Tacoma Stories Read online

  “Hello?” Lars called “Anyone home?”

  He held up the two half gallons of nonfat milk.

  A head appeared at the breakfast nook window to his left, and then Mr. Wilcox came to the door. He said, “What are you doing back here?”

  “Milkman,” said Lars. “Knocked out front. Guess you didn’t hear me.”

  Why he had to lie about it, he didn’t know.

  “Winnie!” called Mr. Wilcox.

  “Two half gallons of nonfat milk,” said Lars. “That’s what you ordered and that’s what you goddamn get.”

  Mr. Wilcox looked at him blankly, and Mrs. Wilcox came into the kitchen wearing a robe.

  “Listen,” said Lars, “once a long time ago my wife and I nearly bought this place. She adored the kitchen.”

  He spoke only to Mrs. Wilcox. “My father’s the real milkman,” he said, “I’m just helping him out.”

  “The kitchen’s what sold me on it, too,” said Mrs. Wilcox. “It’s got such great light.”

  She unlatched the bottom of the Dutch door, swinging it open to meet its top. She asked, “Is your father okay?”

  “He’s fine,” said Lars. “He’s waiting in his truck, probably having a conniption fit that I’m taking so long.”

  It was the first time he had ever said “conniption fit” in his life.

  Though there were fewer windows here than in Lars’s kitchen at home, the whole room was bathed in the kind of light that Lars had always associated with happiness, with birds and whistling and such. It was a great kitchen! How could he have missed it before? The counters were made of granite with little flecks of gold, and the pale yellow walls seemed to dance like the shimmering skirts on hula girls. Even the Mr. Coffee, ordinary by anyone’s standards, perked out the last throes of a new pot of coffee like a chorus of happy frogs.

  “You don’t want to sell this place, do you?” asked Lars.

  “As a matter of fact, we do,” said Mr. Wilcox. “I’m only home this morning because we’re expecting our Realtor. Moving to Portland next month.”

  “Speak for yourself, John Alden,” Mrs. Wilcox said.

  “Cancel the Realtor,” Lars heard himself say. “I’ll buy the house.”

  Lars Larson Motors was not the business he’d thought he’d have when he was young, but it had made him a lot of money. “How much are you asking? We could split the difference, maybe, of whatever your real estate agent would charge.”

  “Seven percent, if you can believe it,” said Mr. Wilcox. “And the price is eighty-seven thousand five hundred, so that would be …”

  “A savings of six thousand one hundred and twenty-five dollars,” said Lars. “Three thousand sixty-two dollars and fifty cents each.”

  He was used to doing calculations in his head.

  “Are you serious?” asked Mr. Wilcox, as Mrs. Wilcox went over to stop the Mr. Coffee in the middle of its climax.

  “As serious as a cancer patient,” said Lars.

  Mr. Wilcox took his Realtor’s card from beneath a refrigerator magnet. “No contingencies, no nothing, just a straight-out purchase, right?” he said. “Because if I call her and cancel this appointment, it won’t be easy to call her back.”

  “Eighty-seven thousand five hundred dollars,” said Lars. “Twenty percent down is seventeen thousand five hundred bucks, in a cashier’s check as soon as I can get to the bank.”

  His prowess with percentages impressed Mr. Wilcox.

  “Winnie can show you the rest of the place while I go down to the stationer’s for a real estate contract?” he said.

  “I’d better go tell my dad,” said Lars.

  When they all walked through the house, heading toward the front door, however, things went downhill fast. There was evidence of water damage on the living room ceiling, plus a hairline crack in the picture window that looked out to the street where the milk truck was parked.

  “We really do live in the kitchen,” Mrs. Wilcox said.

  Outside, the rain had increased, but Lars’s father paced on the parking strip, looking at his watch.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked when he saw them all come out.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, Dad,” said Lars, “but I’m buying this place.”

  “I’m going to the stationer’s for the forms,” said Mr. Wilcox.

  Three of them were smiling, and four of them were getting wet.

  “You’ll have to do the rest of your route alone, Dad,” said Lars.

