Hollyhock Ridge

Hollyhock Ridge

by
Pamela Grandstaff

For Betsy

This book is a work of fiction. The
characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and
are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons
living or dead is entirely coincidental. No part of this may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Copyright © 2014 Pamela Grandstaff.
All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The sky was still as black as the bottom of a coal mine at
5:05 a.m. when Ed Harrison delivered the
Pendletonion
newspaper to the
residents of Rose Hill, but Diedre Delvecchio had already smoked her first five
cigarettes of the day. The ceramic ashtray, a Myrtle Beach souvenir from her
sister’s vacation, had three packs worth of butts in it from the previous day.
Unless her husband, Matt, emptied it while she was out of the house, the butts
would continue to pile up until they overflowed onto the kitchen table.

Diedre scoured the classified pages’ yard sale section like
a four star general studied battle maps in a war room. She had to prioritize
the most desirable locations in order to outmaneuver her competition.

There was one out on Hollyhock Ridge described as a moving
sale. There was nothing like facing the daunting prospect of packing up all
your worldly goods and then paying by the pound to have them transported long
distance to make a family a lot less sentimental about their possessions. It
was a little way outside of her comfort zone as far as driving was concerned,
but for Diedre, a moving sale was like an open bar to an alcoholic. Tired,
stressed, and preoccupied, those poor suckers would just want the stuff gone
and were likely to let it go cheap.

Diedre left the newspaper on the table, where her husband,
Matt, would read it while he ate his cereal, before he left for his job
managing Delvecchio’s IGA, the business his father began back in the 1940s.
After he read the newspaper, he would place it on top of the newest stack, now
five feet high, that was accumulating in the dining room. He wouldn’t dare try to
sneak it out of the house. Matthew hated a fuss, and Diedre could kick up a
fuss like nobody’s business.

They didn’t use the dining room anymore; no point, really.
They didn’t invite people over. Matt’s family stayed away. Diedre’s sister,
Sadie, sometimes stopped by, but Diedre always slid out the front door and
spoke to her on the front porch. Matt and Diedre’s daughter had stopped coming
home for visits years ago. Tina was embarrassed, she said, for her husband to
see the house, and didn’t think it was safe for her children to be in it.
Frankly, Diedre found her daughter to be a prissy prig who overdramatized
everything, her son-in-law a sneering snob, and their whiny children exhausting.
If they did come, they would just complain about the house, or worse, try to
sneak things out when Diedre wasn’t looking. People thought she had so much
that she wouldn’t miss a thing. They were wrong.

The kitchen table was fine for eating, and there was still
room left on top for two people to put down two plates. Stacks of broken down
cardboard milk cartons that Matt had tied with twine took up the rest of the
space.

A toaster oven sat on top of the broken range; they didn’t
need the full-size oven just to heat up frozen dinners and make toast. The
kitchen counters were covered in nested stacks of used plastic containers, the
sizes sorted from large to small, from cottage cheese down to yogurt singles.
The defunct dishwasher contained all the good dishes they no longer used, kept
there since they were last washed three years before, after a disastrous
Thanksgiving dinner with her daughter’s family that ended in a volley of recriminations
that couldn’t be taken back.

If Diedre was the hunter/gatherer, it was Matt who was the
compulsive cleaner/organizer; Diedre thought it must be from a lifetime of
stocking shelves at the IGA. She was a saver, just like her mother and father,
who grew up during the Great Depression. You never knew when you might need
something, but when the time came, she would have it. That was what she always
said, anyway, the truth being something long-buried under the tall stacks of
clutter in her head.

Diedre made sure she had her smokes and a lighter before
getting into her twenty-year-old Buick Roadmaster station wagon with the fake
wood panel sides. Garbage bags full of plastic bags took up the whole back
seat, right where she could get to them when she needed them. On the passenger
side front seat she kept her purse, a large tote bag filled with extra things
she might need, including pens, notepads, maps, a half carton of cigarettes,
spare lighters in case one ran out of fuel, packets of tissues, several small
bottles of hand sanitizer, multiple packets of sugar and sugar-free sweeteners,
a plastic bag full of quarters, and several rubber-banded rolls of one, five,
and ten dollar bills.

