The Clear-Out (2 page)

Duncan fought back.

He did not like looking at the wall made of bookshelves. He did not like having a wife who did not answer when he called.

He tried to move the television into Tess’s library.

Tess put her foot down.

“I want one room in this house that is mine,” she said. “I’ve cleaned this house and earned money to help pay for it. I deserve a space in it that
is mine. If you want
this
space, then I will take over your sports room. If you won’t let me have that, then I will take over your work-out room. And if you won’t let me have
that,
then I will take my pension and my savings and leave. I’ll move to my own apartment with my books.”

“One of these days,” Duncan said, “I’ll get rid of all these books and put my dining room back.”

“You can do that,” Tess said, “but you had better be ready for what happens next.”

He never tried it.

Tess did allow Duncan to move another chair into the room. He would sit in there with her sometimes.

But he was not used to sitting without a TV in front of him, and he had never liked reading.

When he tried to talk to her, she put her book down and let him talk. But he knew she was just waiting for him to be done so she could go back to her reading.

Duncan hated the books. He hated them for what they were doing to his wife.

Before she retired, Tess worked as a secretary in a law office. Her clothes were always pressed and her hair was always done.

Once she got her library, all that changed. She got her hair cut very short. When Duncan asked her why, she told him, “I don’t want to be bothered with my hair.”

He told her he didn’t like it short. Tess said he would get used to it.

She also stopped wearing makeup.

“How I look is not important to me anymore,” she said.

Tess gave away all her small purses and started carrying a shoulder bag big enough to hold a book. She always had a book with her. She would read her book whenever she felt like it, no matter what else was going on around her.

Tess even took one of her books to the annual clubhouse dinner at the golf course. Duncan had gone to the bar for a while to chat with his golf buddies. When he came back to the table, she was not talking with the other wives. She was reading her book!

He took the book away from her. In front of everyone. She called a taxi and went home without him.

Tess and Duncan went on this way. Duncan got used to it. But he never liked it.

Then, one day, Cancer walked into the house.

No matter what they did, they could not get it to leave.

After her second operation for cancer, Tess was too weak to go upstairs. Her library became her sick room.

The La-Z-Boy went into the living room. In its place was their son’s old single bed. The first-floor bathroom was close by, and so was the kitchen.

The books now stood in piles on the floor, and the shelves held the things Tess needed to get through the day. Medicines and clean sheets and nightgowns filled several shelves. On one shelf were the adult diapers for when Tess was too weak to walk to the toilet.

Home care nurses and other help came and went. Duncan hated having strangers in his house. He would turn on the Golf Channel while they looked after Tess. Staring at the TV, he tried not to
think about what was happening on the other side of the wall.

The helpers visited during the day. At night, Duncan slept on the sofa. That way, he could hear Tess if she needed him in the middle of the night.

Tess’s hair fell out with the cancer treatment. Duncan bought her hats to keep her head warm. Hats with flowers, hats with pompoms, hats in bright colours. He looked for hats everywhere he went. If he found the right hat, it would fix everything. That’s what his heart told him, anyway.

When Tess felt well enough, she read in bed.

One night, Duncan stood in the kitchen door and watched her. When her eyes started to close from the effect of the drugs, she shook herself awake and kept reading.

Are you afraid? he wanted to ask her. Did you have a good life? Do you regret anything? Did I make you happy?

He wanted to ask her all of those questions. But he couldn’t ask any of them. He was too far out of the habit of talking with his wife.

“Enough reading for tonight,” he said instead, and he started to take the book from her.

“But I’m almost finished!”

“Finish it later,” Duncan said. “You need to rest.”

Taking the book away from Tess was easy. She had no more strength in her hands. She could not hold on to the book. It slid through her pale, thin fingers.

“I want to know how the story ends,” Tess said.

“There is plenty of time for that.” Duncan put the book on one of the piles in the corner of the room.

“I want my book back,” Tess said from her bed.

“Forget the book,” Duncan snapped. “Who cares about a book? Talk to me! I am your husband!”

