Final Rights (2 page)

TWO

1916

Big
dreams that seem reasonable to the dreamer serve as a common hallmark of early
childhood, and even as a very little girl, Marie Eleanor Vance believed she
would live a happy life filled with everything she wanted. Her parents had
enough of everything to take care of her and her brother. Kind and gentle folk,
not given to drama nor attractive to difficulty, they nurtured their children
with a healthy balance of love and discipline. Families just like Ellie’s populated
the quiet neighborhood where she lived. She had plenty of friends and peaceful
days sprinkled with sunshine, freedom and security.

Then she entered first grade. She approached
this phase of her life with great expectations, just as she did any new adventure.
So when little things began to happen that challenged her beliefs about herself
and her life, she let them slip by barely noticed. She avoided engaging in
battles with the other children. When they tried to provoke her, she smiled
sweetly and went to find other playmates. When it rained, she anticipated the
sun coming back out. In the heat of the day, she awaited the cool evening
ahead. In the cold grip of winter, she bundled up and looked forward to the
arrival of spring. Ellie’s approach to life worked very well indeed, but even
the most optimistic outlook sometimes must give way to reality.

Ellie got her first bloody nose at the hands
of a bully. Grace was sorely misnamed by her parents who believed they had
received a child with a good disposition following an uneventful and easy
delivery. Big and gawky, she towered over most of the other first graders.
Bossy, demanding and downright mean spirited for no reason apparent to anyone,
not even Grace, she enjoyed nothing more than making the other kids squirm.

Ellie didn’t squirm
well. Being an optimist, she took little notice of Grace. For a bully, it is
close to unbearable to be ignored or, worse yet, not even noticed. So Grace had
little choice, in her own mind at least, but to take all necessary action to
get Ellie’s attention.

This took the form, one
fine morning, of a threat to throw a shovelful of sand into Ellie’s face. Ellie
had to acknowledge a danger so imminent and personal. She looked up from her
play just in time to meet the flying sand head on. It filled her mouth and eyes
and slipped under her dainty dress, covering her body with grit. Stunned, she
could barely move as Grace dropped the shovel and came at her with clenched
fists.

Ellie scrambled away at the last second,
heading across the playground. Almost within reach of safety, Grace hard on her
heels, Ellie slipped and fell against the swing set, and that’s when she got
the bloody nose.

Of course the adults in charge had reached
her by this time, and they coddled and tended to her. She saw others haul Grace
away. Her classmates, uninjured and secretly grateful, cowered on the
playground as they watched the scene unfold. They had learned long ago that
Grace picked on those who paid no attention to her. Ellie the Optimist had not
learned that lesson. So, the fault lay with her, didn’t it?

The adults washed Ellie off, cleaned her up
and sent her home. The nosebleed stopped quickly with no real harm
done—according to the adults in charge, at least. Ellie’s parents took the same
approach. One of life’s little lessons: be more attentive next time, steer
clear of trouble, watch what’s happening around you, pick yourself up, brush
yourself off and move on.

In the world of an optimist, these helpful
hints seemed puzzling. Ellie wondered how bad things could happen to a good
child like herself, in a peaceful world like the one she lived in, on a lovely
day like this one. Many years passed before Ellie began to find answers to
these troubling questions. Nonetheless, her life unfolded much as she originally
expected it to in the years that followed.

Grace disappeared from school when her
family moved on shortly after the playground incident. Ellie settled into first
grade easily after that and quickly became a star pupil. Intelligent and
creative, she did as well in reading and writing as she did in arithmetic. She
participated joyfully in arts and crafts and enthusiastically presented her
mother with her macaroni collages and handprints in plaster of Paris. First
grade faded into second grade, then third, then fourth, and although small
glitches occurred along the way, she typically sidestepped any real harm. As a
natural problem solver, whenever little things came up to disturb Ellie’s happy
life, she quickly found a way around them or through them.

By the time she entered high school,
however, Ellie began to understand the flow of her life would not always be as
smooth as she had hoped. This realization formed about the same time Ellie
became interested in boys. Although popular with all her classmates, Ellie knew
the boys she found most attractive did not seem drawn to her.

Dating age arrived for Ellie and her
girlfriends with mixed results. Some of them developed breasts and hips and
winsome smiles, but not so for Ellie. She retained her little girl shape too
long, and when her body finally began maturing, she grew up, not out—no breasts
or hips to speak of—but suddenly she towered several inches taller than her
friends and, in many cases, taller than the boys in her class.

She wore nice clothes, always
clean and neat, but not stylish ones like the other girls. Her mousy brown hair
lacked the rich chestnut glow she longed for. Fine, thick and almost straight,
it fell short of the wavy, full and luxurious hair of her mother. She could
live with all those little shortcomings. With a nice smile, pretty laugh,
generous nature and strong, healthy body, only one problem truly stood in
Ellie’s way: Ellie was almost pretty.