Three years ago her husband had issued an ultimatum: she
could only bring home things they ate or otherwise consumed, or he was leaving
her. No amount of fuss could back him down, so determined was he to gain
control. Diedre couldn’t imagine life without collecting things. What would she
have to look forward to? Why even get up in the morning?

Shortly after Matt’s declaration of war, Diedre went to work
at her brother-in-law’s hardware store, ostensibly to help out after his wife
left him. If she used cash he didn’t know she had, and if she didn’t bring home
what she purchased, she reasoned, her husband would think he’d won and get off
her back.

In the back of the station wagon were several milk crates, a
stack of newspapers with which she could pack breakables, a laundry basket full
of bungee cords, and a hand cart she could use for heavier things. There was a
roof rack on top of the car she could bungee things to if her finds took up all
the cargo area.

Diedre loved this car. It was her best friend.

“Let’s get this show on the road, Beulah Mae,” she said,
patting the dashboard, where a bean-bag weighted ashtray held all the butts
from the previous day’s hunt.

When Diedre pulled off the road just across from the house
on Hollyhock Ridge, she was gratified to see she was the first to arrive. There
was a junk man who sometimes got there before she did, and a few amateurs who
had the nerve to knock on doors, waking up the homeowners and asking to see
what they had before anyone else could. Diedre preferred to bide her time, and
didn’t consider it fair game until the front door opened or the garage door
went up.

She rolled down a window and lit her next cigarette off of
the first. She took the last sip of her third can of diet soda, and then tossed
it in the passenger side floor well, where thirty or forty others were already
attracting bees.

The advertisement had said “8:00 a.m. to noon.”

It was 6:00 a.m.

It turned out to be well worth her wait.

She got over ten years’ worth of Mary Engelbreit magazines
for ten dollars.

“I hate to part with them,” the woman said, “but I just keep
moving them from house to house, and although I mean to, I never go back and
reread them.”

Diedre had found it was best to say as little as possible
when someone was parting with something that had great sentimental value. You
never knew what could trigger them to change their minds about selling.
Instead, she pressed her lips together and turned up the outside corners in
what passed for a smile, and quickly loaded the magazines into the back of her
station wagon.

Among other things, she also acquired five dozen Mason jars
without lids for fifty cents a dozen, a raggedy patchwork quilt made from feed
sacks for ten dollars, a chipped McCoy Pottery planter for a quarter, and a
plastic jack-o’-lantern full of nails and screws for fifty cents.

“How much for the child’s wagon?” she asked the man, who
looked as if he was nursing a wicked hangover.

“I was going to throw that away,” he said. “You can have
it.”

It was missing a wheel and one of the wooden side guards,
but it reminded Diedre of one that she had coveted when she was a little girl.

Other people started to arrive, and Diedre felt that
familiar, panicky feeling.

What had she missed?

What if someone else got something she might need?

Quickly she inventoried the offerings, and although the back
of the station wagon was full, she had the feeling she was leaving something
valuable behind.

“Do you have anything you were thinking about selling that
you haven’t brought out yet?” she asked the woman.

“Well,” the woman said, and Diedre’s heart rate sped up.
This was how you got the thing no one else knew was available. “Dave’s been after
me to sell an old treadle sewing machine that was my grandmother’s. I don’t
sew, and it’s real heavy, and he says he’s not paying to move it one more
time.”

“I sew,” Diedre said. “I just love old sewing machines; I’ll
give it a good home.”

The husband helped her strap it to the top of her car.

“Will you have someone to help you on the other end?” he
asked her.

“Sure,” Diedre said. “No problem.”

Diedre pulled back onto the narrow two-lane road that wound
around Hollyhock Ridge, anxious to get away before the woman changed her mind.
Although the reflection in her rearview mirror was now full of her new things,
in the side-view mirror she could see the woman still standing in her driveway,
holding the fifty dollars Diedre had paid her for the sewing machine, looking
as if she was already regretting letting it go.

