Sometimes Darcy would look out the back window and see them walking around the yard, arm in arm, Luke a half foot taller, Ginger’s hair longer then, the weeping cherry tree and white azaleas behind them. Sometimes they’d bring Ginger’s dog over and they’d throw the ball to it again and again. Darcy wasn’t a dog person, and they never asked to bring it inside. Sometimes, after Ginger had left, Darcy and Von would wake to the sound of the drums or the nasally electric guitar beating through the floorboards. Von would grumble and put his slippers on and march down to the basement, and the noise would stop in seconds. He’d come back to bed and smile. “Noodle head,” he’d say. “He didn’t think it would wake us.” And then Von got sick, and Luke broke up with Ginger, and then Mary Jane was married and pregnant and then and then and then.
She wants this drum set out of here. She can’t look at it another day. Maybe she will call Wally. He could bring it to the thrift store. Two or three armfuls and it would be gone. She hears the washing machine draining now, and another talk show comes on with a host she remembers was an actress once, and Darcy perches tentatively on the sofa. Maybe she can just wait until the rugs are clean. She sits back, and her body remembers this sofa, remembers the way the cushions felt against her shoulders, its velvety texture. How many years since she has sat on it? It must be twenty. But she has vacuumed it every so often. She has folded laundry on it.
She sinks back into the couch and watches the woman on the talk show move through the audience surveying them about their end-of-summer bucket lists, sticking her small microphone in an eager participant’s face. Darcy hates that phrase, bucket list. She hates the thought of doing things only because you’ll die. Most of the time, you don’t know when you’ll die. And items on a list won’t save you either way. Why bother? she thinks. Why discuss it with strangers on a talk show? Darcy puts her feet up on the coffee table.
She looks around when she wakes up an hour later.
Upstairs is Ginger’s letter on the kitchen table. God, that letter makes her angry. She can’t say why. She doesn’t feel differently about Ginger. She is a dear, dear girl. One of the best people she knows. But she wants to burn the letter. She wants to knock on the door of Ginger’s new place and throw it at her, watching the pages scatter on the floor. She stretches and walks over to the built-in phone nook where the black rotary phone sits. “It’s like going downstairs to a time machine,” Luke used to say, pointing to their old furniture, the type of phone the world barely even used in his time. She picks up the phone. His time. Her son has lived and died already. How can that be? His time. How can she still be going through the everyday, looking at the lawn, washing her rugs, rinsing her dishes, when he has already lived and died?
She thinks of Ginger’s letter again, and her stomach flips: I don’t use words like “love of my life,” but Luke was something like that to me. Sure, Ginger, she thinks. Sure, sure. Go on and be free, she thinks. And then to invite her and Mary Jane to the wedding! The absolute, absolute nerve.
She feels the sweat bead on her forehead as she dials. Wally, good old Wally, answers on the third ring. She has called him many times over the years: to prune the maple tree at the edge of her yard, to take down the children’s old swing set, to lug the ancient cash register away from the dry cleaning store before the new one was delivered. He is always pleasant, always polite. Never charges her much. “I have a job for you,” she says.
* * *
A few days later, she stands on her front porch as Wally loads the last of the drum set into the back of his truck. She nods at him and hands him a check for his time, along with a twenty-dollar bill （“You don’t tip ’em, they’ll think twice about coming again,” Von always said）。 Wally nods and thanks her. She listens to his loud engine start up and regards the two guitars, the drums, and music stand on its side, its many legs up in the air, the speaker pushed against the tailgate.
She holds Luke’s drumsticks and almost tosses them into the back of the truck with everything else, but then she remembers these were on a Christmas list when he was a teenager, when he still made lists for her.
She remembers going to the small music shop in Middletown, and the man guiding her to a wall of mallets and drumsticks and all types of cleaners for saxophones and flutes. She liked this set of sticks because they were red.
She holds them in her hand and feels a blast of pain like an ocean wave that nearly knocks her down. She tries to be tough every single day, since Von, since Luke, but these blasts catch her unaware, always hit her so hard. She holds the drumsticks. She watches Wally’s truck take her son’s stuff, and it rattles in the pickup bed, the cord from the speaker dangling out the back, flapping as the car takes off.