There was a sink in the Starling Peake room, which wasn’t officially called that because, though he had been charming, he had let everyone down. When I was little I asked Nonie why that room had a sink and she said it was a consolation prize because it was inferior to the other rooms.
“Why was it inferior?”
“It didn’t open onto a porch.”
“But the other Recoverer’s room across the hall doesn’t open onto a porch either.”
“No, but that room gets the morning sun and is next to the bathroom.”
When I was older, I asked my father the same question about the sink and he said because a man could piss in the sink without having to walk to the bathroom.
“But what if a woman was staying in there?”
“We only had one of those and she had the big front room with the private half bath.”
“The Willow Fanning room,” I said.
“I wish Mother would leave off her precious room naming. It’s been a quarter century since this has been a halfway house for rich malingerers. We don’t need their old ghosts rattling around: we have enough of our own to avoid stumbling over.”
I COULDN’T IMAGINE Finn pissing in the sink, and didn’t want to. Besides, there would be no need for him to. Flora would have gone back to Alabama and my father would be at school all day and if Finn were using the upstairs bathroom or taking a bath when my father was home, my father would make use of the half bath in the Willow Fanning room, or go downstairs, which he would probably prefer to do anyway so he could freshen his drink.
Finn’s recent visit to us had gone downhill after dinner. When we adjourned to the living room for coffee and pound cake, Finn brought out his sketchbook and said he wanted to do a portrait of Flora. After her predictable fluttery protests, he arranged her in Nonie’s wing chair because he said that had worked so well with me last time. I sat beside him on the sofa, which was nice at first, but then he became so rapt with his subject that there seemed to be a lit-up path between him and Flora that left the rest of the room in darkness. He was oblivious of me, but Flora kept darting nervous little glances to see if I was getting resentful or bored. When she asked me how the picture was coming along, I couldn’t very well say, “He’s making you prettier than you really are,” so I borrowed Mrs. Jones’s phrase and told her it was going to be suitable for framing.
“Oh, we will, we will!” exclaimed Flora.
“Please, love, don’t… move… your face,” Finn said.
“Sorry,” said Flora, but she flushed up at his use of the love word.
When he was done and she finished uttering her little yips and saying he’d made her nicer-looking than she was, he reclaimed the sketchbook and said, “I’ll take it away with me, then, and work on it some more. Give you a squinty eye and a few whiskers.” Then they had a mock tussle, after which he still insisted on keeping it in the sketchbook to work on some more. And she got all emotional and said, “How I wish I could draw. Then I would have a likeness of you to take back with me to Alabama.”
Only at the tail end of the evening did I manage to get him to myself by following him out to his motorcycle. “Listen,” I said (I had rehearsed this): “We have some nice empty rooms upstairs, and when it starts getting cold in Crump’s storage attic, you could move in here. I’ll discuss it with my father. I’m pretty sure he’d welcome the company.”
He looked surprised, then laughed. “Will I be one of your Recoverers, then?” He stooped and gave me a hug. “We’ll have to see, darling,” he said. “We’ll have to see how things fall out.”
But he had also given Flora a hug. And called her “love.”
IN THE LAST days of July, Flora’s and my fifth-grade class languished due to sudden breakdowns and interruptions at Old One Thousand. First, the garbage truck got stuck in a rut and we had to call a tow truck and the garbage man yelled at us that he wasn’t coming again until we got our f——ing driveway fixed.
“Please, sir!” cried Flora. “There’s a child present. Her father is off doing important war work in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and it will be fixed as soon as he returns next month.” She began to cry softly and also the driver had heard of Oak Ridge, and he and the driver of the tow truck ended up fashioning a makeshift bridge of planks over the rut and gratefully accepting coffee and hot corn bread from Flora in the kitchen before they left.
Then the downspout that had been hanging tipsily sideways from the gutter fell down across the lawn—or former lawn.
“Oh, dear,” moaned Flora, “we’ll have to get someone.”
“Leave it till my father gets back,” I said. I didn’t say that I was hoping he might surprise us and show up for my birthday, which was a little over a week away.
“Well, I don’t know, honey. Nobody likes to come home and see pieces of their house all over the ground. It looks like someone hasn’t been taking care of things.”
“It’s just one piece, and you can’t even see it when you drive up. You’re only supposed to be taking care of me, not the house.”
But Flora decided to phone Mr. Crump at Grove Market, to ask if he knew of a “reasonable” carpenter, and Finn answered and said he could do it if we had a ladder, which we did. He asked if it could wait until the weekend and Flora said it could and thanked him too profusely.
Then the toilet in the Willow Fanning half bath got clogged, and Flora cried and said now everyone would blame her for flushing something down it when she hadn’t. She phoned the plumber listed in Nonie’s little “Majordomo” book, but the number had been disconnected. “And I can’t call Mr. Crump again,” she wailed.
“Why not? He’s bound to know a plumber.”
“
I saw Finn kneeling in front of Flora’s toilet, pulling out something disgusting. It made me want to laugh, but not for long. It would reflect on me, too, and make him not want to live in our house.
But Flora fetched the plunger and went at the Willow Fanning toilet so violently it choked up an enormous soggy wad, which she insisted on my inspecting. “I want you to see there’s nothing in it but toilet paper. But it’s still my fault, I’ve been using too much. At home, Juliet had this rule: two squares for number one, four for number two, unless it was—”
“Okay, okay!”
I SET TO work on my refurbishment of Starling Peake’s old room, which I was already secretly calling the Devlin Patrick Finn room. There wasn’t any deep cleaning to do; Mrs. Jones had been faithful with that. The floor was regularly vacuumed, the windowsills scrubbed, the curtains and bedspread laundered, and the furniture polished—though there was way too much furniture. The two “lesser” Recoverers’ rooms had become repositories for castoffs, like my father’s Persian carpets that had tripped him once too often and twiggy-legged tables and plant stands and framed pictures and mirrors turned to the wall.
I first thought I’d tell Flora I was fixing up this room for when new friends came to stay over. But I had grown so adept at predicting her responses I could hear her ask why I didn’t put them in my old room downstairs. So instead I told her I wanted to make a study upstairs for myself.
“But, honey, why that gloomy old room? If you want an upstairs study, why not take your grandfather’s consulting room, with all its nice shelves?”
“That’s for family trophies and things. And my father goes in there to look things up in books.”
“Oh, in that case. But wouldn’t the Recoverer’s room across the hall be more cheerful? It gets the morning sun.”
“I don’t always want to be cheerful. I like gloom, too. Besides, when I get home from school it will be the afternoon.”
“That’s true,” she conceded.
“I just have a feeling about that room. I like it.”
“I wonder if—?”
“What?”