  Behind the milk truck sat a Volvo 240 from 1974, the first year the model came out. Lars knew it because he had two of them for sale on his lot. He’d gotten one from a guy moving down to a Volkswagen, the other from a woman moving up to a Jag. Volkswagens and Jaguars were what Lars sold, “Master Craftsmanship for Any Pocketbook” his slogan.

  “Well, you better get on with it if your mind’s made up,” his father said. He was upset with this evidence of Lars’s lifelong impulsiveness, and upset with himself because of his own lifelong reluctance to tell Lars what he thought.

  Mr. Wilcox unlocked the Volvo and Lars’s father stepped back into his truck. Lars reached in and took his Lars Larson Motors bottom-heavy travel mug, leaving the china cup.

  “Don’t do this for Immy, Lars,” said his father. “She’s a lost cause.”

  He put his truck in gear and headed up the road.

  “Who’s Immy?” asked Mrs. Wilcox.

  The wind was whipping them with rain, so Lars didn’t answer until they got back to the house. They would have run, but Mrs. Wilcox was wearing slippers and actually slipped on some leaves, taking Lars’s arm.

  “Oh, the chill of these Tacoma mornings,” she said. “I won’t miss them very much, I don’t suppose.”

  Lars thought that the weather in Portland wasn’t much different from the weather in Tacoma, but he kept it to himself. He’d seen a movie once in which a housewife in a robe seduced a man who knocked on her door asking directions.

  “Immy’s my wife,” he said. “Or she was, I guess. Our marriage ended three months ago.”

  In the movie, the housewife took out some maps and leaned against the stranger as he looked them over. Mrs. Wilcox was staring at Lars so steadily that he feared she might have read his mind.

  “Want to see the bedrooms?” he thought he heard her ask.

  “What?”

  “Do you want to see the bedrooms? And there’s a den upstairs, too.”

  “Could I get more coffee first?”

  Lars held up his mug.

  In the movie, the stranger swept the maps off the table, pushing the woman down on it so firmly that the table’s legs broke. Lars followed Mrs. Wilcox into the kitchen. Her robe was conservative, utterly circumspect.

  “How long have you and Mr. Wilcox been married?” he asked. “I mean, is this your first house, or what?”

  Once in the kitchen, she sighed and turned to face him. “Nate’s the one who’s moving to Portland,” she said. “Just like you and Immy, we’re breaking up.”

  “I didn’t mean to pry,” said Lars.

  But in a great kitchen like this one, prying seemed the order of things. In here, prying looked exactly like caring and kindness.

  “I don’t know why I didn’t point this out to Mr. Wilcox,” Lars said, “but the stationer’s isn’t open yet. And as far as I know, he still hasn’t called your Realtor.”

  “Nate knows what he’s doing,” said Mrs. Wilcox. “And what are you saying? You don’t want the house now?”

  Except for the rain against the windows, the kitchen grew quiet, and was darker than it had been earlier. It shamed Lars deeply that all he could think of was that horrid movie.

  “Of course I want it,” he said. “Do you think I’d go back on my word? You can’t sell very many cars if your word doesn’t stand for something.”

  Mrs. Wilcox poured coffee into his Lars Larson Motors bottom-heavy travel mug. “There’s work to do in the living room, and I should tell you there’s been talk of a new ro
of,” she said. “We even had an estimate, seven thousand dollars.”

  “In the automobile business, we have what’s called a ‘lemon’ law,” said Lars, but he smiled when he said it.

  “There should be a lemon law for marriage,” said Mrs. Wilcox.

  They were sitting at the kitchen table by then, but the sudden lack of light made it hard for Lars to see her face. “I don’t mind about the roof,” he said. “I’m handy, can do a lot of the work myself.”

  He smiled again to let her know he meant it. When she returned his smile, Lars got the urge to take her hand, which was lying on the table. He looked out the window at some water falling over the lip of the rain gutter. Eighteen thousand dollars. He decided he would ask if he could come clean the gutters before the deal was closed, maybe even start tearing the old roof off.

