❚ ❚ ❚
The Flebberman house sat on the crest of the hill, overlooking the valley. As she ascended, Francie saw that the Flebbermans en joyed a view of several miles in all directions. Tarmac roads danced across the countryside as if scattered by wild magnetic forces. Farms were sprawled in the same haphazard manner over hills and valleys, one here, another there, vast spaces of pasture- land and small patches of forest between them. Nothing moved against the blank canvas of the snow. She could see the river
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flowing by their house, as fresh and silver as the belly of a fish. They might have a hill, but we have the river, she thought. Aden- court itself sat squarely aside the road, a fortress, a monument. Francie had never seen it from this perspective before. She stopped and gazed at it for a long time, both dismayed and pleased at how ugly it was from this height. It looked, she real ized, like it was built by someone who didn’t have the slightest idea what they were doing. At that moment, she felt an up welling of tenderness for the old place, as though it was not a house but a misshapen child.
She turned again and plodded up the long driveway. White paint peeled from the dilapidated Flebberman home, and snow was still heaped and humped over mysterious objects in the front yard, lending them an artistic credibility that had surely never been theirs in warmer times. At the end of the driveway was a shed with no doors; in it she could see an old pickup truck, its body stricken with rust. A hand-lettered sign in the windshield advertised that it was “4 Sail.” As she climbed the plank steps of the porch, she could hear shrieks of childish excitement. She’d been watched, no doubt, from the moment she left her own front door.
“Someone’s here!” she heard someone—a young girl—yell out. Then, as she knocked, an unconvincing silence fell. Behind the door tiny feet shuffled, and she heard children giggling. A moment later there were heavier footsteps, and the door opened.
A heavy woman in a loose housedress stood there with a tod dler in her arms, both mother and child blinking away the bright ness of the reflected snowlight, as if they were cave dwellers. She had bags under her eyes, and wrinkles that looked to be prema ture. Even her hair was limp and tired-looking. Terrified, Francie gave her best smile.
“Help you?” the woman said, in a monotone.
“Hello,” Francie said. “I’m Francine Hart. Your new neighbor.” The woman continued to stare at her, her mouth hanging
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slightly open. Francie looked away; then forced herself to look back and smile again.
“Yeah?” said the woman.
“Yes. I, uh—I just thought I would come up and say hello. And—I’m sure your husband must have told you—there was a lit tle disagreement earlier. I just—I just wanted to come up and apologize. On behalf of myself and my husband.”
“Ah-huh,” said the woman. She rolled her eyes back, not in dis gust or dismay but as if searching for something to say. “Where’s your husband at?” she managed finally.
“Oh. Well—he didn’t come. He had to go back to the city.” “Ah-huh.”
Francie cleared her throat and smiled at her again, less certainly this time. She held out the bag of tea.
“I brought you this,” she said. “From the Manhattan Tea Brew ery.”
The woman stepped backward, and two more children, about three years old, appeared on either side of her prodigious hips: twins, a boy and a girl, each chewing a finger. They stared at her, too, drool shining on their pudgy chins. The woman made no move to take the gift.
“C’mon in,” she said, apparently having decided that Francie wasn’t going to go away.
Francie stepped up on the jamb and teetered there for a mo ment. The moist smells of fresh laundry and diaper ointment wafted to her, as well as the heavy fug of bacon grease, and she struggled to repress a sneeze.
“Fleb!” bellowed the woman over her shoulder. “C’mon in,” she said again to Francie, closing the door.
“Thank you,” said Francie. She decided to try again with the tea. “Here, I brought—”
One of the twins grabbed the bag out of her hand, and the other, sensing goodies, went for it. They whined at each other and immediately commenced a game of tug-of-war. The woman’s
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hand came down out of the sky, yanking it away from both of them, and with the back of her fingers she swatted each of them on the ear, expertly, a swift, whiplike flick that made them howl. Francie winced.
“That ain’t for you,” she said crossly.
“It’s just tea,” Francie told her. “Lemon roiboos.”
“Fleb!” the woman called again. “Comp’ny’s here! Lemon
what
?” she said to Francie.
“Roiboos,” Francie repeated, in a smaller voice.