Diedre trembled with the adrenaline revved up by the sale.
This was a great haul. Many of the items were dear to the heart of that woman, and
those feelings were now Diedre’s to enjoy.

Diedre preferred a storage unit on the back side of the lot,
where she could unload in private without passersby seeing her station wagon.
She removed the pad lock and pulled up the garage-style door to reveal a
thirty-foot deep by ten-foot wide concrete pad and cinder block walls with a
ten-foot high ceiling.

None of her husband’s compulsive organizing took place here.
It was stuffed full, floor to ceiling. As she surveyed her treasures, a feeling
of calm, much like the nicotine wave from her first cigarette of the day,
flooded her body with a feeling of well-being. To Diedre this was a comforting
nest of her secret things. She could come here and be with them every day, to
admire them, to feel the safety and security they provided.

Although it looked as if she couldn’t cram in one more item,
there were still pockets of space available. She unloaded and stowed everything
except for the sewing machine strapped to the roof of her car, and was standing
there regarding it when a truck came around the side of her section of units
and parked nearby.

Diedre didn’t like people looking at her things.

She watched two men get out of the truck. With their shaved
heads, scraggly beards, and heavily tattooed skin, they looked to her like drug
dealers; probably did business out of here. It wouldn’t surprise her. People
were always up to no good. One man lifted his head in a greeting, but Diedre
pretended as if she hadn’t seen it.

Diedre removed the bungee cords holding the sewing machine
to the roof rack and eased it down the side of the station wagon to the ground.
It was much too heavy for her and crashed to the ground, scratching the side of
the car. She tugged it into the storage space, and then pushed as hard as she
could to get it all the way in so she could roll down the door behind her. But
it was no use; she couldn’t get it all the way inside.

To the right of the door was a tall metal filing cabinet. If
she could get the sewing machine up on top of that, she would still have room
for some more things.

One of the men came up behind her.

“You need some help?” he asked. “Man, you got a lot of junk
in here.”

Diedre didn’t like people looking at her things, or touching
her things, but she knew she couldn’t lift it on her own.

“I can’t pay you,” she said. “I don’t have any money.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “No charge.”

He smiled and revealed brownish teeth, and there were scabs
on his face from a multitude of sores, but his eyes were the scariest part of
his appearance. Diedre didn’t like to look in them for very long. Those eyes
didn’t care about anything or anybody.

“Can you get it up there?” she asked, pointing to the top of
the filing cabinet.

“Sure,” he said, and then turned and called out to the other
man. “Hey, Ricky, come help me a minute.”

The two men took either end of the sewing machine, heaved it
up to shoulder height, rested a moment, and then pushed it up on top of the
filing cabinet. It teetered a little.

“That don’t look safe,” Ricky said.

“It’s fine,” Diedre said, anxious to get them out of the
storage unit. “Thanks for your help.”

“No problem,” the first man said. “Have a nice day.”

As they walked away, Ricky said, “What a load of junk,” and
they laughed.

Diedre pulled the door down, turned around, and leaned back
against the filing cabinet. Whatever was behind it shifted, the cabinet scooted
backwards, Diedre fell back with it, and the sewing machine came down on top of
her.

It was odd.

Diedre found herself floating up near the ceiling of the
storage unit. All she could see of her body beneath the sewing machine were her
pink sweatpants-covered legs and her tennis shoe-covered feet.

She didn’t feel particularly upset; in fact, she felt calm
and detached. She floated up through the roof of the storage unit, and watched
as one of the men raised the garage door to her unit, and then quickly lowered
it again. He opened the driver’s side door of the station wagon, looked inside,
and then shouted something to Ricky. The first man then drove off in her
station wagon, with Ricky following in the truck.

Diedre floated upwards, above the storage unit facility and
the hillside next to which it sat, and looked down on her station wagon as it
rolled along the narrow two-lane road. As she rose even higher, she could see
all the way north to the four-lane highway, and all the way south to Rose Hill.
The higher she rose the more peaceful she felt, as calm and serene as the puffy
white clouds floating in the beautiful blue sky. The sun was shining so
brightly she felt enveloped in its warm, brilliant light. It felt a lot like
how she felt in her storage unit, in her nest of things.