Close-enough-to-pretty meant she had
friends. It established her place on the fringe of the popular crowd. It
resulted in invitations to parties and landed her a part-time job at the soda
fountain at Woolworth’s. Close-enough-to-pretty attracted just about everything
she wanted except those cute boys who asked girls out.

While her friends began dating, Ellie sat
home alone. She studied her face in the mirror.
If only my eyes were not quite that close together,
she thought.
If only my hair were wavy; if only my face was more oval
instead of so square.
If
only, if only, if only . . .

Then Ellie would quietly cry herself to sleep and
hope for dreams of being more than almost pretty.

THREE

2004

Tate’s excitement about
finding the old house offset her physical exhaustion as she headed back home.
In fact, she found herself enjoying her walk now that she took a more leisurely
pace. Surprisingly, walking had become one of her favorite activities since
arriving in Asheville. She had trudged her way through New York out of sheer
necessity, so the notion of walking for pleasure had taken some time to
cultivate.

So many things had changed in Tate’s life
since she left the City. She now owned two properties, both upstairs-downstairs
duplexes sitting next to each other on a quiet urban street. She occupied the
top space in one of the units, and the upstairs apartment of the building next
door sat vacant in the early stages of a major upgrade.

She hoped the carpenter doing the work would
be on site when she returned, so seeing his truck sitting at the curb as she
rounded the corner made her happy. She popped into the apartment instead of
heading directly home.

“Hey, Dave, how’s it going?”

“Mornin’, Tate. Okay, I guess. Quite a mess
they left in front of your house. Any damage?”

“Nothing a trip to the car wash won’t fix. I
can scrape egg off my windshield, but now I’ll have to actually get the truck
washed. Been putting that off for weeks.” The walk—and the discovery of the old
house—had done exactly what Tate hoped. Her anger about the egging had
disappeared. “How’s the work coming along?”

“Hard to tell at this stage just what you’re
going to find.” Dave’s gesture swept the empty room.

Tate looked around. The apartment had been
gutted, and the salvage and trash covered the front yard in piles. The floors
had been stripped of all covering, revealing an unidentified hardwood coated
with grime and aged to a dull gray.

“I think you’ve got heart pine here,” Dave
said, indicating the floor.

“Really? Do you think we can save it?”

“Don’t know for sure, but it looks pretty
good.” Dave surveyed the floors, running his hands lovingly over the old wood
as if he could feel its soul.

“The wood is solid, not spongy anywhere.
It’s been cut up pretty bad in some places, but I think we may be able to save
it here in this room. This interior has been changed a lot. The doorway to the
back used to be over there, I think.” He pointed to the now barren kitchen
wall. “And it had a fireplace right here at one time.” He tapped the floor in
front of the hallway entrance with his toe.

Tate examined the room. It ran the full
length of the front of the house, over two hundred square feet of open space
with natural light streaming in from sunrise to sunset through tall windows
positioned midway between the floor and ceiling in groups of three.

New windows would eventually grace the east
side of the room, but at this point Dave had progressed no further than
removing the inside trim on the old ones. Tate hated to give up that set of
original windows but decided to replace them with shorter units in order to
create a second wall that could accommodate a countertop and cabinets. By
expanding the counter space, she had made room for a dishwasher—one of the
modern conveniences she considered essential but still lacked in her own living
space.

“I often wonder how old this house really
is, Dave. Any ideas on that?”

Dave focused on the
room, feet planted firmly, shoulder-width apart, hands on his hips, fingers
resting gently on his tool belt. He was a good-looking guy with a gentle,
country way about him. His brown hair hung in short, loose curls over his ears,
his mouth always arched in a small, permanent grin, his blue eyes smiling as if
what he saw always made him happy.

Tate liked working with Dave. She liked
being around him, and that always surprised her a little. In fact, Tate had
spent most of her life being surprised when she met men she actually liked. She
didn’t think of men in general as bad people, she just didn’t have any
particular use for most of them, and she had little interest in getting to know
them—except for her clients, of course, back in her social worker days.

She glanced at Dave now, happy to be working
with him and aware she trusted him. She welcomed feeling that way about a
straight man.

“I’d guess the 1930s, maybe early ’40s,”
Dave said. “It’s got these heart pine floors, and the German siding on the
porch was very common back then. It was cheap and popular.”

“Yeah, I love that wooden porch. It would be
nice to have the whole place like that.”

“It probably is under the vinyl
siding.”
 

“Why do you think they covered the wood up?”
Tate asked.

“Vinyl siding was all the rage in the ’60s.
Everyone wanted it because it was so easy to take care of. You never had to
paint again if you put it on your house.”

“But it’s so ugly,” Tate lamented. They had
walked outside as they talked, and she looked around the house, trying to
imagine what it had looked like when originally built.

