All's Well That Ends Page 9

  Poor woman, so sure the world would appreciate her “treasures” as much as she did.

  The laptop glowed, keeping its secrets. Meanwhile, I played with various spellings of “Breece,” “Breeze,” “Debrise,” and “debris.” Caps and lowercase. Frenchified spelling or Anglo-Saxon.

  “Here’s the silver, and I do remember it.” Sasha came into the kitchen carrying a large wooden box. “I hated it back then. So clunky and heavy-looking, but aside from needing to be polished, it’s really nice.”

  She was right on both counts. It was lovely indeed, and polishing it would be a bitch.

  “You should definitely keep it. It’s beautiful.” I typed another combination on the computer. “Eureka! ‘Breezy’ did it. It’s her password, and I’m in!” I scrolled to the calendar function, then to the month of December. Sasha pulled her chair over to mine, and tilted sideways so she also could view the screen.

  That Thursday had only an “M.”

  “Her damn shorthand!” Sasha said. “It drove me crazy. ‘M.’ Great. Why couldn’t she for once write something out?”

  “It’s something,” I said. “It’s a start. We can go through her address book and find people with that initial and—”

  The doorbell rang.

  “Nobody lives here,” I said. “It’s got to be somebody selling something.”

  “Or good old Not-That-I’d-Pry-But from next door,” Sasha said.

  I shut the laptop down, just in case it was Ramona, and put it into the big carton I was taking home. At least partly it was because I didn’t know if going through Phoebe’s private records was the right or legal thing to do. I already felt embarrassed knowing about the false picture of herself she was planning to use as bait.

  Sasha and I both went to the door, as mutual protection from whatever we imagined the winter night might reveal, but when it opened, we saw only a tiny twenty-something woman with a mane of dark blond curls that could be described as midway between Botticelli tresses and a fright wig.

  She stood in the doorway, the overhead light reflecting off high-heeled boots that covered her calves and disappeared under her suede skirt. She had a burnt-orange-and-forest-green scarf flung artfully over one shoulder of a tight fur jacket. Real fur, I thought, judging by the way the light hit it. The jacket wasn’t even practical, covering a fraction of her body, and it seemed a cruel waste of a soft creature who’d had first dibs on that coat.

  She carried a briefcase that looked too expensive to hold mere paperwork.

  “Not a neighbor,” I said softly.

  “Saleswoman,” Sasha said. “You were right.”

  The petite woman with the huge hair opened the storm door with her eyebrows raised as a way of asking permission, and once there was no more glass barrier between us, only frigid air, she spoke. “I am so glad to find you here! I was afraid the house would be empty. I’m Toy Rasmussen!” She smiled and nodded, as if sure we’d be delighted with that information.

  “Miss Rasmussen, we were having dinner, my friend and I,” Sasha said. “Whatever it is will have to wait for some other time. And, in fact, I’m not the owner, and the house is actually empty in a manner of speaking, so I can’t buy or rent whatever you’re selling.” She backed up a step to close the inside door.

  “No, no, no!” the little woman said with a joyous expression that didn’t match the situation.

  Definitely a saleswoman, no matter what she said.

  And what she said was: “You’ve got me confused with somebody you don’t want to see—but you do want to see me! This is where I belong. You’re Sasha, right? Sasha Berg?” The twinkly woman tapped a long pink nail against her cheek. “Dennis told me you’d be here off and on, but I wasn’t sure when that would be, and he forgot to give me your contact info! I was simply going to leave my card, but this is so much better! Nothing like a face-to-face, is there? So lucky to find you here and all!”

  “Dennis?” Sasha echoed.

  “Yay-uss,” Toy said, pulling a card out of her briefcase. “Dennis Allenby. His mother owned this house—poor soul, she’s gone now—and the house is going up for sale.”

  “Yes, I know that.”

  “Of course!” she said with a laugh that sounded like water running over stones. “Dennis didn’t explain your exact connection with the property, but he did say you’d be glad to help me out. Are you a relative as well? I thought Dennis was an only child, but my condolences in any case. Sometimes friends are as close as family, and all losses are painful. What a pity she was taken too young and so suddenly.”

  There are few things more offensive to me than totally insincere sympathy. My personal ad would say, “Loves games; hates cloying, fake new best friends.” I’d rather the person skipped it altogether, or said outright, “I don’t care one whit about what’s happened to you. I’m here for other reasons, which have to do with making money. I’m here for me.” I might be able to be friends with that person.