“I want to know what happens!”

“Talk to me!” Duncan took hold of her hand. “Be with me!”

“I want to know . . .”

Tess started to cough, a thin, kitten-like cough.

“Do you need some water?” Duncan asked.

He picked up the jug he kept on the shelf of the china cupboard. It was empty. “I’ll get you some water.”

He took the jug into the kitchen. He let the water run until it was as cold as it would get. He
kicked himself for not keeping water in the fridge. He filled the jug, brought it back into the sick room, and poured his wife a glass.

He put his hand under Tess’s head to raise her up so she could take a drink.

That was when he knew that she was gone.

Nothing is quite as empty as a house after a funeral.

Bobby took apart the bed in the sick room and got rid of the stuff of death. After a few days, Duncan had to insist that his son leave. It had taken Bobby months to find that job in the city. Duncan didn’t want the boy to risk losing it by taking too many days off.

Besides, there was nothing for Bobby to do. The funeral was over, and the paperwork was done. The good ladies of the church had delivered their pies and one-dish suppers. The fellows from the golf club had slapped Duncan’s back in sympathy and slipped him some bottles of gin. There was nothing left to do now.

Duncan took a beer out of the fridge and sat on the sofa. He put his feet on the coffee table and
picked up the remote control.
Wide World of Golf
was on. He turned up the volume.

“Tess!” he called out.

Then he started crying.

Duncan cried for a long time. He cried until his head ached and his shirt front was wet. Then he looked up from his tears to the wall made by the backs of the bookshelves.

He hated those shelves! He hated those books! He hated what they had done to his wife. They had changed her from a smiling, busy little woman into some strange person. A thing that frowned and thought and tried to understand things that no one had any business trying to understand.

Well, she was gone now, and he didn’t have to put up with the library any longer. And he wouldn’t. Not one more minute!

Duncan reached under the kitchen sink, grabbed the box of garbage bags, marched into the dining room. He started filling the bags with books. He grabbed them all and threw them in the bags, stuffing the bags as full as he could without breaking them.

“Those books are just good for garbage,” he said. He started to take the bags out to the curb but
stopped by his car instead. The books weren’t any good to him, but they might be good for someone, and he hated throwing things away.

Duncan took his golf clubs out of the car’s trunk to make more room. He filled the trunk, then the back seat, and even the front seat. But he got all the bags in.

He had to back out of his driveway carefully. Five or six skateboarders were spinning around the turning circle in front of his house. Duncan honked his horn to get them to move.

He drove downtown, to the Good Shepherd Thrift Store.

“You take books?”

A man sat behind the counter wearing a badge with “Volunteer” written on it. He turned his head to face the wall of books that ran along the side of the shop.

“What kind of books?” he asked.

“What do you mean, what kind?” Duncan asked. “I don’t know what kind. Books.”

“Well, we do take them,” the volunteer said. “Are they good books?”

“They’re books.”

Duncan spoke the word as if it was a curse.

“I mean, are they clean? We don’t need bookworms or bugs.”

“There are no bugs in my house,” Duncan snarled. “If you don’t want the books, I’ll take them to the dump.”

“Let’s take a look at them,” the volunteer said. “Do you have them with you?”

“They’re in the car. It’s parked out front.” Duncan waited for the volunteer to get up and help him.

For a moment, the volunteer didn’t move, but then he picked up the hint. “Let’s go get them,” he said, as if the job was something bright and shiny and fun to do. As he moved out from behind the counter, Duncan saw the wheelchair.

“Sorry, I didn’t see—”

“Load me up,” the volunteer said. “I can’t feel anything anyway. Might as well make myself useful. I’m Kevin.”

Kevin held out his hand. Duncan shook it and shared his own name. “What happened to your legs?” he asked. He wouldn’t usually ask such a nosy question, but his wife had just died. That meant he could do what he liked.

“Got beat up,” Kevin said.

“What?”

“Coming out of the hardware store. Can you believe it? I got lucky,” Kevin said. “Only paralyzed below the waist. My husband didn’t make it.”

