The Coffee Can
The screwdriver goes in to the handle.
I pull it out and move a foot along the sill and lean again. Same. It runs under the water doors on the lake side and it's punky the whole way, the wood gone to wet bread. Above me the pegboard still has my father's tool outlines drawn on it in black marker, half of them empty, and in the middle of the floor the lift stands over the slip with nothing in it and the water under it flat and black. The boathouse smells like pipe. Cherry tobacco and outboard gas, soaked into the wood.
Leah's van is in the drive with the hatch up. She's been here since ten. She sat in Dad's kitchen first, she says, and it still smells like him, and she can't do the house yet.
"The inspector wasn't lying," I say.
"I know he wasn't lying. I'm the one who got the call." Leah has a bag open and is feeding it flannel shirts off a nail. "Can you fix it?"
"Half a day to sister it. A day if it's gone up into the post."
"Can you fix it so somebody else signs?"
"I'll ask Hal Visser's old foreman. He owes me."
"Good." She shakes out a shirt, looks at the plaid, and puts it in the bag. She doesn't say whose it was. "Nothing of Mom's goes. The canning stuff on that rafter. I don't care if it's chipped."
"Nothing of Mom's."
We work. It's what we know how to do together. She strips the walls and I take down what needs a tool. Coils of hose. A rack of rods with the guides rusted shut. Three hundred feet of yellow rope that's been rained on and dried and rained on since Nixon.
"Greg's lawyer wants a piece of my half," she says, feeding a bag. "If we close on the ninth I get a townhouse. If we don't I'm in a rented one with a kid in each room. So don't let the closing die."
"It won't."
"You don't know that."
"I know a sill."
She laughs at that, short, through her nose. Then she goes quiet, standing at the edge of the slip with a bag in her hand, looking at the lift.
"Dad got rid of that pontoon that fall," she says. "You remember? The fall I came home. I never knew why."
I have a coil of hose over my shoulder. I don't put it down.
"It was old," I say.
"It was six years old. I helped him wax it that summer." She's not looking at me. She's looking at the cradle, the four steel arms that held one boat or another for thirty summers and have held air for nineteen. "He just had it gone. One morning. And then he never got another one, and he loved that stupid boat." She shifts the bag to her other hand. "You were a wreck that whole fall. I figured it was the college thing."
"It was the college thing."
"Was it?"
"Dad wanted the lumberyard."
"Right. The lumberyard." She looks out at the slip. "God. That was a long time ago."
I carry the hose out to the drive and put it in the truck bed. I stack it flat. When I come back she's at the bench.
She's got the yellow can in her hand.
It's the Chock full o'Nuts can from the shelf over the bench. Yellow gone to tan, red letters worn to pink where a thumb has been. She gives it a shake and something inside shifts and settles, dry and light. Paper.
"What's this? He kept his screws in these. This isn't screws." She's got her thumbnail under the rim.
I cross the floor. I don't run. I put my hand over the top of the can and close it.
"Leave it."
"It's Dad's."
"I'll go through it."
"Adam." She looks at my hand, not the can. "What is it?"
"Receipts."
"Since when do you want Dad's receipts?"
"He's got a final return. The accountant wants everything."
"You don't do the taxes. I do the taxes. I do everybody's taxes."
"Then I'll give them to you."
She looks at me for a couple of seconds. She's got our father's eyes, which are the color of dishwater and see nothing they don't want to. I don't take my hand off. Then she lets go of the can, all at once, and it's mine.
"Fine. Keep your receipts." She turns back to the wall. "You look terrible, by the way. Are you sleeping? Does she know you're not sleeping?"
"I sleep."
I set the can on the far end of the bench, behind the vise, where she'd have to walk around to reach it. Then I go and scrub down the rowboat.
Leah wants it kept for the first. The oars are oak, worn through the varnish where the hands go. The gunwales are green paint gone to chalk. I fill a bucket off the end of the slip and take a deck brush to the seats, one at a time, bow to stern. On the bow thwart there's a hook screwed in sideways, brass gone brown, and on the hook there's a yellow battery lantern with the wire handle wrapped in black friction tape. It's always been there. I look at it. I scrub the next seat.
At one we eat on upturned pails in the open doors. Egg salad on white, wrapped in wax paper, the way our mother made it. Leah's had the recipe since she was fifteen and gets it right and never says so.
"I want to do the ashes on the first," she says. "Off the point, where he fished. Take the rowboat out. You and me and Claire. Then dinner here, and I'll make the meatloaf."
"She doesn't do lakes."
"She grew up up here."
"Traverse City's not a lake."
"It's on two." She points her sandwich at me. "I'm calling her tonight. Don't make that face."
"I'm not making a face."