Heavy footsteps, a man’s, crossed the floor above her head and came down a stairway somewhere. Then Flebberman appeared, minus his baseball cap. From the eyebrows down, his face was permanently sunburned, but his forehead was as white as paste. Upon seeing Francie he stopped, startled, and looked around quickly, as if searching for an avenue of escape. Then he appeared to remember that he was in his own home, and he grew suddenly more confident.
“Ah,” he said. “Yeah.”
You
, he might as well have said, Francie thought.
“Hello, Mr. Flebberman,” said Francie. “I hope this isn’t a bad time.” “Naw,” he said.
“Well, I—look. Let me just be frank. I know we didn’t get off on the right foot, and I felt badly about it. If we’re going to be neigh bors, I wanted us to be on good terms. So I came up—”
“She came up t’ ’pologize,” the woman interrupted. “Oh,” said Flebberman.
“Yes,” Francie said. “That’s it.”
Flebberman seemed even more surprised now, as if he’d been expecting an attack of some sort. Like his wife, he rolled his eyes, casting about for something to say. His jaw worked several times until he came up with something.
“Meet the wife? Jennifer.” “Yes. Hi.”
Jennifer the wife smiled again, mirthless.
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“You wanna cup a coffee,” she announced. “C’mon into the kitchen.”
She turned, and Francie followed her, Flebberman falling in be hind, all of them stepping over the twins, who were now wrestling amiably over some toy. The kitchen was a long room with ancient linoleum on the floor and water-stained walls. A pretty young girl sat working at a battered wooden table. Before her was a brown paper shopping bag cut open along its folds, and on it she was cre ating a sunset scene in crayon, her tongue between her lips. She looked up shyly as Francie came in.
“’Melia,” said Flebberman. “Say hello.”
“Hello,” said the girl, who was about nine years old, and looked as if she was on loan from a different family. Her hair was neatly pigtailed, and she wore a dress and knee socks. In her face Francie saw a sharpness that was utterly absent in the rest of her brood.
“Hi, there,” said Francie, smiling, sensing a kindred spirit. “That’s a pretty picture.” The girl smiled back—the first Flebber man to do so.
“Getcher ass up outa there and let us sit,” said Jennifer. “Aw, do I hafta?” the girl said.
“We could sit in the livin’ room,” Flebberman said to his wife.
Jennifer sighed loudly. “Well, I ain’t gettin’ a whole tray set up just to haul it all the way out there,” she said. “We can sit in here just as good, can’t we?”
Francie, dying inside, spoke up quickly.
“I really didn’t mean to stay long,” she said. “I just wanted to come and say hello. Meet everyone. And—” She was going to say “apologize” again, but she stopped herself.
“No, it’s awright,” said Flebberman to her. To his wife he said, “Get out the plates and the silverware, for Chrissakes. And put that kid down. He don’t have to hang on you like a monkey every damn minute.”
“You know how he gets,” said Jennifer warningly.
“Well, try ’im once,” said Flebberman. “You ain’t gonna carry
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him like that for his high school graduation, I hope.” He turned to Francie and raised his eyebrows. She saw that this was supposed to be a joke, and was simultaneously relieved that the ice had been broken and panicked to realize that she didn’t get it. She managed a smile. Jennifer put the toddler down. Instantly he erupted in ter rified screams, looking at Francie with wide, wet eyes. He dove for his mother ’s leg and buried his face in her doughy calf.
“Fer cryin’ out loud,” said Flebberman. “This kid is scared a everything.”
“Hey there,” Francie cooed. She bent down and wiggled her fin gers at him. He turned around and stopped screaming, cramming three fingers in his mouth.
“Well, lookit that,” said Flebberman, pleased.
Jennifer Flebberman stared narrowly at Francie for a minute, as if trying to figure out what kind of trick she was pulling. Then, with out a word, she took some paper plates from a bag on the counter and dealt them out onto the table as though they were cards.
“It’s just because I’m new,” Francie said. “It doesn’t mean any thing.”
❚ ❚ ❚
They sat at the table and ate cake with plastic spoons, while the twins swooped in and out of the room and the toddler crawled around their feet, cooing to himself. Jennifer did not offer to brew any of the lemon roiboos tea. Francie suspected it was going to end up in the garbage after she left.
