On the ride home I kept expecting Dad to talk to me about this commitment I’d made… which was, after all, pretty big for a kid of seventeen. He didn’t, though; just listened to classic rock on the radio and sometimes sang along. I found out soon enough that he was just deciding what he wanted to say.
I walked up to Mr. Bowditch’s house, where I was greeted by Radar. I put her meds on the counter, then peeked in the bathroom. I thought the tight quarters would actually be helpful when it came to installing the safety bars （and for him using them）， but that was tomorrow’s job. I’d seen a pile of clean rags on the shelf over the washing machine in the cellar. I went down and grabbed a double handful. It was a pretty spring day, and my initial idea had been to spend it outdoors putting the fence to rights, but I decided that the windows should come first, so the stink of the cleanser would be out of the house when Mr. Bowditch came back. It also gave me an excuse to tour the place.
In addition to the kitchen, pantry, and living room—the places where he actually lived—there was a dining room with a long table covered with a dustcloth. There were no chairs, which made it look pretty empty. There was also a room meant to be a study, or a library, or a combination of the two. I saw with real dismay that the ceiling had leaked and some of the books had gotten wet. These were nice ones, too, expensive-looking and leatherbound, not like the careless stacks in the back hall. There was a set of Dickens, a set of Kipling, a set of Mark Twain, and a set of someone named Thackeray. I decided that when I had more time, I’d pull them from their shelves, spread them on the floor, and see if they could be saved. There were probably YouTube videos about how to do that. I pretty much lived by the Tube that spring.
There were three bedrooms on the second floor, plus the linen closet and another, bigger, bathroom. His bedroom was lined with more bookshelves, and there was a reading lamp on the side of the bed where he obviously slept. The books in here were mostly paperbacks—mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, and pulp horror going back to the 40s. Some looked really good, and I thought if things went okay I’d ask to borrow some. I guessed Thackeray would be heavy going, but The Bride Wore Black looked right up my street. The bodacious bride on the cover was wearing black, all right, but not much of it. There were two books on his bedtable, a paperback called Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury, and a thick hardcover tome titled The Origins of Fantasy and Its Place in the World Matrix: Jungian Perspectives. On the cover was a funnel filling up with stars.
One of the other bedrooms held a double bed that had been made up but was covered with a plastic sheet; the third was completely empty and smelled stale. If I’d been wearing hard shoes instead of sneaks, my footfalls would have made spooky hollow sounds in that one.
Narrow stairs （Psycho stairs, I thought） led up to the third floor. It wasn’t an attic but was being used as one. There was plenty of furniture jumbled up in the three rooms, including six fancy chairs that were probably supposed to go with the dining room table, and the bed from the empty room, with its head laid lengthwise across it. There were a couple of bikes （one missing a wheel）， dusty cartons of old magazines, and in the third and smallest room, a wooden box of what looked like carpentry tools from the time when talking pictures were new. On the side, faded, were the initials A.B. I picked out the drill, thinking it would help with the safety bar installation, but it was frozen solid. And no wonder. The roof had leaked in the corner where the tools had been left, and the whole works—drill, two hammers, saw, a leveling gadget with a bleary yellow bubble in the middle—had gone to Rust City. Something needed to be done about the leaky roof, I thought, and before the next winter arrived or there would be structural damage. If there hadn’t been already.
I started with the windows on the third floor, because they were the dirtiest. Filthy, in fact. I could see I’d be changing the water in my bucket often, and of course the insides were only half the job. I knocked off for lunch, heating a can of chili on the elderly Hotpoint.
“Should I let you lick the bowl?” I asked Radar. She looked up at me with those big brown eyes of hers. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”
I put it down and she went at it. Then I went back to the windows. By the time I finished, it was mid-afternoon. My fingers looked pruney and my arms were tired from all the rubbing, but Windex and vinegar （a YouTube tip） really did make a difference. The house was filled with light.
“I like it,” I said. “Want to take a stroll down to my house? See what Dad’s up to?”