The Clear-Out (5 page)

“I’ve hired a cleaner,” Duncan lied. He could see where this was leading. He knew without looking that Bobby’s car was full of his stuff. He had quit his job or got himself fired and wanted to come back home.

“You don’t want a stranger here.”

Duncan leaned against the stove. “Let me guess, Bobby. Your boss didn’t understand you.”

“They just plain lied about the job! I thought it was going to be something special. They had me doing the dirty work. It was beneath me. I quit on principle. I have a master’s degree!”

“I know,” Duncan said. “I paid for it.”

“Anyway, it’s just as well. You are not managing here on your own.”

Bobby took a take-out box of left-over chicken wings out of the fridge and sat down at the kitchen table.

Duncan plugged the kettle in and spooned instant coffee into a cup. For a while the kitchen was silent except for the sounds of Bobby eating and the kettle heating up.

When his coffee was made, Duncan sat at the table with his son.

“You gave up your apartment.” It was a statement, not a question.

“The landlord was an idiot,” Bobby said. “Says I owe him money. Really, he was charging way too much for that place. I had to make a statement. And that stuff he said I ruined. It was garbage when I moved in!”

“You’re being sued.” Again, it was a statement, not a question.

“How much are you selling the house for?” Bobby asked.

“What you really want to know is, are you going to get some of the money,” Duncan said.

“She was my mother.” Bobby pouted, his cheek stained with wing sauce. “I should have something to remember her by.”

“Her glass animals are in the dining room,” Duncan said. “Help yourself.”

He took a drink of his coffee. It was hot and burned his throat. “You’re young,” Duncan said. “You’re healthy. You are well-educated. You have nothing to tie you down. You could be living anywhere and doing anything. I don’t understand you.”

“You never took the time to understand me,” Bobby told him. “You never once asked me what I wanted.”

Duncan slammed his hand on the table.

“You cannot say that!” he said. “All I did was ask you what you wanted and then try to get it for you. You want to play hockey? I buy you all the gear, the
best skates. You decide to quit after one game? No problem. You want to go on the expensive school trip? Then you back out when it’s too late to get the money back? All right, anything, so long as you are happy. Boy, was your mother angry with me about that! You want that fancy bike? No problem. Leave it out in the rain so that it gets rusted after the first month? Of course you need another one. You want to live in the basement and play video games for three years after finally finishing university? Anything you want!”

“I stayed so long because Mom was lonely,” Bobby said. “I stayed to keep her company.”

“You stayed because you’re lazy. Too lazy to get a job and too lazy to keep a job. I’ve told you that over and over.”

“If I’m lazy, it’s your fault . . .”

Duncan kept talking over him.

“You say you stayed to keep your mother company? Your mother didn’t need company— not anyone’s company, not yours and certainly not mine! Every spare minute, she had her head in some book. When she did bother to talk to me at all, she said she was tired of cleaning up after
you. Twenty-eight years old and she was still trying to get you to do your own laundry. You were not company for her. You were a chore!”

By now they were both on their feet.

“All right. Maybe so,” Bobby yelled. “I’m man enough to admit that I could have been a better son. But you were a lousy husband. Mom was lonely. You were never there for her.”

“Your mother did not need me!” Duncan roared from deep within his gut. “She did not need me, and she did not need you! All she needed were those damn books. Why did she marry me? I could have married someone who wanted to be with me, not someone who shut me out all the time. Maybe I
was
a bad husband. But she did not need me! She just wanted me . . . to go away . . . so she could read.”

Speaking such a deep truth made Duncan drop to his knees. He sobbed. He felt that he had spent his entire life alone. To his son, he was a wallet. To his wife, he was a noise.

He got himself under control and stood up.

“We’re through here,” he said to Bobby. “You can’t move back in. I’m not giving you any money. You can have the rest of the chicken wings and your mother’s glass animals if you want them. But I don’t want to see you again until you have straightened yourself out. Go. Live your life. And let me live mine.”