“Yeah, it’s ugly,” Dave agreed.

“Well, maybe next time around I’ll try to do
something about that. I wish I could afford to have it all removed and give
this place a coat of yellow paint.”

“Yellow would be nice . . . I guess.” Dave
seemed skeptical.

“You know, Dave, I was walking over in
Montford just before I got here and I saw an old house with a door much like
this one. Don’t you think that’s odd?”

Tate and Dave studied the massive front door
which stood at least eight feet high. The wood had never been painted, only
sealed, so it retained its beautiful natural color. The bottom of the door
sported a solid wood panel framed by delicate, scrolled molding. A similar
panel in the top held six panes of old glass mottled with the small
imperfections Tate loved. The original lock mounted to the outside of the door
needed a skeleton key, which had been lost long ago. A cheap silver deadbolt
had been added to provide security. The metal hinges also sat on the outside of
the door and matched the old lock, all of them adorned by intricate carvings.

“Yep. It’s a bit odd on this little house,
but it’s beautifully crafted and in great shape.”

“Any idea how I can find out who made this
door?”

“Why would you wanna do that?”

“I just wonder why this house has such a
fancy door. It seems out of place.”

Dave
watched Tate as she surveyed the house. He’d seen the same look on her face
many times.
Obviously a
dreamer
. She had a vision
for this place as crystal clear to her as raindrops glistening in the sun after
an afternoon thunderstorm. Practical, too, and he appreciated that about
her.
 

When he first began this job, he wondered
what to make of her. On one hand, she could be a bit overwhelming, on the other
quite forgiving. Though overweight and strongly built, she made no attempt to
appear small by hiding her even bigger personality. He quickly understood that
Tate rarely displayed self-consciousness. When she stood near him, it always
came as a surprise to realize the difference in their heights. She just acted
like a taller woman, if that made any sense, which it didn’t when he tried to
think about it. But still, he could not deny the truth of it.

Dave knew Tate had a temper. He had seen it
brewing on a few occasions over the course of their work together. He also knew
she never came close to venting her frustration at him. He found this curious.
He had let her down in different ways on several occasions, and this job in
particular had been a problem. He had too many things going on to give it the
attention it needed. He had done his best to squeeze in a couple of hours here,
a morning there, to work on the renovation. But everything remained way behind
schedule, and he would soon run out of excuses for the many delays.

“So what’s on the agenda for today?” Tate
asked.

“Well, I’m hoping to get that wall in the
bathroom torn out so things are ready for the plumber. It should only take me a
couple more hours.”

“That sounds good. Can
we be ready for the carpet to be installed in the bedrooms next Thursday?
That’s when the guys are scheduled to come.”

“We should make it by then. It depends on
the plumber more than me. He has to rough in the half-bath and get it inspected
before I can get the sub-flooring down.” Dave braced himself for her response.

“You
know I’m concerned about getting this place done, Dave. I was hoping to have it
ready for occupancy by the first of next month. Any chance that can still
happen?”

“It’s possible. We’ll have to push it some.”

“Okay, Dave. We’ll figure it out. I’ll need
enough time after you’re done to paint before getting the carpet installed.”

The only hint of Tate’s
frustration was the veiled comment about painting near new carpeting. Even though
he knew he had let her down again, Tate didn’t give him a hard time about it.
He wondered if she had always been this way and if not, how long her
flexibility would last.

Tate left the apartment feeling good about how she had
handled things with Dave. Controlling her anger became easier each time she
practiced it. Ever since she had escaped from New York and her job working with
mentally ill and substance abusing homeless people on the city streets, Tate
had been mellowing. A slow process for sure, but now, three years later, she
seemed like a different person.

She felt enormously grateful that she had
somehow managed to land in Asheville. The move had not been a conscious
decision, nor the result of plenty of research and planning. Rather, she came for
vacation with the intent of spending the fall riding her motorcycle along the
Blue Ridge Parkway, and she simply never left.

Everywhere she went, Tate met folks who had
moved to Asheville for the same reasons she had. Nestled in a valley in the
Blue Ridge Mountains, it is a small town surrounded by natural beauty. With
long, leisurely springs and falls, and short, mild summers and winters, the
weather appealed to Tate greatly. Even today, as she had cleaned the dried egg
off her windshield, she’d taken time to breathe in the crisp air of the chilly
morning and feel it deeply in her lungs. She relished the simple act of being
aware of her breathing. She had lived most of her life shutting out
non-essentials such as feeling, enjoying and being present in the moment, and
she liked the slow, steady change in how she lived her life.
  

Tate spent the rest of the day cleaning
house, reading and trying to push thoughts of the abandoned house in Montford
out of her mind with little success.
Wonder
who owns the place. Why is it just sitting there vacant?
Those questions and more populated her
thoughts and dreams that night.