I can’t say that I was sorry to see them go when they finally left.
The first thing I did was take my boots off. Alison would have thrown a fit if she saw me do it. She had already managed to moan about how dirty the place was and who knows what was lurking in that crummy shag rug, like I think she thought there might be bed bugs or worms or slime from distant centuries just oozing through it all, waiting for some idiot’s bare foot to come in contact so it could spread fungal disaster into your system. She really has that kind of imagination; sometimes talking to her is like talking to someone who writes horror films for a living. But I didn’t care; my toes were so hot and tired by that point and I just felt like being flat on my feet before I started checking the place out. As it turns out the carpet was kind of dry and it seemed clean enough, just a little scratchy. It really was a pretty hideous color but I think that honestly is the worst that could be said about it.
By then the sun actually had gone away, as predicted, so I didn’t have a lot of light to explore the place with. I decided to just head back to the boring little area where Mom and Bill had more or less camped out, and then I slipped out of the one dark blue skirt I had brought for the funeral, pulled on the jeans I had stashed in my backpack, and took a look around. Lucy had already cased the refrigerator so I knew there were fish sticks. A little more casual probing in the cabinets yielded something like sixteen packets of ramen noodles; and then I noticed that on the teeny tiny counter there was half a bottle of wine, open and useless, next to three empties. The search continued, and sure enough, when I poked around the laundry room—which was right behind that little kitchenette—there was a pile of clothes on the floor which really looked like nothing until you nudged it with your foot and found that it was stacked on top of two mostly full cases of red wine. So I was feeling so good about that, I just kept looking, and wouldn’t you know, I hit the mother lode: Up in the freezer of that little refrigerator, back behind the ice cube machine, there was a huge bottle of vodka, with hardly a dent in it.
Knowing my mother I also knew that would not be the only bottle out there. She liked to have it in reach, so I was pretty sure I’d find something squirreled away in several other thinly disguised hiding places. By the looks of the two cases of pricey red wine, Bill was also a bit of a drinker himself, so for a second I did think, well, at least she finally hooked up with someone who could pay for the good stuff, as opposed to the truly undrinkable crap she was surviving on the rest of her life. Seriously, I felt a little better about their utterly inexplicable marriage when I saw all the bottles. Which I’m not saying drinking yourself into an early grave is a good thing? But on the other hand, I honestly don’t see much point in judging the dead.
Anyway, in the door of the refrigerator I also found a half a jar of ruby red grapefruit juice, which meant I could have an actual cocktail instead of trying to down the vodka straight or over melted ice. So I made myself a drink, put the water on to boil for the noodles and turned the television on for company. They only had basic cable so I found one of those stations that runs endless documentaries all the time and started to look around.
The bedroom was not really a bedroom, even though there was a bed in there. There were huge pocket doors which were clearly meant to shut the room off, but they had been left open for so long they were stuck on their rails. Another set of enormous pocket doors made up the entire wall on the other side of the room, but they were stuck closed and the bed was shoved up against them. Then there was a little cove that had been built into one wall, with fancy plasterwork up the sides and a crown at the top. That had a little dresser in it. Other than that there were no closets—just clothes everywhere on the floor—which in addition to the huge pocket doors made it clear that this room was not in fact ever meant to be a bedroom, and was more likely intended as a dining area. Daniel had said that there were two dining rooms but I don’t think there were two, I think this bedroom was really the dining room, and the room behind it with the television was supposed to be the original kitchen, and the servants would cook back there and then come in with the food, through the pocket doors, which presumably opened and closed at some previous point in history. Well, honestly, I had no idea what was supposed to be what in this crazy apartment in the other century when it was built. But that’s what I thought.
I also thought, I wonder where Mom’s perfume is? Because back in that sort of freaky half-bedroom-half-dining room you smelled it everywhere; it was in all the clothes and the blankets and the sheets, along with the red wine and the cigarettes and dirty laundry and mothballs. I kind of had it in my head that I might find that little black bottle and snag it before Lucy turned it into some big issue for no reason whatsoever. Seriously, you just never knew when she was going to get all twitchy and start making lists and arguing about everything, and Alison sometimes goes along with that shit just because in general it’s not really worth arguing with Lucy. Then the next thing you know, Lucy’s telling everybody that we have to put everything smaller than a paperback into a box and sell it all together because that’s the only way to be fair, and then she’s handing it over to some thrift store for ten dollars or something, not even enough to buy a pizza. It made no sense to me to let Lucy try something like that, so I started looking. I was pretty sure if I found that little bottle first I could stick it in my backpack and no one would ever know.
The first place I checked was the dresser in the alcove. It seemed to me that that was probably the only place where Mom might have put anything of value to her; the rest of the room really was nothing but piles of clothes, a chair, a couple of books on the floor, and the unmade bed. Besides, the dresser really did look like she might have been using it as a vanity; there was an old gilt mirror glued to the wall above it, with the feet of half a cherub hanging down from the top. The top of the dresser had a few things on it—a hairbrush, a comb, a couple of empty glasses with some dry little well of alcohol stuck to the bottom. Then there was a completely tarnished little round silver boxlike thing, with curlicues and a big French fleur-de-lis right on top that when you opened it there were a whole bunch of keys and an old wedding ring and three little bitty medals inside. One of them said CHEMISTRY on it. In addition to the round silver box there were a couple of really old photographs in really old frames of no one I knew, and then there were a couple photographs unframed, behind them, with the edges curling toward the middle. One of them was of me, when I was about fifteen and going on the first of many disastrous dates with Ed Featherstone. He was a mighty jerk, but at fifteen who knew? But seriously it is a bit of a shock to see yourself seventeen years ago, with your arms around someone who is now seventeen years older and who made a fortune on Wall Street back when everyone was doing that, got out while the getting was good and now owns lots of property in Connecticut. Whatever. I set aside the can of keys, which I thought might be useful for future exploration, and then I looked in the drawers.
The top drawer had her underwear in it, lots of sad bras and panties, several old pairs of neutral-colored support hose, and a quart bottle of good vodka. Then in the other drawer, just beneath it, was Bill’s underwear, gigantic pairs of white and light blue cotton briefs. I so did not want to go pawing through that stuff—I mean, really, I wanted to find that little bottle of perfume because I wanted to have it and honestly I didn’t think anyone else would want it, but I was quickly losing my nerve. I had never even met this nutty alcoholic; who knew what lurked in his underwear? Rather than just give up, I pulled the drawer all the way out of the dresser and upended it. There was nothing in there except all those huge pairs of underwear, and a wallet.
A wallet; there was a wallet, and the guy who owned it was dead, and everything he owned got left to my mom, who left everything she owned to me and my sisters. I figured that gave me some rights, so I sat on the floor and looked through it, and lo and behold there were three receipts from a liquor store, a couple more pictures of people I didn’t know, and a lot of money. A serious wad of money, the bills smooth and neatly pressed together, like they give it to you at the bank, if you are the sort of person that a bank will actually give money to. So I thought, Oh thank God, and I took it out to count it and those crispy new bills were all fifties and hundreds; Bill had seven hundred dollars in that wallet, which would I think be a significant windfall to pretty much anybody, but was a virtual miracle to a person