Bobby stood in shocked silence for a moment. “I’ll never forgive you for this,” he said.

“I can live with that,” Duncan told him. “Grow up, son. It’s way past time.”

Bobby moved slowly towards the door, as if he thought Duncan would call him back. Then he turned around and picked up the rest of the chicken wings. Duncan sat at the table with his coffee. He didn’t look up when his son walked out the door, got in his car, and drove away.

But he had the strongest feeling that Tess was with him, sitting across the table, nodding and smiling.

Duncan couldn’t sit at the kitchen table forever. After a while, he had to move to the sofa to watch TV.

He picked up the
TV Guide,
looking for something worth watching. He looked at the page listing all the movies, and he read the descriptions. A lot of the movies were about either blowing things up or kids becoming pop stars.

Duncan felt a sense of peace he hadn’t felt since Tess’s death. He was so sure she had been in the kitchen with him. He was so sure she was happy with him—in that moment, anyway. For once, she was not angry at him or just putting up with him. He smiled now as he thought about what he had said to Bobby. How she seemed to agree with him. The two of them had done what they had to do about their greedy, freeloading son.

“We’ll get it figured out, Tess,” he said. “It’s all going to be all right.”

And then his eyes landed on something.

It was a movie listing:
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.
Based on the novel by R. A. Dick.

That was all it said.

Duncan grabbed the remote and turned the television to the right channel. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were kissing. Duncan recognized the movie:
To Have and Have Not.
He checked the
TV Guide
again.
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
had been on the day before. He had missed it.

He threw the
TV Guide
on the sofa and called Kevin.

“R. A. Dick is the name of a writer,” Duncan said. “Start checking. I’ll be right there.”

He went out to the garage. It was empty. His car was still being repaired. How would he get to the thrift store?

“Going somewhere, bro?” Fly King was at his elbow.

“Don’t you have a home to go to?” Duncan asked him. “Don’t your parents wonder where you are?”

Fly King lifted up an extra skateboard.

“It will get you there fast, man.”

“Are you crazy? I’m not going to ride that thing. I’m nearly seventy years old. I’ll fall off. I’ll break a hip. I’ll be killed in the streets.”

The kid shrugged. “Maybe.”

Duncan was about to call the kid an uncaring little jerk, but then he thought for a second. The walk to the thrift store would be long, and not pretty. The buses did not run very often and would not take him straight there anyway. And taxis took forever to get to his house.

“What do I do?” he asked Fly King.

“Just step on it,” the kid said. “Step on it and let it roll.”

So Duncan did just that.

He stepped on the skateboard.

And he let it roll.

“You never want to try something new,” Tess would tell him. “You only want to do the things you have always done. You want to eat the same food, wear the same clothes, play the same game, and see the same people.”

“Look at me now, Tess,” he yelled as he zoomed down the street. “Look at me now!”

Kevin and Duncan almost didn’t find the book.

They searched through the shelves, looking for any book written by R. A. Dick.

“R. A. Dick is a pen name,” Kevin said. “The writer’s real name was Josephine Aimee Campbell Leslie.”

“No wonder she made it shorter,” Duncan said.

“She was Irish,” Kevin added. “She wrote three books. The most successful was
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.
I looked it up online.”

“Did you find out how the book ends?”

“No. But I found out that it was made into a movie and a television series.”

“Never heard of it.” Duncan shoved aside another pile of books. They were almost through the shelves. “What if you sold it already?”

“Then we will try the library, the bookstores, and the internet. There must be more than one copy in the world.”

Duncan did not think he had the strength to go through all that. He started looking through the last shelf. He got to the end without finding any book by R. A. Dick.

And then he spotted the corner of something peeking out from under the bookshelf.

He knew it was the right book even before he reached down to pick it up.

He held it in his hands.

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

“What happens?” said his wife’s voice inside his head.

“I found it,” Duncan said to Kevin.