"You're making the Dad face. The one where he's not saying something." She eats. "Somebody in this family has to say something."
She gets up after that and takes our father's binoculars off their nail by the door. Bushnell, black, the strap gone stiff, his name on a strip of tape. He used them for ducks. She lifts them to her face and works the wheel.
"Somebody's in a johnboat off the point. Look at him, he's got the anchor down in the weeds." She swings a little south, then north. "And there's someone on the landing. On the county dock. At the end, sitting."
I put the last of the sandwich in my mouth.
"Gray coat. Hood up." She's quiet. Then, in a different voice, "Adam. Isn't that Claire's coat?"
I chew.
"That charcoal one. With the hood. You bought her that, I was at the birthday." The glasses don't come down. "It looks just like it."
"She's at her mother's."
"You said Traverse."
"That's where her mother is."
"It's fifty minutes from Traverse."
"Lots of people have gray coats."
"Not with the hood." She holds the binoculars out to me by the strap, at arm's length, still not looking. "Look. If it's her I'm going to wave."
I don't take them.
"Look, Adam."
"I'm not going to look."
"It's a person on a dock. It's not going to bite you."
"I said no."
It comes out flat. Not loud. She lowers the glasses and turns and looks at me for real, and I've got the pail between my boots and my hands hanging off my knees, and I look at the floor between them. There's a nail on the floor, a roofing nail, bent. I pick it up.
She hangs the binoculars back on the nail. "Somebody's got a gray coat," she says, and she doesn't wave.
We go back to work and neither of us says anything else. I work with my back to the doors. There's a place on the apron where you can stand and see straight across the north end of the lake, and I don't go to it. I carry the canoe out over my head and lay it in the grass. I carry the rods. I carry the anchor chain, and every trip I keep my eyes on the door frame and off the shore.
At three I go out on the apron for air.
The landing is a gray notch on the far side of the water, most of a mile off, and the dock a pencil line running out from it. I let myself look.
There's nothing on it. A gull, maybe, at the end. Nobody sitting.
Leah goes at four. She's got work at seven in Kalamazoo. She says so standing at her open door with the keys in her hand, and then she stops and comes back across the gravel and puts her arms around me, hard, brace and all. She has to reach up to do it.
"The first," she says into my jacket. "Eleven. Don't be late."
"I won't."
"I'm calling Claire tonight."
"Tell her it'll be cold on the water."
She lets go. She takes my face in one hand for a second the way our mother used to, not gentle, checking it, and gets in the van and goes up the drive. I stand there until the sound is gone off the road.
I shut the doors and put the padlock through the hasp and check it. Then I take the can from behind the vise and carry it up to the truck. Leah's had her thumbnail under that lid. It doesn't stay on a shelf now.
I put it on the seat. It's a little after five and the light is going flat under the cloud, and the cottage windows have gone dark. I sit at the end of the drive with the engine off and both hands on the wheel. The can sits beside me with its yellow gone to tan. I put my hand on the lid.
A car goes by on the fire lane behind the cottage and its lights go across the windshield, and then it's dark in the cab.
I've opened it once. I don't open it now. I put it on the floor under the seat and start the truck.
It's nine when I come up the drive. Her Subaru is in its place, nose in, and I don't put my hand on the hood.
The kitchen is lit. Marsh is at the table with a mug and a claim file open and her reading glasses on, the ones she won't wear in front of anybody else. Her coat is on the hook by the door. Charcoal, the hood hanging down. I look at it going past and I don't touch it.
"You're late," she says.
"Traffic at Big Rapids."
"How was it?"
"Most of it's in bags." I put my keys in the dish. The little brass key's still not in the dish. I wash my hands at the sink and she waits, and I take my time with it. "The sill's gone soft all along the lake side. Half a day, if the post's good."
"And Leah?"
"Leah's Leah. She wants the ashes on the first."
"I know. She called me." She turns a page in the file without reading it. "I said I'd think about it."
"You don't have to."
"I said I'd think about it."
I dry my hands. She takes her glasses off and folds them and sets them on the file, square to the edge.
"Did your dad have a boat back then?"
I'm holding the towel. I finish with it. I fold it.
"A pontoon."
"What happened to it?"
"He sold it."
"Was it a big one?"
"Twenty-one feet."
"Huh," she says, and picks up her mug, and it's empty, and she looks into it.
She's never asked about the boat. Nine years.
I hang the towel on the oven door. The refrigerator hums. Somewhere over our heads the old house ticks, cooling, and I stand there with my hand on the oven door and she sits with her hand on the mug.
"Are you coming up?" she says.
"In a minute."
She goes. I hear her on the stairs. I hear the bedroom door.
I leave the kitchen light on.