  “If Nate thinks he’ll be happy in Portland, Oregon …” said Mrs. Wilcox, but just then the phone rang and she reached around behind her to pluck it from the wall. “This better be an emergency,” she said, before she even said hello. Lars put his hand where hers had been. He felt a bit of warmth on the tabletop.

  “I know that, Lindy. Who doesn’t know a thing like that?” she said. “What do you take me for, Nate’s doormat?”

  She looked at Lars. My sister, she mouthed.

  Lars thought of the comment his father had made before he drove away, and imagined himself saying, “What do you take me for, Dad, Immy’s doormat?”

  Mrs. Wilcox shifted the phone to her right hand, and when she turned to sit properly again saw Lars’s hand where hers had formerly been, his fingers drumming the tabletop. She rested her left hand on his. Lars continued looking at the water pouring over the rain gutter. He let out a rueful laugh. People were nuts when it came to houses, constantly trying to turn them into homes.

  “Yes, Lindy, I will,” said Mrs. Wilcox, “but now I’ve got company and Nate’s not here, so I have to go.”

  Lars did it then. He moved his free hand over and placed it on top of hers, which was still on top of his. He waited for her to pull her hand away, leaving him holding hands with himself. He felt her start to do it, but then, quite miraculously, her hand stayed where it was. The rain gutters would need replacing, too, if someone didn’t tend to them. Her hand felt familiar. It made him realize that she and Immy were about the same size, but also that human warmth, of this most basic kind, at least, was universal.

  When Lars finally looked across the table at her, she was watching him. “You work and work,” she said. “A nice kitchen, a beautiful yard …”

  She put her other hand on top of his in a way that reminded him of summer pickup baseball games. They sat that way for a while, talking a little but really just waiting for Mr. Wilcox. When the rain let up, they stood and went out into the backyard to look at the roof and the gutters. And when Lars saw a ladder lying in the grass, he lifted it and propped it against the wall of the breakfast nook where it just reached the roof.

  “One quick look,” he said. “Do you have a trowel and bucket? While I’m up there, I might dig a bit of that stuff out.”

  Water was still spilling over the gutters, and as he climbed, careful of his footing, Mrs. Wilcox went back into the house. Lars had his Lars Larson Motors bottom-heavy travel mug with him, so he set it on the roof and pushed a hand down into the gutter to see how bad the damage was, his fingers slowly sinking into the muck. Then he stepped back down to wait for Mrs. Wilcox in the yard. When he looked off toward Puget Sound, he saw an even darker sky than the one overhead. More rain was coming, another real storm. March is a whole lot crueler than April, he thought.

  When Mrs. Wilcox came back outside, she was carrying two buckets, two trowels, plus a plastic garbage bag. And she had changed into work clothes similar to Lars’s. “Tag-team gutter cleaning,” she said.

  Lars let himself go a little then. He remembered that the Wilcoxes had the same standing order he did, for two half gallons of nonfat milk. He also remembered that they didn’t have an insulated box on their porch and decided he would bring them his while the house was in escrow, for when neither Winnie nor Nate Wilcox was at home. He would call it a gift to seal the bargain, say that milk had brought them together and they shouldn’t let it spoil.

  He looked at Mrs. Wilcox and then at the roof again, where his Lars Larson Motors bottom-heavy travel mug peeked down at him. The slanted rough gray shingles kept it from falling off.

  “Let’s get to work,” he said.

  The Man Who Looks at the Floor

  [2010]

  I TEND TO WALK FAST, so I want the outside lane of the indoor track I use at my YMCA to be free for passing, if it isn’t used by runners. The clearly posted track rules do say “Slower athletes use the inside lanes,” after all. Athletes, they call us, but 90 percent of us walk, changing directions daily.

