Three Story House: A Novel (32 page)

Lizzie’s blue eyes softened. “Doubt they hold any meaning. Granny liked to save everything—margarine tubs, aluminum foil, bread ties. We cleaned a lot of that stuff out when she died and left the practical stuff. Mom never got sentimental about things.”

“I’ll pay to fix it. All of it. I mean, I was going to anyway, but I can cover this and more,” Isobel said, walking to the closet for the broom and dustpan. She knew her cousin was concerned about money, which was why Lizzie had agreed to the television show in the first place. Craig had offered to pay her an amount large enough to cover the cost of finally bringing the house fully up to code. There was the possibility of more money on top of that if a network picked up the show or even if Craig could find another investor or two to film a pilot.

Elyse stepped forward to hold the dustpan for Isobel. Her eyes flitted from the broken glass to the crew. “Surely this part isn’t worth filming—who is ever interested in clean-up?”

“It’ll take you guys a few days to get used to having us here,” Craig said. “Until then we’ll film most of what we see. You never know when we might need this footage.”

Over the next week, while the crew filmed, Craig followed the three of them around asking a series of increasingly unrelated questions. They learned to ignore Jake and his camera as well as Kitty and her silent, stealthy way of slipping a wireless microphone on them or skittering around the house with the boom. In many ways, Kitty with her small frame and impossible thinness was the one most at home in Spite House. Isobel wished she had a clearer picture of what Craig wanted for his sizzle reel. There seemed to be as much footage shot of Lizzie as there was of Isobel, and yesterday the entire crew had followed Elyse to her cooking class. They’d wanted to come to the community center to film Lizzie and Elyse and the work they did with the girls there, but Rosa May had been adamant in her opposition. Isobel had wanted to try to explain that it could be a good fundraising opportunity for the school and for Rosa May’s programs, but nobody asked her for advice or even her opinion.

Unlocking the back door, she stepped inside, not expecting anyone to be there. She wasn’t supposed to be there, but after she’d dropped the cabinets off at the detailer’s shop, she realized she’d left the hardware at the house. She intended to grab it and be back out the door in a matter of minutes, which was why she left the keys in the lock and the back door open. The shoddy patch job Benny had started on the plaster where the cabinets had fallen caught her eye. He seemed to be getting worse. Not that he was a problem that Lizzie would deal with. Her cousin was as sweet as pie, but terrible at conflict. She never should have hired him.

In many ways, Isobel was older than her cousins. While they’d spent their adolescence in school, she’d spent hers playing at being an adult. She wished other people knew this about her. Because she was the baby of her family, everyone treated her like a child—it had always been that way. Maybe for a brief moment when Lizzie first became part of their family there had been the possibility of Isobel’s not being treated as fragile, but then Lizzie became a big sister and extended the same protective feeling toward Isobel that she had toward her younger siblings. She took up the plastic bag with the hardware and turned to the door, thinking that the way people treated her was as much her own fault as theirs. She smelled smoke. Benny stood in the doorway squinting at her through the hazy late afternoon light.

“Watcha doing here?” he asked, leaning against the doorway.

“I live here.”

He dropped his cigarette on the threshold and twisted his foot to put out the few embers.

Isobel’s eyes searched Benny’s face for some sign of why he was acting strangely toward her. She’d seen him drunk before, but this appeared to be more than that. “Maybe you should head home for the day,” she said.

“You shouldn’t tell me what to do.” He took a step toward her. “Besides, home is right there.” He gestured outside the house to his RV, which Isobel took to mean the trailer that had become a near-permanent part of the lot next door to Spite House.

She couldn’t help herself. The smart move would have been to keep her mouth shut. “That’s illegal, you know. If Lizzie finds out and tells T. J., you’ll have to leave.”

He looked as if he hadn’t heard her. The skin underneath his eyes was dried and wrinkled like tissue paper. “I can do what I want. You know this place was supposed to be mine? I mean, Mellie offered to sell it to me when Annie got married. Would’ve given it to me for a song, too. Knew all the problems with the place. We all thought a guy like that, a Northerner, wouldn’t ever let her come back to this place.”

