Chapter 6 - The Anatomy of an Attic
Three weeks after Thanksgiving, the winter finally settled into the Ohio River bottoms with an iron finality that locked the county roads in six inches of hard, rutted ice.
The call didn't come from Nicole. It didn't come from Aaron.
It came from Mrs. Hattie Gable, who had lived across the street from my parents on Sycamore Lane since the year the smelter had its big explosion down in Owensboro. Hattie was eighty-two, carried an aluminum walking cane with four rubber feet, and knew the precise time every mail carrier, oil truck, and stray beagle crossed the city limits.
My shop phone rang at six-fifteen on a Tuesday morning while I was dressing the wheels on the bench grinder.
"Mara?"
"Morning, Mrs. Gable."
"There’s a commercial dumpster in your mother's driveway, child," Hattie said, her voice dry as corn husks through the receiver. "A thirty-yard roll-off from that outfit up in Evansville. Two young fellows with pry bars and work gloves have been hauling boxes out of Warren's attic since twenty minutes past five."
The grinder wheel hummed against the tool rest, a high, singing vibration that traveled through my fingers into my elbow.
"Who ordered it, Hattie?"
"Nicole's car is sitting by the curb," Hattie replied, her tone sharpening with an old woman’s unyielding contempt for out-of-town children. "She got here last night in that silver thing with the Indiana plates. Beverly’s sitting in the front parlor with her coat on, watching them throw things through the upstairs window. They just tossed Warren’s canvas duck decoys into the bin, Mara. The ones he carved out of cedar telephone poles back before you were born."
I shut off the grinder.
The wheel took forty-five seconds to spin down, the sound dying in a long, descending whine that felt like a drill bit sinking into bone.
"Thank you, Hattie," I said.
"You want me to walk over there with my cane, Mara? I can tell those boys this street has an ordinance against commercial dumping before seven a.m."
"No, Hattie," I said softly. "Don't you get your feet cold. I’ll be there in twelve minutes."
I didn't take the school truck. I walked out to the staff lot, climbed into my F-150, and pulled the gearshift down into reverse before the oil pressure gauge had even climbed out of the red.
The sky over Henderson was the color of a bruised turnip—dark, purple-gray clouds scudding low over the bare sycamores, carrying the sharp, metallic smell of fresh snow coming off the river.
When I turned onto Sycamore Lane, the roll-off dumpster dominated the street. It was an enormous, rusty orange box, twenty feet long, its steel sides scarred with scrapes and spray-painted with the name TRI-STATE DISPOSAL. It sat crookedly on Beverly’s front lawn, its steel wheels having torn two deep, frozen ruts through the turf where Dad had planted his zoysia grass thirty summers ago.
A young man in a hooded sweatshirt was standing in the bed of the dumpster, using an eight-pound sledgehammer to smash an old oak chest of drawers so it would lay flat beneath the rim.
Crack.
The sound of sixty-year-old mortise joints splitting apart carried through the freezing morning air like gunshots.
Nicole stood on the front porch, wearing a long down coat the color of wet slate, holding a clipboard in one gloved hand and a travel mug of coffee in the other. Her hair was pulled back into a tight, severe knot behind her ears, her breath rising in short, rhythmic puffs of white steam as she pointed toward the attic dormer window.
"The metal trunks next!" Nicole shouted up toward the roof. "Don't bother with the stairs, Cody! Just drop them over the sill! The hinges are rusted shut anyway!"
I didn't slam the truck door. I stepped down into the slush, my heavy boots finding purchase on the icy asphalt, and walked up the concrete drive.
Nicole saw me when I was twenty feet away.
Her posture didn't shift, but her hand tightened around the handle of her travel mug until the plastic lid clicked.
"Mara," she said, her voice carrying that bright, defensive executive edge that she used when an administrative audit went sideways. "I wondered when Hattie would get around to calling you. That woman spends more time looking through her blinds than a state trooper."
"Get those boys out of the attic, Nicole," I said.
I didn't yell. My voice was low, flat, and cold as the frost on the dumpster's orange rim.
"We have a right to prepare this property for an estate liquidation, Mara," Nicole said, stepping to the edge of the porch steps, holding the clipboard against her chest like an armor plate. "Aaron filed the emergency petition for appointment of a temporary conservator on Monday. Mom signed the voluntary declaration of incapacity yesterday afternoon in front of a notary at the bank."
I stopped at the bottom of the steps.
"She signed what?"
"A voluntary declaration," Nicole repeated, her chin lifting with that sharp, aristocratic certainty she had inherited from Beverly. "She declared that she is no longer capable of managing the maintenance and physical preservation of this residential improvement. Under Kentucky Revised Statutes Chapter 387, that allows the designated conservator—which is me, Mara, not Aaron, so you can stop waving that vocational plat around—to clear the personal property and secure the premises against structural waste."
"Where is she?" I asked.
Nicole gestured with her coffee mug toward the front bay window.
Behind the lace curtains, Beverly was sitting in her high-backed wing chair. She was wearing her Sunday coat—the heavy, dark-green wool coat with the faux-fur collar that Dad had bought her at the department store in Evansville for Christmas in nineteen-ninety-five. Her gloved hands were folded in her lap, her small, round face pale and still as a stone behind the double-paned glass.
