “I had to come into Tacoma for a seminar, so I thought I’d drop by. And I wanted to remind you that the second half of property taxes is due the end of this month. You pay it yet?”

      “No. But it’s on my desk.” That, at least, was true. It was on her desk. Somewhere.

      She saw him eying the retirement home brochures. “Junk mail,” she told him. “Ever since your dad signed us up for AARP, we get those things.”

      “Do you?” He looked abashed. “I thought it was because I asked them to send them. I thought maybe you’d look at them and then we could talk.”

      “About what? Recycling?” Her joke came out harder-edged than she had intended. Alex got his stubborn look. He would never eat broccoli—never. And he was going to have this conversation with her no matter what. She put a spoonful of sugar in her coffee and stirred it, resigned to an unpleasant half hour.

      “Mom, we have to face facts.” He folded his hands on the edge of the table. “Taxes are coming due; the second half of them is seven hundred bucks. House insurance comes due in November. And oil prices are going up, with winter heating bills ahead of us, and this place isn’t exactly energy efficient.” He spoke as if she were a bit stupid as well as old.

      “I’ll put on a sweater and move the little heater from room to room. Like I did last year. Zonal heating. Most efficient way to heat a home.” She sipped her coffee.

      He opened his hands on the table. “That’s fine. Until we start to get mold in the house from damp in the unheated basement. Mom, this is a three-bedroom, two-bath house, and you live in maybe four rooms of it. The only bathtub is upstairs and the laundry is in the basement. That’s a lot of stairs for you each day. The electrical box should have been replaced years ago. The refrigerator needs a new seal. The living room carpeting is fraying where it meets the tile.”

      All things she knew. She tried to make light of it. “And the bulb is burned out in the back porch light. Don’t forget that!”

      He narrowed his eyes at her. “When the beech tree dumps its leaves, we’ll need to rake them off the lawn and get them out of the rain gutters. And next year the house is going to need paint.”

      She folded her lips. True, all true. “I’ll cross those bridges as I come to them,” she said, instead of telling him to mind his own damn business.

      He leaned his elbows on the table and put his forehead in his hands. He didn’t look up at her as he said, “Mom, that just means you’ll call me when you can’t get the leaves into the lawn recycling bin. Or when the gutters are overflowing down the side of the house. You can’t maintain this place by yourself. I want to help you. But it always seems that you call me when I’m prepping a presentation or raking my own leaves.”

      She stared at Alex, stricken. “I … Don’t come, if you’re that busy! No one dies from clogged gutters or leaves on the lawn.” She felt ashamed, then angry. How dare he make himself a martyr to her needs? How dare he behave as if she were a burden? She’d asked if he had time to help her, not demanded that he come.

      “You’re my mom,” he said, as if that created some irrevocable duty that no one could erase. “What will people think if I let the house start falling apart around you? Besides, your house is your major asset. It has to be maintained. Or, if we can’t maintain it, we need to liquidate it and get you into something you can manage. A senior apartment. Or assisted living.”

      “Alex, I’ll have you know this is my home, not my ‘major—’”

      Alex held up a commanding hand. “Mom. Let me finish. I don’t have a lot of time today. So let me just say this. I’m not talking about a nursing home. I know how you hate visiting Uncle Richard. I’m talking about a place of your own with a lot of amenities, without the work of owning a home. This one, here?” He put his finger on a brochure, coaxed it out of the junk mail pile. “It’s in Olympia. On the water. They have their own little dock, and boats that residents can use. You can make friends and go fishing.”

      She put a stiff smile on her face and tried to make a joke of it. “I can’t rake leaves but you think I can row a boat?”

      “You don’t have to go fishing.” She had annoyed him, popping his dream of his mom in a happy little waterfront terrarium. “I’m just saying that you could, that this place has all sorts of amenities. A pool. An exercise studio. Daily shuttles to the grocery store. You could enjoy life again.”

      He was so earnest. “The bathroom has this safety feature. If you fall, you pull a cord and it connects you, 24-7, to help. There’s a dining hall so if you don’t feel like cooking that day, you don’t have to. There’s an activity center with a movie room. They schedule game nights and barbecues and—”

      “Sounds like summer camp for old farts,” she interrupted him.

      He was wordless for a moment. “I just want you to know the possibilities,” he said stiffly. “You don’t like this, fine. There are other places that are just apartments suited to older people. All the rooms on one level, grab bars in the bathrooms, halls wide enough for walkers. I just thought you might like something nicer.”

      “I have something nicer. My own home. And I couldn’t afford those places.”

      “If you sold this house—”

      “In this market? Ha!”

      “Or rented it out, then.”

      She glared at him.

      “It СКАЧАТЬ