“They’re coming back,” Isobel said, uncertain of what Lizzie’s parents wanted with the house. It didn’t make sense, but then not much about Lizzie’s family had ever made sense to Isobel. She remembered her father talking about how hard his little brother made life. Of course, that had been before, when their own lives seemed easier than they should be.

“We’ll see about that,” Benny said, giving a sort of chuckle that turned into a raspy cough.

Isobel forgot her concerns about Benny and moved toward him. “What do you mean?”

“People got other plans for this place, you know? I don’t want to see Lizzie waste her life waiting around in Memphis with a guy like T. J. You know what he is?”

Isobel shook her head. She didn’t want to interrupt him, thinking Benny was on the verge of revealing the truth about facts that Isobel hadn’t previously realized were lies.

“Nothing better than a meter maid. Going around fining people for stuff that nobody but him gives a rat’s ass about. And I’m no racist, but them dating doesn’t sit right with me. You know what I mean? I worry about that girl. She’s more fragile than the rest of you.” He fiddled with the brim of his hat and then seemed to see in her what others had not. “I mean, you’re as fragile as a pit bull. Your daddy did something right.”

“You shouldn’t talk about people’s fathers,” she said. She had nothing to fear from Benny. He was a worthless drunk. Taking a step toward him, she inquired after his own children. If he wanted to bring up fathers, his own abilities were fair game.

Pulling the brim low over his eyes, he looked away from her. “My kids is fine. I do all right as their dad. I’m not perfect but I keep an eye on my daughter and kick my sons’ behinds when they need it.”

“But you don’t see them that often? Do you?” She took another step toward him. “Who threw you out of the house this time? The mother of your daughter or the mother of your sons?”

Benny took his hat off and looked wildly around the kitchen. His eyes landed on the jagged hole in the plaster. “That’s going to cost you extra and I think you ought to be nice to me or you’ll find more surprises in this house when I’m done.”

“More surprises?” She looked again at the shitty start he’d gotten on repairing the wall.

“I’m saying I like to take out my own kind of insurance.” He swayed a bit and then put his hand back on the doorframe for support. “I gotta make sure Papa gets paid cuz I hear you three are about out of money.”

“What are you talking about?” Isobel’s mind worked to try to put together what Benny meant. He must have been doing more than drinking. Usually he was a comical drunk but at that moment, his words held an edge to them.

“I’m just saying that plaster might not have been damaged if that leak in the roof had been patched up.”

She set the bag with the hardware on the table and fished around the piles of tools until she came up with a flashlight. Pulling a ladder over, she walked to the area where the cupboards had fallen. She’d been right about their being ruined. Her plan now was to install shelving on the wall instead of trying to match the lower cabinets. The walls were plaster and lathe, which essentially meant that the heavy plaster had been smeared on top of thin strips of wood. Benny had torn the jagged edges of the hole away and smoothed them in preparation for laying on new plaster. He should have fixed the broken pieces of wood, but instead, he’d nailed several paint stirrers to the exposed studs. She turned the flashlight on and shone it toward the top of the hole where the plaster had failed. Then she reached and felt carefully around the wood and remaining plaster. Bits of the material crumbled in her hand. The wood felt damp and cool. She pulled a chunk of plaster out and stood on her tiptoes to peer into the space until she traced the source of the water to the corner of the room where the windows met the wall.

“How long have you known that was there?”

Benny shrugged and the corners of the lips tugged upward into a smirk.

“What the hell?” She tore a chunk of the damp plaster from the wall and threw it at Benny. It hit him in the chest. He staggered backward as if he’d been hit by a rock. “You checked these windows out in February. That was your first job and you ignored the broken seal?” She threw another piece of the wall at him and he stumbled, falling down the porch steps and onto the gravel beside the entryway.

Isobel jumped from the counter, getting close to Benny. “You’re fired.”

He looked like a pill bug trying to right itself. Finally he rolled onto his stomach and then using the handrail pulled himself into a standing position. “You can’t fire me.”

“I can,” Isobel said. “I did.”

In her periphery, she saw Jake walking around the corner of the house, holding his camera down by his knees.

“You’re not the boss,” Benny said, taking one step toward her. “You’re a little girl.”