The book was small and thin, and its cover was black with white letters. On the front was a picture of an old sea captain in a dark blue cap.

“Yes, that’s it,” Kevin said. “You found it.”

“I’m going to go home now and read it. And that will be the end of that. Tess will be happy, and I will be able to get on with my life.”

“Good,” said Kevin. “If that’s what you want.”

“Absolutely,” Duncan said. “What do I owe you for this?”

Kevin waved his hand. “It’s a gift. From one widower to another.”

“Thanks.” Duncan shook Kevin’s hand. “Thanks for everything.”

He made his way to the door, then turned back. He needed the answer to one question.

“When you found the insurance papers, what happened to your husband?”

“He disappeared,” Kevin said.

“Did he ever come back?”

Kevin looked really sad. “Not yet.”

Duncan nodded slowly, then left the shop.

He had a lot to think about.

Duncan went home and read.

He read the first line of the book to himself, and then he read it again out loud:

Mrs. Muir was a little woman.

The words made him think of his wife. As he spoke them, Tess appeared in the La-Z-Boy chair across the room. Mr. Snuffles, the cat, trotted over and sat by the chair. Duncan could hear him purring.

Duncan sat on the sofa with his feet on the coffee table and a cup of coffee at his side. He read out loud until the coffee got cold. Then he made a fresh cup and kept on reading.

Duncan could not remember the last time he had read a book. The teachers had made him
read in school. Endless questions and essays and exams always followed. Reading was a chore. It was homework. It was something to get out of doing if he could. If he couldn’t get out of reading, it was something to do quickly. Something to rush through, so he could do the things he liked to do.

He had never read a book because he wanted to.

In
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir,
Mrs. Muir’s first name was Lucy. Her husband had died. Everyone around her thought they had the right to tell her what she should do. But she had her own ideas. She made her own life.

As he read, Duncan found himself cheering for her. He lost himself in the story until the room got dark. When he had to turn on a lamp, he was surprised to find himself in his own house. He had felt as if he were in Gull Cottage, Lucy’s home by the sea.

“Is this what our life was like for you?” he asked the ghost of his wife. She just smiled.

He kept reading.

Duncan read as much as he could that day, until he started to nod off. He hated to stop reading, but he marked his place at page seventy-five. Then he
went to bed, slept soundly, and got up early to go back to his reading.

While he was reading, he saw Tess, sitting and enjoying the story. But he knew from her face that she had already read this part. By late morning, he had only a few short chapters left. That’s when he saw her sit up straight and even lean forward.

“This is what you have been waiting for, isn’t it?” he asked her. “It is the ending you want to know about. Now you will find out what happens.”

His wife smiled and nodded. He saw her ghost face sparkle in a way that he had rarely seen when she was alive.

He was afraid that if he finished the story, she would go. And he wanted her to stay.

“That’s enough for today,” he said, gently closing the book. “Come back tomorrow. Maybe we’ll read some more.”

Duncan watched her fade away. He was once more alone.

He looked down at the little book in his hand.

“She’ll be back,” he said to the cat. “She’ll be back with us again.”

The House for Sale sign came down.

The dining room furniture went back into the basement.

And the library went back into the dining room. But Duncan put up the bookshelves along the walls. That way, they didn’t block off the living room, as they had before.

At first, Duncan put books on the shelves that he thought his wife would like. Then he decided to look for books
he
might like, too. He had enjoyed reading about the sea captain, so he looked for more sea stories. Reading them led him to novels about war, and they led to novels about other countries. Each book he read made him want to read something else.

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
stayed on the coffee table. Unfinished. There was plenty of time to finish it in the future. He wanted Tess to stick around for a while.

Duncan read his books aloud every day, and when he did, Tess appeared in her chair and listened.

Why didn’t Tess just pick up
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
and read the ending for herself? Duncan did not know. Maybe ghosts didn’t work that way. Maybe she wanted them to finish the book together. He didn’t mind not knowing why. He just liked having her back.