Abigail hadn’t eaten since breakfast at the cafe, when she’d barely touched her food. She washed a plate and made herself a sandwich. Turkey, tomato, and mayonnaise was hardly haute cuisine, yet the fact that the sandwich would be easy on her burned taste buds made it sound divine.
Having moved the dishware to the dining table in order to clean the cupboards, Abigail had to clear a section so she’d have room to eat. When she sat on the only chair that didn’t look like it would collapse, the cushion released a burst of air as if she’d come down on a whoopee cushion.
“Very attractive.”
Her tongue was still sore from the scalding coffee. She was too famished to care. Since the fire, she’d been eating purely for sustenance and because her parents forced her. If they hadn’t put meals right in front of her, Abigail would have forgotten to eat altogether. Food no longer seemed necessary. She was constantly full, glutted with feelings nobody would crave.
The chore of eating complete, Abigail picked up where she’d left off. Instead of putting the dry goods in the cupboards, she stored them on the table along with the dishware. Why bother if she was going to paint, she reasoned.
Abigail hated to leave the living room in such a state—cluttered with boxes and grocery bags, the furniture stacked with overflow from the kitchen—but if she was going to do this, she was going to do it right. She started in on the wallpaper, attacking it where the edges had come free. Although the blue and white flower pattern might have had country quaintness when the paper was first applied, the yellowy paste now showed through the white sections, turning them a pallid shade and adding to the sense that the kitchen was permanently dirty.
“
Not every sheet came down willingly. Abigail picked at loose corners until she broke both thumbnails. Forced to resort to a butter knife for the stubborn sections as well as the glue that streaked the wall, she redoubled her efforts. A haze of paper shavings drifted in the shafts of sunlight shining through the kitchen windows.
As the afternoon wore on, Abigail caught herself waiting for the CD to falter, yet the music played on uninterrupted. She began to hum, losing herself in the buoyancy of the violins. Paul had favored cello music. They would often debate what they should listen to in the car, vying over symphonies and comparing the virtues of each stringed instrument as if arguing political positions. For Paul, the cello spoke to the soul, with its mellow, sonorous voice. Abigail preferred the lighter, loftier range of the violin. The low tenor of the cello was too melancholy for her taste, well before she knew what true melancholy even felt like.
Strips of wallpaper plopped at her feet in growing mounds, while bits of paste speckled her clothes and the tips of her fingers took on a bluish cast from the cornflower color in the design. Eventually, the butter knife bent under the pressure of scraping the calcified glue. Only belatedly did it occur to Abigail that, as a rental tenant, she had no right to remove the wallpaper. The lighthouse wasn’t her property.
“Way to go. That’s playing it safe.”
What was done was done, and nobody—not even Lottie—would disagree that the kitchen appeared more spacious minus the dated paper, a supreme achievement in light of its dimensions. Abigail considered it a victory. She took a break to open the windows and let in some air. The breeze seemed to rustle the paper-thin curtains in tempo to the music. Dust had collected in their lace trim, making the edges appear mealy.
“You’ve got to go too,” Abigail announced, snapping off the curtain rod. Then she heard a bump.
Abigail dismantled the other set of curtains to see if it would happen a second time. The violins played on and there were no other noises.
“You’re losing it, Abby.”
After her assault on the kitchen, it looked as if it had been looted. Empty drawers hung open. The cabinet doors were swung wide, the shelves bare. What mattered was that everything was clean. Abigail had removed years of grease from the appliances and decades’ worth of dirt from the sink. Beyond the slanting shelves and dislocated counters, she could imagine how the kitchen had once been: homey, pleasant. Perhaps it could be that way again.
The master bedroom was next on Abigail’s agenda. She laid the freshly laundered towels and linens on the rocker, preparing to make the bed. Stripped, the sunken crater in the middle of the mattress looked like a pothole.
“Maybe the other side isn’t so…concave.”
Flipping the mattress took muscle. Deadweight, it teetered, then collapsed onto the box spring, sending a piece of paper fluttering to the floor as a plume of dust fogged the room.
“Some people keep money under their mattress. Or dirty magazines. Here you have”—Abigail bent over to check—“a newspaper article.”
The news clipping was amber with age and had been cut rather than torn out. The edges were neat, purposeful. The bold-type headline said: BISHOP’S MISTRESS SINKS, ENTIRE CREW LOST.
Before Abigail could read on, she was overcome by a coughing fit brought on from the wave of dust constricting her tender throat. She dropped the article on the nightstand and went to the bathroom for water. A sip from the tap and she was fine, albeit shaken.
“Here’s a headline:
Abigail put the fresh sheets on the bed, along with the fabric-softener-scented quilt, which was prettier than it originally appeared. Handmade with squares of blue and yellow material and worn soft through the years, someone had put their heart into the blanket. Abigail admired that.
After carting the mop and bucket she’d bought upstairs, she swabbed the bedroom floor. The wood boards
