Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (14 page)

“Do not even tell me,” she said.

“I’m at Caesar’s,” he said. “As in the Palace. You ought to get a kick out of this,” he said, pausing for great effect. “We got married!”

“You did not, Dad,” my mom said. She lifted her chin when she said this, like someone trying to get more air, another breath. Someone drowning. Someone being hanged. “Tell me you did not.”

“So I can tell you’re upset. That’s fine. But I need you to take care of my cat. Just make sure she gets a whole can of that Fancy Feast in the morning and then again at night. On a clean plate too, or she won’t have anything to do with it.”

“Tell me, Dad!” She was screaming now. It would soon be full dark in the yard and in the house. There was no moon. There were no crickets.

My mom called me as soon as she hung up on Grandpa. I was at work, and it was one
A.M.
by the time I got the message. “Call me back no matter what time you get home.” It was her worse-than-usual voice, and considering what the usual had been, I knew this was going to be something.

We had only one swig of gin left in our apartment. Jenae heard the message and poured me the drink. I rolled a cigarette and sat on our front porch and left the light off.

“Well,” Mom said, “he did it. He got married.”

“To who?” I asked. That I had to ask that question was as amazing as the fact that I had to ask at all.

“Tonya,” she said. Her name was like spit she couldn’t get off her tongue. My mom was loaded at two
A.M.
, Central Standard Time, even though she had to be up in four hours to walk Fairway, her morbidly obese cocker spaniel, and then go to work all day.

“I probably shouldn’t have called,” she said. Ever the Lutheran, my mom.

She told me the story. It took an hour and a half.

There was no comfort. There was no resolution. There was only the numbness and silence that the small hours of the morning held, still as a streetlight on pavement.

Once, my grandpa and I were in a terminal at Logan Airport in Boston. We were sitting on bench outside a
Cheers
-themed bar
.
I thought it was funny that they’d put a bar where everyone was supposed to know your name in a place where no one did. He was waiting for a flight back to his home in Illinois, I had just graduated from college, and the two of us had gone to Boston together to find an apartment for me.

He chose this time to tell me about his father, Charles F. Tucker. He did not go into detail. As quickly as he could, while we sat in the terminal as two strangers bound for separate destinations, he told me his father’s story.

“He was a whoremonger,” he said. I didn’t know what that meant exactly, but I had a pretty good idea. “He was also an insurance salesman turned fraud and therefore a felon. He died in prison when I was at IU. He never met your grandmother.” Grandpa took off his glasses as though to see if he still needed them and then put them back on. “And he was short. And his handshake was too strong.”

That was it. This was my lineage.

Apparently Tonya had not connived to get Grandpa to go to Las Vegas without help. She had called him at one in the morning on Sunday to see if she could come over. He said sure. When she arrived, she had brought her twenty-four-year-old daughter, Daphne, and her daughter’s friend. “Some Mexican,” as my mom describes her. Together they got crocked and cajoled Grandpa into boarding a plane.

Grandpa bought them all tickets, paid for the room at Caesar’s, and took them to a bar, where they drank and danced until four in the morning.

“All that fast dancing,” he told my mom, “Lord God, it about did me in. I fell down three times on the way back to the room.”

They were going to get married the next day, but he had called my mom that night and told her they were already married. For fun, presumably.

Grandpa told her how they went to the jewelry store in the hotel, but he shied away from Caesar’s prices. They then went to a pawn shop where my grandpa bought Tonya a three-thousand-dollar ring, as well as some bangles and chains for her daughter, whose birthday was coming up.

“I know what you think of me, Patti,” Grandpa said, “but I’m not a complete moron. I told her we had to sign a prenuptial deal. Well,” he said, really enjoying the torture he was putting my mom through, “Tonya, Daphne, and her Mexican friend—all of them were stomping mad.”

They soon acquiesced and made their way to the courthouse, since none of them had much use for churches or chapels. The last time Tonya or my grandpa had been in a church was for Gram’s funeral.

“Daphne and the Mexican went back to Hogs and Heifers on the Strip,” Grandpa said, “while Tonya and I waited in line at the courthouse. Tonya said she had to go to the bathroom, so I stayed in line, and it was moving along and I was getting worried and finally realized when I got to the clerk by myself that she wasn’t coming back.”