It was not a squalid house, but it wasn’t exactly clean, either. She hadn’t been offered a tour. From her chair in the kitchen she could glimpse brown pile carpet in the living room, a disembow eled sofa, a picture window that looked down the hill to the south. The girl Amelia stayed in the living room, peering some times around the corner. Francie could tell she was interested but shy, and she was not invited to sit with the grown-ups.
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“This place was built about forty years after yers was,” Flebberman told her over the cake. To Francie’s immense gratification, he had warmed up to her considerably, and he was now in a talkative mood. “Branch o’ the same fambly as them. Used to be some other name, somethin’ German. Flavia somethin’. Flavia-Hermann, that’s it.”
“Flavia-Hermann,” Francie repeated.
“Somehow it got turned into Flebberman somewhere along the way,” said Flebberman. “Prob’ly durin’ one of the wars, when they didn’t wanna sound so German.”
“And they were related to the Musgroves?”
“The guy that built the house yer livin’ in—that would have been the Corporal—”
“The Captain,” interrupted Jennifer.
“—the Captain, I mean—he woulda been three or four genera tions back from my mom’s Aunt Helen,” Flebberman said. “I don’t know what that makes him to me, some kinda great-great-great uncle or somethin’. They had ten kids, and five of ’em died. Imag ine that? And no boys to carry on the name. No more Musgroves left a ’tall, and we here are the last of the Flebbermans ourselfs. ’Course I got two boys a my own. Haw haw. Go forth and spread the seed, my son!” he said, in the direction of his feet. The wet- mouthed toddler, laughing, pounded on Francie’s toes.
“That house was a hairloom,” said Jennifer Flebberman bitterly. “Now, it sat empty twenny-fi’ years,” Flebberman reminded her. “And we couldn’t a ’forded to buy it anyway.” To Francie he said, “Aunt Helen left it to my mom, but she had to sell it. Couldn’t even ’ford the taxes. And the bank was the only one who would take it.” He shook his head. “Old place oughta be on the Hysterical Register, you wanna know what
I
think. You folks got
any plans for remodelin’?”
“We like the place just the way it is,” Francie said. “Some of the bathrooms need to be brought up-to-date. But we’d like to keep it hys—historical.”
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Flebberman, finished with his cake, leaned back and crossed his arms. “Uh-huh,” he said. He glanced quickly at his wife, who was eating her cake in tiny, vicious bites, without looking up. Francie decided it was time to change the subject.
“It just occurred to me as I was walking up here that I’ll be needing a vehicle of some sort,” she said. “My husband went back to the city and left me without a car. How much are you asking for that pickup truck in your driveway?”
Amazement crossed Flebberman’s face. “You wanna buy
that
thing?” he said, incredulous. “Does it run?”
“Sure, it runs, but . . .”
“Show it to ’er,” said Jennifer quickly.
“Yeah, yeah, sure, I’ll show it to ’er. Might be better off with a two-legged horse, but I’ll show it to her,” said Flebberman. He stood up and frisbeed his paper plate in the direction of the garbage can. It bounced off the wall and dithered crazily on the floor, like a dropped coin.
“Plate fell,” he said to his wife. “I’ll get it,” she said sullenly.
“Lemme get my boots on,” he said to Francie.
❚ ❚ ❚
They stepped outside again and Francie breathed deeply, grateful for the fresh air. Flebberman led her around the house to the shed and got in the old pickup truck. He started it up after several tries and eased it out onto the driveway, where it sat shivering, belch ing blue smoke. Thanks to Bondo and rust, the truck itself was no discernible color, though it might have been red once. He got out and slammed the door, but it bounced open again, accompanied by a shower of rust from underneath. Embarrassed, he pushed it gently, leaning into it until it clicked.
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“Forgot about that latch,” he said. “You got to hit ’er just right or she don’t shut. Push ’er, see. Yeh don’t ever slam ’er.”
“I see,” said Francie.
“You know how to drive a stick?” “As a matter of fact, yes.”
“Well, that’s good, ’cept when I put the new transmission into this thing I kinda got things a little backwards. I oughta show ya what I mean.” He paused, considering. “She don’t have long left. You sure you want ’er? She’s gonna need work. A lotta work.”
“Will it be the kind of work I can hire you to do?”