Off Keck Road by Mona Simpson

Author:Mona Simpson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780375412639
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2001-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

XI

Bea was offered the listing for June’s brother’s house in 1975. Nance called her up at the office and said they were moving to Florida. She wasn’t sure she wanted to sell; she just wanted to see what kind of money they could get.

“Just sniffing around,” Bea said. “All right.”

The mother’s house, next door, had been sold a few months earlier. Bea looked up the file to see the square footage and the price. June had wanted Bea to list her mother’s house, but at that time, Nance and George had given it to someone at another firm, someone Nance played cards with. Which was why the call now was surprising.

Even on the telephone, Bea shied away from the listing, saying (diplomatically, she thought) that it was hard to work on a property you’d known so long yourself.

She’d heard enough from June about Nance. Of course, by then June was gone. She’d moved to Arizona right after her mother died. She used the money she inherited to pay the first and last months on a commercial lease, to open her flower store. Peggy was no doubt already getting used to her new school. But they seemed to Bea somehow diminished, on their own, so far away. Was that because she had most often seen them in her own mother’s house, in De Pere?

After all, June had chosen to go.

But Bea regretted now that she hadn’t learned more about the financial side of June’s life. Likely as not, she could’ve helped her find a location to open a flower shop here and even gone over the financing.

Bea drove out to June’s old road to take a look. It was April but still cold, a hint of ice in the wind. The colors, in the country, seemed full of browns, under the pale blue sky.

Nance met her at the door, holding her lilac cardigan closed at the neck. The minute Bea stepped inside, the woman began following her. She was a person who stood too close behind you. It was an ordinary six-room ranch built in the late forties and now decorated and added on to. Bea had been in the house less than six minutes when Nance asked, “So what do you think we could get?”

Not that Bea couldn’t have told her after two.

They were standing in the bright, clean kitchen, walled with sliding glass doors, which gave out to the pool and backyard compound and didn’t do quite enough to insulate from the sharp wind. The stove was dry and still. No tea was offered.

“I’ve pulled the comparables, from your mother’s house,” Bea began.

“Mother-in-law,” Nance corrected. “And, with the pool and all, this’d be worth a lot more. He’s sure put a lot more into it.”

Speaking of he, Bea was thinking, where was he?

“I can see” was all she said. You couldn’t not. Cement surrounded a kidney-shaped pool enclosed by a wooden fence crisscrossed with lights. There was also a two-story pool house, winterized, with a Ping-Pong table set up inside on the first floor.

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