My mom was careful with the details, as though getting them wrong would allow it all to happen again—as though getting it right was its own kind of exorcism.

“She was back at that Hogs and Heifers,” Grandpa said, “bunch of women’s underthings stapled behind the bar. And ‘I’m sorry,’ Tonya tells me. She won’t even look me in the eye. ‘I love you but I can’t marry you.’”

My grandfather was hung over. His hip ached from the previous night’s falls. His knees felt brittle from all the fast dancing. He felt old. He had nothing to say except why.

“You know what she said then?” Grandpa said. “She said, ‘I can’t marry you because of my morals.’”

“What the hell did that mean?” my mom said. “Jesus Christ. Her morals.”

The next day, my mom went to his condo and took down all the pictures of Gram. The day after that, she put them back up. The following day, none of us talked to the other.

We prayed it was over. Humiliation enough.

My mom asked Grandpa if he was coming over for dinner on Friday. The day after they returned. He said sure, that he’d love to. My mom thought it was all in the past.

But then on Friday he was late arriving and clearly addled by something more than gin.

“I’ll have to leave a little early,” Grandpa announced before he had taken off his coat. “Daphne, Tonya’s daughter, wants to go dancing again. She says I’ve really got the moves.”

“I am going to kill her,” my mom told me after Grandpa left. “At the very least,” she said, “I’m going to call her up and really let her have it. I’ll tell her that the authorities have been contacted and that we have a lawyer. Oh, I’ll give her a good piece of my mind.”

“Yeah,” I said. I waited for the rest of my words to rush into the pause, but they didn’t come.

“And he’s got his appointment tomorrow with the doctor,” she said. “My God. What’ll he think?”

I was afraid I knew. He’d probably think it was hilarious.

“I wish you’d write him a letter,” she said, softening. “You’ll know just what to say, Matthew. You’re so good with . . . words.”

But I wasn’t. I didn’t have a thing to say to him or anybody else. All of this was so soon after my mom’s own cancer scare and, of course, my grandmother’s death. In another lifetime, I’d be able to see the sad humor, the tragicomedy of it all. That he’d spent his life married to a woman he loved poorly, one who wisely didn’t accept his first offer, only to propose now to someone he barely knew, who would not take his hand either.

The next day, we waited for the results from his doctor. We knew it had to be bad news. We did not know how bad. We waited to hear, but we knew he might not tell us the truth. It was his truth, after all. But still, beyond it all, he’s my grandfather. My grandpa. Gramps.

It seemed like only yesterday when they lived in their house on a bluff above the river, just off Route 9, in Mackinaw, Illinois. The light bursting from the west-facing picture window, my grandfather settled in his wing chair, his gray hair ablaze in the sunset. Deeper inside, my grandmother next to him in her low-backed recliner, the one Grandpa called her “boudoir chair,” to which she’d say, “You’d know.” Between them always a bowl of mixed nuts, golf magazines, an empty pewter ashtray, a mason jar of nail files, clippers, cuticle sticks, and dental floss. On a lamp stand next to my grandmother, a red plastic cup of oyster crackers. A crystal rocks glass of Scotch in her hand, glowing like amber.

A hundred feet below the bluff, the Mackinaw River dragging past. In between the treetops below, a canoe slides by. The smells shift with pending darkness. Citronella, scorched soil, fertilizer. Homegrown tomatoes. Fresh cut grass.

We have finished our game of golf. “Better to cheat than lose,” Gram whispered, kicking my ball out from behind a shrub. Back at the house, golf is on the television but the sound is off. We are hot and unpleasant. It is high time to have another cocktail and be still and wait for the sun to set and take the yellowjackets and the mud daubers with it.

At dusk, Gram stands and flips on the track lights above with her wooden spoon. Raised a Hoosier and a Methodist, she believes in busy hands, so everything is made on the stovetop, and soon the air is jeweled with popping lard. I wipe the grease off the cookie tin so I can steal one more pecan sandy before dinner.

And then it is almost dark and the table is set and there is food on it and we eat. She has split a banana lengthwise, spread on mayonnaise, sprinkled it with Spanish peanuts, and set it on a bed of butter lettuce. This is our salad. The rest is fried chicken. Everything is as it should be.

