who’d wanted a daughter, Bern was quite skeptical of other people’s daughters, though her skepticism about Lucy took the form of mentioning little oddities and quickly adding, “Nothing wrong with that, of course.” One of the things that there was nothing wrong with was Lucy’s inability to cook—her ineptitude extending even to lettuce- washing, to not understanding what a salad spinner was. She recoiled from the blender and the toaster as if they might become animated without her touching them. She drank a lot of tea, so she could boil water. But why did she resist when Bern tried to explain how other things were done in the kitchen?
Then Bern had begun finding banana peels in strange places: thrown behind a flowering bush in the garden, or pushed into a vase. “Fortunately none in the linen closet yet,” Bern said wryly. She had found two or three folded inside empty toilet-paper rolls in the trash; she’d found another buried in the little trash can that held lint from the dryer.
“What do you think?” she asked Francis. “Is it some kind of eating disorder? Some comment on something or other?”
“She’s realized we’re monkeys,” he said, curling his fingers and scratching his ribs, puckering his lips.
“It isn’t funny to me, Francis, it’s upsetting. I’ve never known anyone to stash banana peels.”
“How do you know it isn’t Sheldon?”
“Have you ever once known him to bring any food whatsoever into this house? He doesn’t even come in eating a candy bar. I’ve never once seen him with a cup of takeout coffee. He’s so lazy he relies entirely on the groceries I bring home.”
Francis put down his newspaper and looked over the top of his glasses. “Maybe it’s a mating ritual,” he said, but she’d already left the room.
Now Francis stood in the hallway of his aunt’s house, wondering if it would be worth it to take out the ceiling fixture and replace it with something less expensive and less unique before the real-estate agent came back. This required outguessing the people who would eventually tour the house: would they be inclined to like everything, once they’d seen such a splendid light fixture, or would they breeze past, the men concerned about the basement, the women interested in the kitchen? He was contemplating calling Bern to ask her opinion when he saw the Burwell Boys Moving truck turn in to the driveway, sending gravel flying into the peony beds. A hollyhock went flying like a spear. Low-hanging tree limbs snapped off.
Two men wearing chinos and dark-brown T-shirts hopped out. “Mr. Field? How do you do, Mr. Field?” the burlier of the two said. “Moving day, Mr. Field,” the other man said, retrieving a clipboard from the passenger seat. He had a couple of feathers in his shirt pocket. “I’m Jim Montgomery. My partner here is Don O’Rourke.”
“Don,” the partner echoed. “We want to do a good job here, make sure you got no reason to remember us.”
Both men came forward to shake Francis’s hand. Jim plucked a pen from between the feathers in his pocket. “Just need your John Hancock on the line, then we can get started.”
Francis signed their forms, then led the movers inside. “My aunt’s summer house,” he explained, giving them a quick tour. He’d supposed that everyone in the area knew that his aunt was dead, though, of course, he had no reason to suspect that she would have met these particular men.
“Aunt didn’t have tons of furniture,” Jim said. “She an older lady?”
“Ninety,” Francis said.
Don let out a low whistle. “Make it to ninety, then a couple of crooks come in and load everything out.”
Jim crouched to examine a side table, then looked at Francis. “You tagged the pieces we load last?”
“They’re both in the hallway. The pie safe and the hall seat.” The movers had told Bern that they would be unloading these pieces to another moving company, which would transport them to California.
“We’ll get started, then,” Jim said. He turned to Don. “What that remark was about us being crooks, I won’t ask.”
“We took those six-packs of water from behind the 7-Eleven,” Don said. He grinned at Francis. “Go to auctions, get things and distress ’em, bang ’em up and make ’em old.”
Francis nodded, trying to indicate that, whatever they’d done, he did not intend to pass judgment. (It didn’t much matter to him.) His wife had arranged for the moving men, who had been recommended—wasn’t that what she’d said?—by the real-estate agent.
Jim and Don began issuing orders to each other, pulling furniture into the center of the room, moving quickly. Francis turned, pretending to have something to do upstairs. Over his shoulder he noticed something small on the floor and went back to see what it was, as the two men carried the Sheridan sofa out the door. It was Jim’s feather. He put it on the chair cushion, where Jim would be sure to notice it, and returned to the stairs. He went up three steps, four . . . then stopped. Through the window, he saw the broken limb of a tree dangling over the front windshield of the moving truck. On the stairs, a dust ball grazed his foot, stirred up by the small breeze coming through the door. His aunt had lived to be ninety, and he was sixty-six. His son was twenty-four, which, he quickly computed, was the difference in age between his aunt and him. The computation meant nothing.
Francis had practiced law for years, and he did not think his son was at all suited to the vocation. But what was he suited to? He’d been a solid B-plus student, but he’d done very well on his law boards, and he had two very good letters of recommendation, plus one that Bern had helped him get from their congressman. Sheldon played tennis and golf, if that mattered. Lawyers were always disparaged and joked about; probably passion was not a prerequisite quality. Still, he imagined the worst: that Sheldon might get engaged to Lucy just to keep her from other men; that, yes, Lucy did have an eating disorder, and, even if she didn’t, being sneaky was a problem; Sheldon would begin law school then quit—Francis was entirely sure that that was the way things would go—and then he and Lucy would rethink things, though it would be too late if they were already married, or if she was pregnant. She was pregnant. That was why she was eating the bananas, he realized, standing on his aunt’s stairs, the moving men coming and going, oblivious to him. She was coming back—Lucy was coming back from Tokyo early, because she was pregnant. He and Bern would be grandparents. Sheldon would be overwhelmed with responsibility. His life would be nothing but takeout coffee. He wouldn’t have time to study if he wanted to. He would be in a relationship with a woman who did not love him, and whom he did not love.
“That feather,” Francis said, standing (how had he got there?) in the living room. Jim and Don were sweating. The clipboard was on a table. Both feathers were in Jim’s pocket. The pen lay on the clipboard.
“Yeah?” Jim said, patting his pocket.
