The house isn’t there.
He gets out. Has Timothy gotten confused, somehow turned around on the roads that bisect the island? He double-checks the address on his phone. He has the address correct.
The house is gone. All nine-hundred-plus square feet of it. In its place is a gorgeous home at least four times the size, all light wood, with an enormous, sloping roof, a three-car garage, an elaborate garden, a shed that is a miniature version of the house. A deck, a bird feeder, a mailbox, set on a stone pillar, that looks roomy enough to hold a golden retriever. All of this in place of Timothy’sold bedroom, his Van Halen posters, the shelf that used to hold histape deck, the closet that sheltered his basketball shoes, the galley kitchen with the Formica and the mustard-yellow four-burner stove. Gone, all gone.
“What the hell,” he says. “What the actual hell.”
Rose sold the house a few years before she died and made a handsome profit, because by then Block Island had become much more desirable. But he didn’t know (had Rose known?) that she was selling their home to be demolished.
More memories come, fast and furious. His mother standing waist-deep in the water at Scotch Beach, shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand. He remembers her laugh, which was bright and merry, and remained so all the way until just before she died. He remembers the banana muffins she used to make. Amy liked them with chocolate chips and Timothy did not, and his mother, God bless her, took the time and the effort to carefully place the chocolate chips by hand inside six of the muffins for Amy. He remembers that she would come home after a long shift on the mainland, where she worked as a nurse, and that sometimes she would take off her work shoes and lay her feet in David’s lap and he would massage them through her socks. She would tip her head back and moan, “That feels so good!” And, “What adayI had!”
You really can’t go home again, thinks Timothy. Never mind the title of that movie: it’s incorrect. You especially can’t go home again if your home is gone. He backs up farther from the enormous, beautiful house, to get a better look at it, and he thinks of taking a photo for Amy, but things still feel uncertain with Amy so he doesn’t. Let her come look at it herself if she wants to see it. Then he hears a honk, and a car moves around the bend in the road behind him, so close that he can almost feel the wind from it, and he jumps forward, heart pounding. He climbs back into the safety of the jeep.
Now he’s melancholyandsuffering from an adrenaline rush, which is a bewildering combination, and one, he eventually decides, that can be soothed only by bourbon. He parks Floyd’s jeep behind Poor People’s Pub, and, inside, sets himself up on a barstool. The bartender is young with enviable biceps, probably mid-twenties, well outside the demographic of most of Timothy’s fans. He doesn’t even gratify Timothy with a second glance. Which is fine.
Mostly.
“What’ll it be?”
“Bourbon,” Timothy says. “Let’s make it a good one.” He scans the shelves. “Basil Hayden’s.” After a beat he adds, “Please.” It’s notthisguy’s fault he got in a fight with his sister and that his trip up, down, and around Memory Lane has worked him into a funk.
“You got it.” The bartender pours; he serves; Timothy drinks. “Anything to eat?”
Timothy scans the menu and orders truffle fries. Above the beer bottles behind the bar someone has hung a dozen or so confiscated fake IDs, and on the far end is a vintage PBR sign with a mustached surfer, a beer in his hand. The background music might have been chosen by Timothy himself, back in his high school days: classic Journey. Two of the tables are occupied, and there’s a guy in a gray T-shirt at the opposite end of the bar, head down, scribbling on a yellow legal pad, a big glass of something beside him. Every now and then he takes a sip from the glass but for the most part his concentration on his notepad is total, and as enviable as the bartender’s biceps.
Timothy nods toward him. “What’s that guy doing, writing the Great American Novel?”
“I guess.” The bartender shrugs. “He comes in most afternoons, sits right there, drinks two soda waters with lime, sometimes stays a few hours. Apparently he’s some big-shot author, and he works better when he’s not home.”
Timothy looks over, mildly interested. “Yeah? So he actuallyiswriting the Great American Novel?”
The bartender shrugs again. “I guess. I don’t know, man. I studied business at URI and I’m doing this until I can go back for my MBA. Honestly, I don’t read many novels.”
“Me either,” admits Timothy.
“Never really understood the point of fiction, you know?”
“Right,” says Timothy. “Sure. I hear that.” He’s not going to go as far as agreeing wholeheartedly with that statement—Amy, for one, would metaphorically tan his hide—but he’ll do his best to be friendly.
Timothy sips his bourbon and looks out at the summer traffic going by on Ocean Ave. Cars, mopeds, people on bike and on foot. A woman who looks a heck of a lot like Gertie passes by on a moped: long, strawberry-blond hair streaming behind her from underneath the helmet. And then he does a double take, and he realizes itisGertie. Gertie is on a moped! Where on earth did Gertie get a moped? He whips out his phone.
That you?he types.
More bourbon. A painful amount of time goes by. Then, many, many minutes later, the reply comes.That me what?
You going by poor people’s pub.
Three dots appear, then disappear, then return. Timothy finds it so disconcerting when this happens, those moving dots. Then this:Who wants to know. Timothy waits it out. Gertie can sometimes have a strange sense of humor. Next:Ha! Just kidding. yup, it was me. I’m home now. Just bought this, wanted to try it out. Was wondering where everyone is.
(Gertie Sanger bought a moped? This, Timothy could not, would not have predicted.)
Timothy sips some more, sips, in fact, until the glass is empty, and then—it takes him a couple tries to do this, the bourbon is hitting him—he writes seven words. If texts could have a tonehe would have tried to make the tone of this one nonchalant, but texts don’t have tones so he has to let the words land however they land on Gertie’s phone screen.
Come back, he texts.I’m sitting at the bar.
This time there are no dots, no answer whatsoever, and Timothy’s fingers are beginning to sweat, but fifteen minutes later Gertie walks through the door, and Timothy’s heartbeat picks up more than he would like.
The bartender may not have recognized Timothy but hedoesknow Gertie: he doesn’t say so, not out loud, but his very biceps seem to stand at attention when she comes in, and he tries not to look too closely at her while also looking very, very closely. How can Gertie span the fan demographics in a way Timothy does not? Inwardly, he sighs. She is younger than he is, sure, but she’s not the same age as Mr. Biceps! She has at least fifteen years on him. The Great American Novelist looks up from his yellow legal pad too, but his face yields nothing, no surprise or recognition, and then he looks back down and keeps writing. Probably a poker face. He is probably, in fact, writing about sitting down the bar from the famous Gertie Sanger.
