The Love Letter by Cathleen Schine

Author:Cathleen Schine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

9

ON SUNDAY MORNING, almost one week after the morning she and Johnny had made love in his unmade bed, Helen ventured up to her attic. In the endless renovation of the endless house, the workmen had finally arrived at a room beyond which they could not go. Helen had always carefully avoided going up there herself. Old junk and mold and mouse droppings—the attic depressed her. There were nesting squirrels too sometimes. For years, she had just closed it off, hoping it would somehow disappear. But here it still was. Helen sneezed, sat down on an old chair on top of what she believed she remembered calling a granny dress, and thought, This is everything I left behind when I moved to New York.

She had named her store Horatio Street Books out of nostalgia for her last address—and because it had a slight Shakespearian ring to it. Did Johnny miss New York? Hadn’t he said so once? What difference did it make where a twenty-year-old lived? A twenty-year-old had no reason to be there, or anywhere else.

I do have a reason, Helen thought. I have a reason to be here. I chose it. And I was right.

Her conquest of her own house, though, was somewhat less complete than her conquest of the town. When she moved back to Pequot, Helen took one look at the house and set out to find Ray Bean, whom she remembered from the old days, and there he still was in his hardware store surrounded by sparkling chains of varying sizes. Can after can of varnish and paint, hooks and ropes and toilet seats, sat where she remembered them, all clean and dusted and inviting. Don’t buy that pretty red axe, she had to tell herself. Just throw yourself on Ray’s mercy and get out.

Ever since, with six months off here and there, Ray Bean, contractor and mayoral hopeful, had driven up her driveway each morning in his van. Recently, his new assistant, Howard, drove up, too, but he came in a BMW. Howard had just been laid off as an account executive at a downsizing corporation.

“Mort!” Howard would call to Ray, slamming the screen door. “You here?”

“Hey, Mort!” Ray would answer. “Where you been?”

They always called each other Mort.

“Mort?” Helen asked.

“Mortimer’s,” Howard said.

“Restaurant,” Ray said.

Helen wondered what life would be like without them. Idle speculation.

The two Morts had finished most of the upstairs rooms and were now cleaning out the attic, a large repository of rot as well as cribs, high school English papers, miniature plastic horses, labeled envelopes of shed baby teeth, and racks of musty clothing. Wedgwood ashtrays were brought down. A shawl; riding boots with patent leather tops; chaps as stiff as cardboard; a picnic basket from Hammacher Schlemmer, covered in thick green mold. Bell-bottoms. Hideous paintings in even more hideous frames. Two guitars. An aquarium. Bicycle pumps. Bicycles. A moped.

In the last ten days, Ray and Howard had taken two tons of rotting junk to the dump. Still, the house looked like a rummage sale after the ladies had rummaged but not bought.

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