Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,14

bananas, now wouldn’t it?”

I looked into her frowning face, searching desperately for something to say that would soothe her. I took a breath, opened my mouth in anticipation of finding the right phrase, but I could think of nothing.

“So, what do you think?” My father was beaming as he emerged from the other side of the van, where he’d been providing instructions to the removal men. As he approached us, the two men had begun unloading our things, noisily rolling my father’s battered armchair down the ramp toward the front door. I watched flecks of its stuffing fall onto the path and float, like huge, asymmetrical snowflakes, across the weed-ridden garden to catch on the rangy stalks of purple-blooming thistles.

“What do you think I think?” my mother said, opening her handbag, fumbling about for a few seconds, then pulling out her sunglasses and promptly putting them on. Since there was no sun in sight and the clouds overhead were so dark and threatening that I worried we might not get our furniture inside before it began to pour, I suspected that she might be trying to make a point.

“Oh, come on, Evelyn. Don’t be a wet blanket. I mean, what a beautiful view, eh?” His voice was jolly, as expansive as the landscape. “And we’re only a few minutes from the village.”

“Sorry,” my mother said. “I’m afraid I didn’t see a village. I must have blinked when we drove through it.”

We had driven through the village of Midham a few minutes before arriving at the house, and though it wasn’t quite as tiny as my mother made it out to be, it was hardly a bustling center of activity. There was a little main street that, on one side, held an old stone church, a post office, a handful of shops, and two shabby pubs; the other side looked out across open fields. The street was narrow enough that, as we’d driven through in the removal van, the couple of cars we encountered coming in the opposite direction had had to pull over to let us pass.

My father turned to me. “What about you, Jesse, do like it?” His features were animated with hopefulness, his smile a buoyant question pressed across his face.

I stood between them, my needy father and my irate mother, shifting nervously from one foot to the other, looking at each of them and then up at the ominous sky. Finally, I shrugged. “It’s all right,” I said, turning to walk toward the house, hoping for shelter before the imminent storm.

NOT LONG AFTER the removal men started carrying our things out of the van, the skies opened up and the rain poured, promptly revealing several holes in the steep, slate-tiled roof of our new home. While my father and I ran around frantically trying to locate enough buckets, bowls, and any other containers available to catch all the water that drip-dripped, drizzled, or simply flowed into the house, the two men worked at a leisurely pace, apparently unfazed by the rain that glided off their greased-down hair and soaked almost every item of furniture we owned. That evening, my father and I sat on our damp settee eating cold baked beans out of a tin that we planned to use afterward to capture what we hoped was one last leak discovered in the upstairs bathroom. Meanwhile, my mother, having spent the past half hour drying her side of the mattress with the hair dryer, had gone to bed.

“Now, I know there’s a few things to be fixed here, Jesse,” my father said, exhibiting a remarkable gift for understatement. “But nothing I can’t handle, mind you.” I watched an orange streak of tomato sauce roll down his chin as he leaned forward to pick up one of a stack of new handyman books he had laid in front of him on the floor. “Look,” he said, flipping open the shiny cover and leafing through the untouched pages. “They explain everything in here. I’ll be done in no time.”

I wished I shared his confidence. The house was a shambles. Aside from the leaking roof, there were the broken sashes on the windows, drooping ceilings, wallpaper that hung off the walls in strips, rusted, dripping taps in the kitchen, and lights that flickered whenever someone walked across the room. The whole place smelled of mold and old people, and when I’d first walked inside I wondered if the previous owners had died there. I imagined them buried beneath the uneven