The House at Royal Oak (6 page)

It is easy enough to see slanted floors as quaint when anyone who knows anything, I had yet to learn, will see a clear red flag indicating structural damage. It was easy to dismiss what Hugo called “small collapsed areas” in the floors as he tried to minimize the problem. Once you fall into the rhythm of minimizing problems, it's easy, and if both partners agree to it, it's a cinch. After a while, you don't even have to think about it. An off-balance radiator ready to topple over and rip pipes from the walls? No problem. Ditto crumbling plaster which, more knowledgeable buyers will know, always waits until after a sale to start seriously falling. Ditto the cinderlike particles filtering out of faucets, the flaking lead paint on windowsills and doors, and the icing on our catastrophe,
out in the utility shed, sinister gray dustings of asbestos. The home inspector had pointed out the asbestos to Hugo before the sale. Hugo didn't mention it to me until now because he didn't want me to worry.

The oil furnace, with long black pipes like giant spider legs, was another worry, but at least it worked. It had a
catchpan
for dripping oil. Now those are words you don't want to hear if you have an oil furnace because it isn't supposed to need one. The pan, which I noticed but didn't mention because Hugo already looked concerned, brimmed with black oil. But even if I had understood what I was seeing before the sale, it wouldn't have made a difference. By now we were so attached to the idea of a bed-and-breakfast in this house, in this village, at this time that I saw no resemblance between this shaky structure and us.

Subliminally, though, I felt it.

When the nausea and exhaustion of full-blown buyer's remorse set in, I decided we should drive back to our house on the Western Shore, where I had lived much of my life, get some rest, even though we hadn't done anything except sit at a table to sign papers, and come back in a week or so to start work. Hugo quickly agreed and we headed for home.

It was more my home than Hugo's because I'd stayed on there after my marriage collapsed so as not to disrupt the children's lives any more than necessary. Eventually Hugo joined in there and helped raise the children. For twenty years he quietly wished for a home of our own. This was it.

In less than a minute, Hugo swung the truck around into a K-turn and headed back to the future bed-and-breakfast.
Pulling into the driveway again, we remarked that the evicted tenants still seemed to be gone. We discussed what to do, maybe look around some more. I climbed down from the truck and saw in the grass at my feet a man's hiking boot and small plastic baby toys, a red car, a green tree, and a blue block. I picked them up.

It was an icy, mouse-colored February dusk. There were few signs of life except for smoke puffs from a chimney down the road and the sound of the wind, punctuated by the distant spit of gunfire. The only bright objects in sight were new padlocks on the doors and the brilliant orange “No Trespassing” signs.

As Hugo leaned against the kitchen door to hunt for the key, the screws holding the padlock popped out of the rotting doorframe. The door swung open.

Trash and moldy rugs stretched in every direction. At least the furnace was running and it was pleasantly warm. I lined up the baby toys on the mantle, reached in my pocket for a red ribbon saved from Christmas, and went outside. Breaking a bough from the magnolia tree, I tied it up with a bow but the wind untied it so I settled for a knot. On the front door I found a rusty nail and hung it there, red tails flapping in the wind. I tore down two “No Trespassing” signs and stood back to see if it looked like someone lived here. Maybe.

Hugo came outside carrying our sleeping bags, unopened. He thought he'd see if the inn had a room for the night. The former Pasadena, now called The Oaks, was a busy place in season and he hoped it might provide some start-up business
for us when they were fully booked. I never imagined being grateful for it so soon.

As we registered at the inn, I reminded Hugo as much as myself that we could not make a habit out of this even though the manager gave us a discount, clearly out of pity. You could see it in her eyes.

The idea of a warm, clean, comfortable bed for the night lifted my mood and I went back to the house to start cleaning. Upstairs I surveyed the filthy rooms and the radiators laced with cobwebs. I like radiators, with their gentle warmth, soothing hiss, and all-around handiness for warming up pajamas and snacks. My sister and I knew that on a cold night with the heat turned up, the marshmallows and chocolate for s'mores set on top of a radiator would melt in the time it took to change for bed.

Since we couldn't afford to replace these radiators, I got to work. As a child I learned how to clean radiators from my mother, who believed it built character. To do this, you take a long, narrow brush in one hand, the hose attachment of the vacuum cleaner in the other, hold your breath, and brush between the pipes while sucking up the dust. The second step is to wipe all the radiator's horizontal and vertical surfaces with disinfectant.

Character-building, maybe. A bigger benefit came from telling my own children about radiators and radiator cleaning in hopes of getting some help around the house.

Downstairs I heard Hugo ripping up carpeting.

“This really isn't so bad,” I called to him as we passed on the stairs or in the hall. “It will be fine,” he answered as he
lugged junk out of the house, everything from leftover food to old rugs, to a desiccated animal. He held it up by the tail.

“It's an r-a-t!”

“Not necessarily,” he said. “It
could
have been a squirrel. But even if it was an r-a-t, it's been dead a long time.”

“How long?” I was thinking about how much a second night at the inn would cost and if they might give a discount again.

“Come take a look at it.”

I stood in the doorway. “I can see fine from here. How long do you think it's been dead?”

“A very long time.”

Hugo usually knows when to change a subject. “Honey, look at the bright side. In six months, with a little carpentry, a little paint, we'll have this place up and ready to go. You can decorate, arrange flowers. There will be guests. Let's open champagne tonight.”