She wasn't reading. She wasn't watching the men. She was staring straight ahead at the blank plaster wall where my father’s high school diploma and his forty-year service certificate from the smelter used to hang.
The wall was empty. Four small, white squares of unpainted drywall showed where the frames had been pulled down, the picture hooks dangling from their bent brass nails like tiny hangman’s nooses.
"She’s seventy-four, Mara," Nicole said, her voice dropping into a tight, urgent hiss. "She can't climb the stairs. She can't carry a laundry basket up from the basement. Aaron and I have already put down the five-thousand-dollar deposit on the Carmel suite. They have an indoor swimming pool. They have a driver who takes them to the symphony on Thursdays. What are you going to give her? Another winter of frozen pipes and a son who brings her birdhouses made out of pine scraps?"
From the attic window above our heads came a heavy, sliding scrape.
A metal footlocker—an old olive-drab army trunk Dad had brought back from his service at Fort Knox in nineteen-fifty-six—appeared on the sill.
"Heads up down there!" a voice yelled from the dormer.
"Hold that trunk!" I roared.
The voice was the one I used when an apprentice stepped across the red line while the radial arm was spinning. It wasn't loud; it was an explosion of pure, diaphragmatic force that hit the front porch like a physical wave.
The young man in the window froze, the heavy steel trunk balanced half-in, half-out on the yellow-painted pine sill.
The boy in the dumpster stopped his sledgehammer mid-swing, his eyes wide through his plastic safety glasses.
Nicole flinched, taking half a step backward toward the front door. "Mara, stop it! You don't have the legal authority to interfere with a court-appointed conservator!"
"The conservatorship hearing is set for next Tuesday, Nicole," I said, walking up the three concrete steps until I stood twelve inches from her face. "I received the clerk’s notice yesterday afternoon. Until the judge signs that order, this house is held under the life estate of Warren Collins's widow, with the remainder interest vested in his two daughters."
I reached out, my calloused fingers closing around the top edge of her clipboard with a grip that had spent twenty years turning three-quarter-inch steel pipe wrenches.
"And you," I whispered, leaning in until she could smell the cold yellow pine sawdust on my coat, "are currently committing criminal trespass on an undivided remainder estate."
"Let go of that," Nicole hissed, trying to jerk the board away.
The aluminum didn't move. My hand was a five-inch steel vise anchored into thirty years of manual labor.
"You have twenty minutes to get that dumpster off this lawn, Nicole," I said. "If that truck isn't hooked to that orange box by seven o'clock, I’m calling the county road engineer. The curb permit for a thirty-yard roll-off in this precinct requires a fifty-dollar fee and a signed bond from the adjacent landowners. I didn't sign the bond. Which means that box is sitting on the county right-of-way without a commercial variance."
Nicole stared at me. The color drained from her lips, leaving two thin, white lines that matched the ones she had made when we were seven and nine years old and Dad caught her taking quarters from his change dish to buy strawberry lip balm at the Rexall.
"You're an animal, Mara," she whispered, her voice trembling with a hatred that had been curing under the floorboards of this house for forty years. "You've always been an animal. Just like Dad. You think because your hands are dirty, you're the only one who loved him."
"No, Nicole," I said, releasing the clipboard so suddenly she stumbled back against the brick siding. "I think because my hands are dirty, I'm the only one who knows what it took for him to build this."
The front door opened.
The brass knob turned with that familiar, dry click, and Beverly stepped onto the porch.
She didn't have her walker. She was leaning with both hands on an old umbrella—an umbrella with an imitation tortoise-shell handle that Warren had bought her at the drugstore thirty years ago.
Her wool coat was buttoned crookedly, the second button forced into the third hole, pulling the green fabric tight across her frail, rounded shoulders. Her hair, usually so stiff with lacquer, had come loose on the left side, a thin, silver wisp blowing across her cheek in the river wind.
"Mother," Nicole said, turning instantly, her voice adopting that high, synthetic sweetness that made my teeth ache. "Go back inside. It’s twenty degrees out here. Mara’s just being difficult about the paperwork."
Beverly didn't look at Nicole.
She looked past her, past the orange dumpster, past the bare sycamores, straight at my face.
Her eyes were pale, watery, ringed with the yellowish haze of cataracts that she had refused to let the clinic in Evansville remove because she said she didn't want strangers cutting on her face.
"Mara Jean," she said. Her voice was thin, like greaseproof paper, but it had the old, sharp edge beneath it.
"Yes, Beverly," I said.
She stood there on the porch her husband had poured with river gravel, her small, arthritic hands shaking against the black umbrella shaft.
"Your father’s cedar decoys," she whispered.
I paused, my boots frozen on the top riser. "What about them?"
May you like
"They're in the bottom of that box," Beverly said, her chin lifting half an inch, the pearls at her ears glinting in the gray December dawn. "He carved the mallard drake the winter you had the scarlet fever down in the old house on Second Street. He sat by your crib with a drawknife until your fever broke. You tell those boys to get it out of the trash."
Then she turned, her umbrella dragging across the concrete, walked back into the empty living room, and pulled the oak door shut behind her.