We are all exhausted, but my mother talks, says, “Well, that
was
some kind of drive you hit back on eleven, Dad,” and “You know, Matthew, if you’d only listen to Grandpa—slow, slow,
swing!—
I promise,” and “Oh, Mom, this chicken!”

And then we are finished, and while it seems the birds of evening are begging me to shoot them, my grandfather is firm. “It is a man’s job,” he says, “to wash and dry the dishes.” So he washes and I dry, and he tells me the story of how he was a hasty dishwasher in his college fraternity and a waiter once presented him with a dish he had just cleaned that still contained a scoop of ice cream.

And then it is dark in earnest, so we have after-dinner drinks—the same as the before-dinner drinks—and listen to the news—and then have a nightcap—and then watch the Letterman show, because we may be in Illinois, but all midwesterners are really from Indiana. My grandfather and mother are snoring in their chairs, and my grandmother feeds me her Scotch-soaked ice cubes and her oyster crackers, and
The
Bridge on the River Kwai
is on TV, and though the sound is off, we can hear the soldiers whistling while they march, and I get her another Scotch and more oyster crackers, and a bowl of pralines and cream for myself, and in this manner we all will be forgiven.

But now. Now, I had to say
something.
I had to find just the right words. I’d get a good dictionary. Some heavy paper. A nice permanent ink. I’d write him a letter in fine, legible script. And I’d tell him. I’d ask him.

Dear Grandpa, it would say.

Love, Matt.

AFTER LAEARL LEAVES,
I am alone with the floor for a very long time. Stanley had nailed the Masonite in place with a twelvepenny nail every three inches or so. That’s fifteen nails per square foot. At 300 square feet per room, that’s almost 10,000 nails for the living and dining room alone. Each nail is three inches long, so I figure I pulled up about 30,000 inches—2,500 feet—of steel. That’s two Empire State Buildings stacked end on end.

Once I get the carpet out and the Masonite pulverized and then removed—which was itself a full day’s work—we find waiting what promises to be the life work of a latter-day alchemist, because it will be just as easy to bring that maple floor back to life as it will to spin straw into gold. We know it’s maple because Stanley had cut a sample out of the floor when he was putting in a new vent. The sample was a bright, glowing blond, textured with a gentle grain like a piece of driftwood smoothed down by sand and salt water. The wood beneath our feet, on the other hand, looks as if it had been worked over with feces and the remnants of a fast-food restaurant’s grease trap. Moreover, half of the floor in the living room is maple and half is cement covered with one-by-sixes, then topped with tarpaper on what must once have been the porch. And as if that isn’t bad enough, there’s a two-square-foot section where there might have been a fireplace or something—inexplicably, right in the middle of the room.

I suggest we create a little carpet nook where we can have a fluffy floor covering and big pillows and bean bags and such. The administration vetoes this straightaway. Having grown up during the home decorating depression of the seventies, Jenae wants her new house to avoid everything Nebraska celebrated: microwave ovens, wallpaper, decorative nooks, linoleum, wall-to-wall carpet. Our home is going to be bold and classy and it is goddamned going to have hardwood floors.

“Can’t you just, you know, like, weave the wood,” she says, “like this?” She spreads the fingers of each hand and laces her fingers together.

I explain what little I know about floors, namely that such a proposition would entail ripping up every floorboard on the end where it met the unfinished floor, removing or cutting back a sufficient length, sliding in new boards to fit, and then, finally, finishing the whole works with a sander and polyurethane and so forth.

“Not going to happen,” I say.

She curls her lip. For the record, she does not say “Whatever.”

“We could just carpet this one room,” I say. I feel that’s a totally reasonable proposition. “Think about it. We could have a super-nice hardwood floor in the dining room and some, I don’t know, casual elegance with a carpeted living room.”

“Why not skip the painting too and just put the wood veneer back up everywhere?”

She’s furious, and I can see discretion will have to reign here.

“Knotty pine then?”

No reaction.

It’s a huge impasse. Our very first and, as with any respectable roadblock, potentially our last. Jenae is as opposed to carpet as she is to polygamy. Growing up with two brothers, she saw, I’m sure, her share of rug burns, but what she is so excited about in the bedrooms she is diametrically opposed to elsewhere.