The next day my sister, in Washington on business, drove out to see for herself how much trouble Hugo and I had gotten into. She left the car engine running, came in, took a quick look around. In less than five minutes she was ready to leave. She's known for speaking her mind, so I didn't have to wonder what she really thought.

“I don't need to go upstairs,” she said. “I get the idea.”

I stood in the driveway and waved good-bye, thinking how much I would have given for a word of encouragement.

That night I fell asleep in a haze of self-pity. In the morning I woke up to the heart-stopping sound of gunfire.

Hugo lay motionless next to me in his sleeping bag. Are we being attacked? I whispered.

He turned over. “Why not relax where you are, stay away from the windows?” It was the ultracool voice he uses when something is really wrong. “I'll check it out.”

Getting up, he edged along the wall to the window and looked out.

The gunfire stopped at that instant, then started up louder than before.

“I guess the neighbors don't like us. They don't want any outsiders—come-heres, I think they say.”

“No, that's not it. They're firing away from the house, about fifty yards off. It just sounds close. That was a rifle, a twenty-two . . . Now they've moved on to a twelve-gauge shotgun.”

After another silence there was more shooting.

Now Hugo didn't sound calm. “That's a two-twenty-three.”

“What's that?” I zipped up my sleeping bag.

“It's what you'd use to take down a lion.”

Next he identified a forty-four magnum going off, and after that a semiautomatic forty-five.

“Jesus! Someone around here has a lot of firepower.”

A barrage started that sounded like the finale in a gangster flick. Hugo flattened his body against the wall and moved away from the window.

“What's
that?”

“That is an automatic assault weapon.”

I thought about the former tenants. “Drug dealers?”

“Who knows? Maybe we'll work inside today.”

It got very quiet. Hugo went downstairs to make coffee
and when the reassuring dark-roast aroma drifted up to the bedroom, I climbed out of my sleeping bag and went down. Sitting on the floor away from the windows, we drank coffee and planned the day's projects. When it had been quiet for half an hour, Hugo decided to go out and look around. He came back, saying he did not find any bullet holes or broken glass around the house. If it stayed quiet, he thought we could go outside later.

That afternoon when Scott Kilmon biked by, Hugo flagged him down. We stood in the driveway talking weather until Hugo got around to saying, the way males do when they need information but don't want to be caught asking for it, “Some gunfire this morning.”

Scott nodded. “Yep.”

“Trouble around here?”

“Probably not.”

“Well, that's good.”

Scott was playing the game. Humiliating himself, Hugo finally got out an actual question.

“You hear anything over at your place?”

“Heard a couple of rounds,” Scott said. Then he looked at Hugo.

“Probably the deputy sheriff. Lives a few doors up from you.”

“And?” I tried to help out.

“Sometimes on weekends he target shoots.”

Hugo had not fired a gun since high school, when he joined the rifle club out of a vague sense of self-preservation. Once his parents decided this was not an optimal educational
environment, he landed in a military boarding school where he also figured that being on the rifle team might be a safe bet for a new kid. Although he qualified as an expert marksman, he never liked guns and after high school his rifle stayed in the closet.

When Scott left, Hugo said he might get his gun cleaned.

This struck me as a bad idea. We were supposed to be creating a tranquil bed-and-breakfast experience for guests from the cities seeking rest and relaxation, I pointed out, not a rod and gun club. Hugo said nothing, which meant he was planning to ignore my advice.

THE NEXT WEEKEND, LOADED WITH OPTIMISM, HUGO
packed saws, lumber, sandpaper, and scrapers into the back of the truck and I added a dozen paint and fabric samples, a vase, and a clock. Time to stop dreaming, time to work.

Pushing open the unlocked side door of the future bed-and-breakfast, I sensed something wrong, though I couldn't immediately say what it was.

A wave of cold hit my face as I stepped inside. It was cold in the kitchen, in the sunny dining room, the parlor, and upstairs—a deep, biting cold. I checked the thermostat. Forty degrees. In the hall I noticed the corner of a white envelope under the front door. Our first mail in the new house, probably
a note of welcome from a neighbor, I thought, forgetting the cold for the minute, maybe even an invitation. I ripped it open. A season's greetings card from the local oil company.

Hugo took the card out to the field behind the house where cell phones sometimes worked, and called them up. Wind whipped across the field to the side porch where I waited. After sunset it would get colder. We could work in parkas, but with the prediction of a hard freeze coming, the pipes were in danger.

Less than half an hour later the oil company man knelt in front of the furnace. A dark, foamy excrescence oozed from a pipe. “Doesn't look good.”

“Did it die?” Hugo asked. I knew from his studied calm that we were both thinking the same thing. A big unexpected expense.

“Not that bad. Out of oil.”

“But the owner said he would fill it enough for us to get started, or that's the first thing we would have done,” I said, trying to pretend I wasn't a clueless come-here from the Western Shore.

“We would have filled it,” Hugo said.

After wiping clean various parts of the furnace, he demonstrated how to ignite it. Then he went out to the yard and called on his cell phone for the oil truck, which arrived in less than ten minutes.

The oil tank filled, the furnace man turned the igniter. A groan came from a contraption behind him, an industrial-looking tank I hadn't noticed before. He jerked his head in the direction of this tank.

“Bet your water pressure's low, too.”

At this point I decided to admit I didn't know anything
and just go for information. “How did you know that?”

“Water holding tank for your well keeps turning on. You need air in the top of the tank.”

“How do you do that?”

The oil company man explained that all you have to do is turn a knob on the side of the tank, attach a hose, drain half the water out, then fill the top with air using a compressor attached on the opposite side.