something, because it says mammography and radiology above the windows and above those are some apartments or something with some plants in the windows in clay pots and the building looks like it’s eight stories and on the left side there’s a very expensive-looking restaurant with a black awning thing and dark windows and it doesn’t have any tables and chairs out front like most of the cafes in Paris and-”
All this from memory.
“I’m really tired, Thomas. I had to go in and talk to Harry Peyton today.”
“The Louvre is like the simplest place to get to from there. You can almost see it when you come out of the hotel.”
“Do you not want to hear what happened at the lawyer’s?”
He waved his hands busily in front of me. “You go across the Rue de Montalembert and then across a triangle of sidewalk, and then you’re on the Rue du Bac, and then you go right and you walk up that way and you cross the Rue de l’Universite and you keep going and you cross the Rue de Verneuil-I’m not sure I’m pronouncing these right because I never took French in high school-and there’s this place on the corner that has all these really good- looking pastries in the window and bread too and then you cross the Rue de Lille but you keep on going and-”
“Mr. Peyton said the way Dad’s will is set up, he left the house to both of us.”
“-and if you look straight down the street you can actually see it. The Louvre, I mean. Even though it’s on the other side of the river. You keep going and then you cross the Quai Anatole France on the left, and on the right it’s the Quai Voltaire. I guess the road changes from one name to the other there and you shift a bit to the right but keep going over the bridge, which is the Pont Royal. I think pont means bridge. And when you get to the other side you’re there. See how simple that was? You didn’t have to do any twists or turns or anything. You just go out the door and turn and you’re there. Let’s do a harder one. Name a hotel in any other part of Paris and I’ll tell you how to get there. Shortest route. Although, sometimes, there’s a hundred different ways to get to the same place but it’s still about the same distance. Like New York. Well, not like New York, because the streets are all over the place in Paris and not in square blocks, but you get what I mean, right?”
“Thomas, I need you to stop for a second,” I said patiently.
He blinked at me a couple of times. “What is it?”
“We need to talk about Dad.”
“Dad’s dead,” he said, again looking at me like I was short a few IQ points. Then, with something that looked like sorrow washing briefly over his face, he glanced out the window. “I found him. By the creek.”
“I know.”
“Dinner was late. I kept waiting for him to knock on the door and tell me that it was time to eat, and I was getting really hungry so I came down to see what was going on. I went all over the house first. I went down into the basement, thinking maybe he was fixing the furnace or something, but he wasn’t there. The van was here so he had to be somewhere. When I couldn’t find him in the house I went outside. I looked in the barn first.”
I’d heard all this before.
“When I couldn’t find him there I walked around and when I got to the top of the hill I saw him with the tractor on top of him.”
“I know, Thomas.”
“I pushed the tractor off him. It was really hard to do but I did. But Dad didn’t get up. So I ran back up here and called 911. They came and they said he was dead.”
“I know,” I said again. “That must have been pretty awful for you.”
“It’s still down there.”
The tractor. I had to bring it back up and put it away in the barn. It had been sitting out there at the bottom of the hill since the accident. I didn’t know whether it would start. For all I knew, the gas had all drained out when the machine was upside down. There was a half-full gas can in the barn if I needed it.
“There are things that we have to get figured out,” I said. “About what to do, now that Dad’s, you know, passed away.”
Thomas nodded, thinking. “I was wondering,” he said, “whether it would be okay to put maps on the walls in his bedroom now. I’m running out of space. Because he and Mom said I couldn’t put any on the first floor, or down the stairs, but his room is on the second floor so I was wondering what you thought about that since he’s not sleeping in there anymore. And with Mom already gone, no one’s sleeping in there.”
That wasn’t exactly true. I’d started off sleeping in the empty bedroom next to Thomas’s, the one Mom had always kept ready for me when I came to visit, which was not that often. But last night I ended up moving down the hall into Dad’s room because I could hear all the mouse-clicking through the wall and couldn’t take it anymore. I’d gone in once to tell Thomas to shut it down but he’d ignored me, so I’d switched beds. I felt funny about it at first, slipping under the covers of my dead father’s bed, but I got over it. I was tired, and I’m not much of a sentimentalist.
“You can’t live in this house all alone,” I said.
“I’m not alone. You’re here.”
“At some point I have to go back home.”
“You are home. This is home.”
“It’s not my home, Thomas. I live in Burlington.”
“Burlington, Vermont. Burlington, Massachusetts. Burlington, North Carolina. Burlington, New Jersey. Burlington, Washington. Burlington, Ontario, Ca-”
“Thomas.”
“I didn’t know if you knew how many other Burlingtons there are. You need to be specific. You need to say Burlington, Vermont, or people won’t know where you really live.”
“I figured you knew,” I said. “Is that what you want me to do? Every time I tell you I have to go back to Burlington, do you want me to add ‘Vermont,’ Thomas?”
“Don’t be angry with me,” he said.
“I’m not angry with you. But we do need to talk about some things.”
“Okay.”
“When I go back to my own house, I’m going to be worried about leaving you here on your own.”
Thomas shook his head, like there was nothing to worry about. “I’ll be fine.”
“Dad did everything around here,” I said. “He made the meals, he cleaned the house, he paid the bills, he went into town to get the groceries, he made sure the furnace was working and called the guy if there was something wrong with it. Anything else that broke, he fixed it. If the lights went off, he went down and flipped the breakers to get them back on. Do you know where the breaker panel is, Thomas?”
“The furnace works fine,” he said.
“You don’t have a driver’s license,” I said. “How are you going to get food into the house?”
“I’ll have it delivered,” he said.
“We’re out in the middle of nowhere. And who’s going to actually go to the grocery store and pick out the things you like?”
“You know what I like,” Thomas said.
“But I won’t be here.”
“You can come back,” he said. “Once a week, and get my food and pay the bills and see if the furnace is okay and then you can go back to Burlington.” He paused. “Vermont.”
“What about each day? Let’s say you’ve got some food in the house. Are you going to be okay making your own meals?”
Thomas looked away.
I leaned in a little closer to him, reached out, and touched his arm. “Look at me,” I said. He turned his head back reluctantly.
“Maybe,” I said, “if you made some changes in your routine, maybe you could take on some of these responsibilities yourself.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Well, maybe you need to manage your time better.”
He adopted a puzzled expression. “I manage my time very well.”
I took my hand away and placed both palms down on the table. “Tell me about that.”
“I do. I make very good use of my time.”