  I try to vary the times I go to the Y in order not to keep meeting the same people, basically because I’m inclined to form a negative opinion of them without any evidence other than track behavior—it is something I’ve done all my life. And I also tend to give them nicknames. Here’s a list of those I have currently: “The Two Chatting Women,” who stretch across all three track lanes, so I have to make a big deal out of passing them; “The Lying Bully,” who clips those walking in the running lane and then pretends it was an accident; “The Tea Party Shrew,” who walks in the running lane like she owns it, saying, “I’m a citizen of this country, too!”; and “The Guy Who Looks Like One of the Actors from Soap,” who moseys along at the farthest edges of the running lane like he’s creating a new lane outside of it. I also dislike people who bring their cell phones onto the track, as well as those who try to strike up conversations with me. By now you may be saying, “I don’t have enough jerks around me already that I have to listen to this guy?” but let me tell you, an indoor track is a microcosm of life.

  Now, the title of this story is “The Man Who Looks at the Floor,” which is what I call this one fellow. He’s about my age and something is wrong in his neck, causing him to aim his face squarely down while he wheels around the track. And when I say “squarely,” I mean that if the floor were a mirror, he’d see himself in it straight on.

  On Saturdays, I usually go to the Y an hour before closing, and one recent Saturday, I saw the man who looks at the floor coasting along on the opposite side of the track, staring down like an eagle looking for a lost contact lens. I did a bit of torso twisting in order to avoid him, but when the man walked by, he said, “Good luck, Jonathan” to me in a clear and sarcastic voice. It was the first time I’d ever heard him speak, and it caused me great suspicion, since Goodluck Jonathan, against all odds—and you may know this—happens to be the name of the president of Nigeria. I know it because before my retirement I was a U.S. Foreign Service officer, with my last posting to Nigeria.

  The next time he came around the track, he didn’t say anything. He could have simply been wishing me luck, of course, since my name is Jonathan, but I was sure he was giving me a message.

  “Good God, Jonathan, you need to find a hobby,” said Millicent, my wife, when I told her about the encounter during our stroll that evening.

  “I do have a hobby,” I said. “It is getting into shape after all those years of sitting behind embassy desks.”

  “Oh, those embassies,” said Millicent. “If I never have to go to another cocktail party …”

  Millicent hadn’t grown up in Tacoma, Washington, the town we live in now, but in England, where they still name children Millicent. We met in London during my first posting, and we go to England yearly to see our only daughter, Millicent Junior, a psychiatrist.

  “Maybe it’s a stretch,” I said. “But he said it very sarcastically.”

  “Stretch, my ass, you’re starting again! You’re Jonathan Fleming, not Ian Fleming, Jonathan. If you keep this up, I’m telling Milly the next time she calls. This man who looks at the floor is not giving you a message! But read my lips, because I am giving you
one. You’re starting again!”

  We took our usual stroll, with Millicent’s dog, Fathead, down to a spot that has wonderful views of Puget Sound, with ships and sailboats on it.

  “Do you think Milly gets tired of talking to us?” Millicent asked. “I mean, she does have her own life now.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “When has Milly been reticent about saying what she’s tired of?”

  Millicent squeezed my hand while Fathead twisted his leash around his neck, like he’d hang himself if he had to listen to any more of our banter.

  WHEN MEMBERS GET TO THE Y, we leave our cards in this little wooden box at the front desk. It’s an absolutely ancient system, but perfect for snooping, especially for an old spook like me. Yes, I was the spy at the various embassies I was posted to, though always officially attached to the economics section. In Nigeria, my job was to report on corruption among Goodluck Jonathan’s cronies, prior to his ascent to the presidency. I’d worked hard at it, courted certain members of his party (the ruling PDF), and reported that by Nigerian standards they were relatively clean. Perhaps with retirement looming, I hadn’t worked hard enough, however, because my report was eviscerated. I even received a cable from Langley telling me to rewrite the damned thing, and this time not to give them a pass. How humiliating that was! I can remember complaining to Millicent and Milly, who was visiting from England at the time. Milly was going to the Marine Ball with one of our embassy guards that night, in fact, so we were standing in our living room, Millicent, Milly, the young marine, and I, having a preball cocktail.

  “I give someone a clean bill of health and they want dirt,” I had said, and Millicent shushed me. “Loose lips sink ships,” she told the marine. My real job at the embassy was an open secret, but what a breach! I really was tiring of the CIA.