to Martin as a wedding present. The Bartell farm was south of town on Route 8, further out than I remembered. You could just see a bit of the roof from the road. "Secluded" was the word for this property, if you were feeling charitable. Actually, the farm seemed forlorn and bleak, out here in the winter countryside. As we reached the end of the long gravel driveway, I saw that Martin had indeed had the house restored. It was trim and painted now, and the barn had been leveled so there was no longer a blight on the landscape. The driveway had been regraveled, too, and we pulled up to the side of the house under a new carport. It was just a roof on four posts, but it would keep the worst of the snow and rain off the car. As best I remembered, there were three ground-floor doors: the front, covered by a tiny roof, the kitchen door to the side, and the back door, which led onto a small porch-cum laundry room that was now glassed in. Martin had the door keys on his key ring - another surprise. I found it interesting and strange that the keys to the old farmhouse were always by his hand. "Is there a phone?" I asked.
"I don't know. I should've called Karl before we left town. He'd know. I've always got the cell phone if we have to use it." I waited at the bottom of the kitchen steps, Hayden a bundle of blankets in my arms, while Martin fumbled with the key. Finally the door yielded, and we stepped into the house.
"How long has it been since you were here?" I asked cautiously, looking around at the room. The kitchen had been scrubbed and repainted and the counters had new surfaces since I'd toured it so briefly years before. The overhead light was on, and there was a plate on the table. It still held food. It had been there for days. The glass beside it was half full of Coke, or one of the other dark cola drinks.
"Not since it was finished. I came to look at it once, when I had to be in Pittsburgh for business. And I got the cleaners and contractors out here to tell them what to do, though it was Karl who checked on their work for me. I haven't been in here since then, and I think that was at least a year and a half ago. I told Regina when she married Craig that the house was sitting empty and since they were going to be in Corinth for a while, they might as well use it. Barby had been hinting how hard up they were going to be." I wandered slowly through the downstairs, deciding the house was even older than ours in Georgia. The old window coverings - I remembered them as ragged blinds - had been thrown away, and Regina hadn't replaced them. The gray sky outside seemed to fill the rooms with gloom. While Martin brought in the rest of our things, I walked around with Hayden.
I had very little memory of the house, but today I discovered that in that memory I had minimized the size of the rooms and maximized the height of the ceiling. Martin's childhood home was an old two-story farmhouse, with three large rooms downstairs and three up; a decent bathroom on each floor that had obviously been created from a small bedroom or large closet; a large original pantry off the kitchen; and a washer and dryer crammed on the added glassed-in back porch. I was betting that had first been called a mudroom. If Joseph Flocken had left anything in the house, Martin had had it cleaned out. The plaid couch and matching armchair in the family room were surely out of someone's attic, probably Barby's, and the lone bed upstairs with its matching night tables and chest of drawers had been Barby's wedding gift to the couple, I recalled. I opened the closet door. Clothes, not many. Mostly flannel shirts and blue jeans, for both Craig and Regina.
I wondered where Regina was now. It made me shiver, seeing those clothes hanging there.
But I shoved them over to one side of the closet, making room for our hanging bag. Awkwardly, one-handed due to Hayden, I stripped the sheets off the bed. I tossed them down the stairs, so I could pick them up and wash them later. I