She would feel the end of summer approaching, and maybe it was the intolerable heat, maybe it was the insects everywhere （she couldn’t even sit with her tea on the back deck because the mosquitos would swarm around her）， but she found herself in a rage every August. And this year she is worse than ever.
“If you would be so kind as to not insult me, dear, we can continue this conversation later,” she says to her daughter, Mary Jane, on the telephone before hanging up and wringing her hands. It is a Wednesday morning, and she has told Tabby she won’t be in until later this afternoon. She shakes her head, and fills a glass of water from the tap and sips it slowly. She thinks for a minute and can’t remember what annoyed her so much about Mary Jane. Something about her saying, “Mother, just relax,” or, “You know you can hire someone to do that, right?” Darcy shakes her head. Whatever Mary Jane said doesn’t seem that bad now, seconds later. She will have to call her back and apologize.
Darcy rinses her glass and sets it in the drainer. She examines the peel on a banana that she’ll eat later. She checks her small stack of bills and places them in her mailbox with a clothespin so the mailwoman will take them. She comes back into the kitchen, sees Ginger’s letter on the kitchen table, and attempts to read it once more. Her heart races as she does. She becomes so annoyed. Some phrases stand out: I think of you often; I sometimes think I see Luke in a crowd; I wanted you to know… Darcy holds the note on its thick stationery and crumbles it slightly—not enough to rip it. “That’s enough of that,” she says, and sighs.
She walks down the basement steps, tearing her stocking on a loose nail that’s been bothering her for months now, only to find that the washing machine has stopped midcycle because her small bathroom rugs were unevenly balanced, and she is so irritated that she kicks the appliance.
“Darn you, you piece of junk.”
The basement has a pleasant coolness to it, and she takes a deep breath to calm herself. She thinks of Ginger’s note again, about Mary Jane telling her to relax, and her head hurts. She gets flashes of thoughts about Luke—they come to her this way （sharp, quick, vivid） almost every day: Luke gone eight months. Wrecking beautiful Betsy. His sweet, tired face that day in December, just a few days before he died. It’s good to have you back here, she said. Did she hug him when he came into the house, his last time home? Did she?
They found all sorts of things in his system—alcohol, painkillers, you name it. She refused to look at the autopsy report. She still sees Luke on the stepladder with the Christmas star. Does this look right, Mom? he said. Yes, dear, fine. Fine.
She rubs her temples.
These old cars weren’t made for that kind of impact. Somewhere in the paperwork it said Betsy couldn’t even be towed. She wonders if he ever wore Von’s sunglasses when he drove. He would have looked so handsome.
I’m trying to wake up. I’m trying, Mom.
She busies herself, reaching inside the washer to align the rugs a bit better and pushing the button again, hearing the machine kick back on and make its satisfying whirring noise. She likes when things are happening, when something is being worked on. She hugs her arms by her waist and doesn’t want to leave this basement.
When the children were still young, she and Von had toyed with the idea of making it more of a finished room. They had moved the old living room furniture they were replacing down here—the brown sofa with its floral print and the two blue La-Z-Boy recliners she and Von would sit in after dinner, along with the low wooden coffee table with the claw feet and the television built into the cabinet that Von said still worked “perfectly good.” When they had new carpeting put in, she asked the installers if they could bind a section of the old carpet when they were hauling it out, which she placed in the center of the basement.
It was never a musty, typical basement because their house was built into a hill, so it had a wall of windows and a nice door that led right out into the backyard. Against the back of the house sat the wrought-iron bench that Von used to rest on after he mowed the lawn. He would take out a pack of cigarettes and look at the enormous view of the green lawns of Wharton, shake his head, and say, “I tell you what. If this don’t beat all.”
For a while after Von died, she kept the lawnmower in the corner of the basement where the furnace and water heater sit in their closet, pestering Luke to help her out and cut the grass, but he wasn’t reliable, and sometimes he cut the grass too close so he wouldn’t have to cut it so often. It was around this time of year, her angry time, that she dragged the lawnmower out to the yard, parked it by the curb, and put a sign on it that said FREE and hired a lawn service. “You’re no muss, no fuss,” Von would have said. Luke was still living at home then. She felt glad that the worry was gone about the grass getting cut, but also felt as though she was taking something from both Von and Luke.