“Get out of here,” Isobel said, her voice rising. “Give me your keys—to everything, the trailer, the house, all of it. I can’t even let you drive home in this condition.”

“What’s going on?” Jake said.

“Nothing. We’re fine.”

“Are you sure?” Jake asked, bringing the camera to his shoulder. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to. He’ll be pissed if I don’t get any of it.”

She ignored him and kept her eyes on Benny. The presence of the lens appeared to have a calming effect on him. He’d avoided the cameras when they were at the house and now that Jake’s was on his shoulder and pointing in his direction, he couldn’t get away fast enough.

“Give me the keys,” she said, holding out her hand.

Benny turned his back to the camera and dug around in his pants pockets. “How am I going to get home?” he asked. “Ain’t no bus runs along here.”

“Walk,” Isobel said. “You got any of your personal effects in the trailer?”

He nodded.

“I’ll let you get them and put them in your truck. But you’re not driving.”

Jake pulled his phone out and began texting furiously. Before putting the camera back up, he explained to Isobel that he’d planned on filming some exterior shots—close-ups of the house’s unique architectural details. “Mostly for my own reel,” he said. “Craig doesn’t care about that stuff. They’re on their way. I’m really sorry about having to film this.”

“You should apologize to Benny. He’s the drunk one.”

By the time Benny had emptied the trailer, Kitty and Craig had arrived and offered to get Benny home themselves. “We can do the exit interviews that way,” Kitty had said to Craig.

“Good stuff,” Craig had said to Isobel before getting inside the cab of the truck.

His voice chilled Isobel. She hadn’t fired Benny for the show, and yet objectively, it created the drama that had been missing the last few days. She shook her head, trying to figure out her own motives.

Jake and Kitty followed them in the SUV and in a moment Isobel was alone again in the house. The whole exchange had taken less than an hour. The sun sat in nearly the same place it had been when she’d come home. She stepped up onto the back stairs and took her keys out of the door. She still had to take the hardware to get painted. But she felt protective of Spite House and didn’t want to leave it alone.

Instead, she stood in the kitchen and looked at the torn-up wall and thought about Elyse, with her broken heart, and Lizzie with her broken leg. She supposed both were doing what Benny had been doing to Spite House. They were working on fixing the outward appearance of something without first finding all the damage that had been done.

A
t sixteen, the Triplins were oblivious to the world outside themselves in a way that was abhorrent in anyone but teenage girls and saucy sitcom sidekicks. To make matters worse, Isobel and her cousins had been adolescents before terrorist attacks and the recession became the bulk of news headlines. That summer the news had been filled with old men flying balloons around the world, a missing Washington intern, and sharks. All issues of little consequence, especially given what would come after Labor Day that year. Isobel wouldn’t have taken notice of any of this news, except that every other day someone at the beach would think they’d spotted a fin and scream at everyone to get out of the water. The lifeguards would take up the false alarm and whistle until a whole shivering mass of wet bodies stood at the shoreline, craning their necks trying to get a look at what could possibly be a shark. So far, in her time at the beach, this crying wolf business had happened half a dozen times.

As always, Isobel and her family had been the first to arrive at the Cape, but that particular year, her brothers hadn’t come. Joel was studying in Amsterdam and Carl hadn’t wanted to leave his girlfriend. Her mother and father typically arranged their schedules so they could spend most of the summer at the Cape. This was because for the whole of the eight years she’d been working on
Wait for It,
her family hadn’t lived together. Her mother lived with her in Los Angeles and her father and brothers lived in Sacramento. They spent most weekends together and any stretch of time when the set was closed—like during holidays and the beginning of summer. Isobel hadn’t ever been lonely at her grandparents’ house, but she’d also never been there without her brothers. Complaining about her boredom elicited little sympathy from her parents. “You’ve got to learn to live without an audience,” her father had said.

After the first week, which had been among the slowest of her life, she convinced Elyse to drive up to the Cape on the weekends and arranged to fly Lizzie out early since her cousin was on a different school schedule than her siblings. Several years earlier when the depth of her soccer talent had become evident, one of the private schools in Memphis had snapped her up. As a result, she was always on breaks at a different time than her family.