“Your husband.”

Once Duncan would have been shocked or disgusted. But cancer changes everything. Now he just wanted to know one thing.

“How do you manage?” he asked. “My wife just died.”

The two men looked at each other.

Kevin shook his head. “Let’s get those books.”

They made several trips. The black garbage bags made quite a pile on the floor.

“She was always reading. Drove me crazy.”

“Dan was always volunteering,” Kevin said.
“That
drove
me
crazy. And look at me now.”

Duncan didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to think. He didn’t want to feel. He didn’t want to do anything but put his dining room back together and get drunk.

So that’s what he did. He went home and carried the parts of the dining room table up from the basement. How had his tiny little wife got them down the stairs in the first place? He screwed the legs back on. Next, he put the china and Tess’s little
glass animals back in the china cabinet. Then he opened one of the bottles of gin he got from his golf buddies. He stayed drunk for a week.

Months went by.

Life went on.

That was the worst part about death, Duncan thought one morning as he was pulling on his socks. He had put on socks when Tess was alive, and he was still putting on socks now that she was dead.

For a very short time, her death was important. People cried. They talked about her. They gave him things to try to cheer him up. But time passed. Life went on. It went on without Tess.

And, every morning, Duncan put on a clean pair of socks. Just as if nothing had happened.

He was managing okay. That’s what he told people when they asked: “I’m managing okay.”

He had a freezer full of frozen dinners. He often bought a roasted chicken. He learned how to work
the washing machine and dryer. He could run the vacuum cleaner, and he knew how to use the dust cloth. When he ran out of something, he wrote it on the chalkboard so he could remember to buy more.

As always, he put his dirty coffee cup in the sink. But it was not washed and back in the cupboard the next time he reached for it. That was the hardest thing to get used to.

When the pile of shoes by the door got messy, it stayed messy. No unseen hand straightened it up for him.

Wherever he dropped stuff, that’s where it stayed. If it got picked up, he had to do it.

At first, Duncan let the mess grow. Tess was supposed to clean the house, damn it. If she didn’t do her job, he sure wasn’t going to do it for her! He had his own things to do—mowing the lawn, hosing down the driveway. Things like that.

His feelings changed the day their minister, Reverend Jones, dropped in. Duncan saw his mess through the other man’s eyes. Ashamed about what he had done to his wife’s clean house, he thought about hiring a cleaner. But he could not stand the thought of another stranger in his home. Way too
many strangers had come in and out when his wife was sick. Visiting nurses, home-care workers, busybody neighbours.

The worst were the members of his wife’s book club. They would sit with her and hold her hand and chatter quietly, as though they had some big secret. They stole time from him. He could barely stand to look at them at the funeral.

So he had to learn to pick up after himself.

“I hope you’re happy, Tess,” Duncan muttered to her as he dried and put away his dishes. “You finally got me to do housework.”

Other things changed, too.

He could no longer watch the Golf Channel. He tried after the funeral, but he couldn’t do it. It just wasn’t fun anymore. He realized that it was fun when Tess was alive because it proved he was running his own show. Tess didn’t like golf, but he was his own man. He could watch and play golf whenever he wanted to. Now that sort of thinking held no meaning.

But there were other channels. Duncan watched a lot of reality TV and the channel that showed old movies. Between television and little errands around town, he could fill up a day. He did not look back,
and he did not look into the future. This moment, the one he was in, was all he could manage.

Three months after Tess died, strange things started happening.

Duncan didn’t notice them at first.

And when he did, he put them down to old age.

He got into the habit of tidying the house every night after the eleven o’clock news. He would walk through the rooms, picking up any stray papers, putting away any stray dishes. He put the newspaper in the blue box and tidied the shoes on the mat by the kitchen door. Alone now, Duncan feared falling if he got up in the middle of the night. He liked to know the stairs and the floor were clear of anything he could trip over. And, he noticed, waking up to a tidy house was nicer than starting the day in a mess.