“Well, of course!” Mercy told him. “Anyone can do that. But I am aiming for something a little more meaningful. I want to zero in on the single feature that reveals a house’s soul.”
He looked worried. He said, “What if you decide that the house’s soul is a bathroom or something?”
She laughed. “I can assure you that’s unlikely,” she told him. Although actually, one of the paintings she hadn’t yet shown him depicted the green tongue-and-groove partition enclosing the little “maid’s toilet” in Robin’s basement workshop. She shut her portfolio with a snapping sound and gave Clarence another smile. “In any case,” she said, “you can always say you don’t want it after you see what I’ve done. You’ll have absolute veto power.”
Evelyn sat up straighter and clasped her hands and gazed expectantly at Clarence.
“Ah,” he said. “And…may I ask how much you charge?”
She had contemplated raising her price from one hundred to two as soon as she saw that grand piano, but she could tell now that he didn’t think much of her work. Meekly, she said, “A hundred dollars.”
He sent a look toward Evelyn. “Well,” he said. “All right.”
“Yes!” his wife said on another outward breath.
“Pending approval of how it turns out, of course,” he told Mercy.
“Of course,” she said.
* * *
—
On the first of November, a Sunday, Mercy phoned David. She chose late afternoon, figuring that was when he was most likely to be in his dorm; but even so, the boy who answered the phone took a long time tracking him down. “Garrett?” she heard him shouting, and then, farther off, “Hey, Garrett! Where you gone to, man?”
She was using the phone in the kitchen, and now she sat down at the table while she waited. It was a good sign, she thought, that the boy had called David “man.” It implied that they were friends. She looked across the room at Robin, intending to tell him this, but he was standing with his back to her in front of the open fridge, as if his only reason for being there was to get himself a snack. Perversely, she changed her mind and said nothing.
The connection was one of those where other conversations on other lines somehow threaded themselves into this one. She heard a tiny laugh, a faint “What?” So many happy, carefree lives going on elsewhere.
David said, “Hello?”
“Hi, hon!”
“Hi, Mom.”
“How’re you doing?”
“Doing fine,” he said. “Is everything okay?”
“Well, except we never hear from you.”
“Aw, I’m sorry. I’m just really busy,” he said.
“Are they giving you much work?”
“Yeah, they’re giving me a lot, but so far I’m keeping up.”
“That’s good to hear.”
“How’s everybody there?”
“We’re fine! You want to speak to Dad?”
“Sure.”
“Robin?” she said. She held out the receiver, and Robin turned away from the fridge with a show of surprise. “Your son,” she told him.
He shut the fridge door and moved toward her slowly, with feigned reluctance, which made her cluck in exasperation. He took the receiver and said, “Hello?” and then, “Oh, hi, son.”
David said something on a rising note, and Robin said, “We’re okay. How about you?”
Something-something from David.
“Ask about Thanksgiving,” Mercy said in a piercing whisper.
“Huh? What? Your mom wants to know about Thanksgiving.”
Another murmur from David.
“Well, I don’t know. Just whether you’re coming home for it, I guess,” Robin said, and Mercy gave another cluck and grabbed the receiver from him. “David?” she said. “You know they run a shuttle over the holidays, right? From school to the Greyhound bus station, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.”
“Yeah, but seems to me that’s a long way to come for just a couple of days,” David said.
“It’s not a couple of days; it’s Wednesday, Thursday, Friday—”
“I was thinking it would be a good time to get my history paper out of the way,” David said.
Mercy said, “Couldn’t you do that in Baltimore?”
Robin was studying her face.
“Well, but here I’ve got the library and all.”
“Oh,” she said.