  I wanted to demand that Toy explain why she considered it a pity that Phoebe, a woman whose name she didn’t even know, had died. I expected Sasha to challenge her, but, “What did he tell you?” she asked instead.

  “Dennis?” She laughed again before going on. “He agreed with what I told him and am here to tell you. I am the best stager in the tristate area.” This laugh, like the others, sounded like a tiny chandelier’s crystals. She dug into her soft briefcase another time, and whipped out a second card, placing one on each upturned palm, as if they were offerings, and we each took one. Her business cards showed an open theater curtain on each side margin, and between them, a flat line with a sofa on it, and TOY’S STAGING: THIS TOY’S FOR REAL in a fake scriptlike font.

  I was freezing. It was not a night for open front doors; yet inviting her in seemed a worse option. Once again I thought about other things I could be doing. Better, more interesting things, like doing absolutely nothing, but in my own home.

  “So, long story short,” she said, “he hired me to come stage his mother’s house, and here I am, at your service!” Again her laugh tinkled forth like a child’s xylophone, then it stopped abruptly, and she pointed one leather-gloved finger at me. “We haven’t been introduced, but you know who I am, so who are you, may I ask?”

  I wanted to say no, she couldn’t ask, but Sasha had better manners, so she introduced me, and tried to explain what we were doing there; and finally, in a resigned tone, she said, “Come in.”

  “Well, my oh my,” Toy said as she just about leaped into the house. She pulled off the fur jacket and dangled it from one hand. “She certainly liked…” She pivoted, surveying the living room. “Everything. Didn’t she, though? A distinct personality lived here, I can tell, but it means I’ve got my work cut out for me.” She twirled once more. “Some of this is quite nice, but…really. Not for this setting!” She lifted a box with a tableau on it in inlaid woods. “Nice but too small—and too muchness! Way too cluttered. No room for people to imagine their lives in this room. It’s too full of hers.”

  “You’d think a person intelligent enough to have the wherewithal to buy a house would have a little imagination, wouldn’t you?” Sasha stood, arms crossed at the chest, looking not at all happy about the twirling, trilling woman. “I mean they’re buying the place from another human being, so why be shocked if its contents reflect who that person was? After all, they aren’t buying its contents. They don’t have to match the buyer’s personality.”

  “People…” Toy said, letting the idea trail off into whatever negative meaning we wanted to give it. “Imagination…you can’t imagine…” The mini-chandelier laugh sounded at her word play. “When you’ve dealt with as many people in transition as I have…” she said in her airy voice. “Well, what can I say?”

  She could say a lot, most likely, but so far, she’d said nothing.

  “May I?” she asked as she edged toward the dining room.

  So this is what became of my students who could not get it straight that they should be
called on before they spoke. The ones who raised their hands only after they’d said their piece.

  Sasha closed in on her. Phoebe’s house was not large. It took only a few steps for Sasha to be next to Toy, or more accurately, to loom over her. There had to be a foot’s difference in height, though I thought that if psyches and determination were duking it out, it might be a draw. “First tell me,” Sasha said. “You ‘stage’ the house?”

  Toy shook her great yellow mane in a nod.

  “The entire house?”

  “Attic to basement, if need be,” she said. “We’re a full-service staging operation.”

  “And that means what?”

  Toy made a sweeping motion with her hand. “Pare down, arrange what’s left, bring in accessories, flowers, paint the walls, replace the furniture, make sure the grounds are inviting—whatever it takes to give the place some juice, some feel, maybe even some pizzazz.”

  “But no personality,” Sasha said.

  Toy, despite her name and diminutive stature, was in no way intimidated by my friend Sasha’s dark mood or six-foot height. “No specific personality—and no idiosyncratic personality. But more than that, no clutter! You want the buyer to walk in and feel at home, to say, ‘Yes, this is where I belong.’ And you don’t want them to think it’s a dark place, a cramped place, because the former owner stuffed it with too much!” She waved at her surroundings, almost like an orchestra conductor, then turned toward the dining room. “You want them to have space to breathe, to imagine themselves in here. To imagine putting Aunt Sadie’s enormous breakfront right there and the gigantic flat-screen TV over there. To let them imagine cluttering it up themselves.”

  “Specifically, what are we talking about?” Sasha asked. “What does what you’re saying entail?”

  “Up to you, and in this case, Dennis, too, I suppose. We can do anything and everything. Make that garage look useable. Replace gangly houseplants with smaller, tidier-looking ones. Replace, recover, redo the furniture if need be—and your budget allows. Trust me, it’s money well spent. Staged houses sell for more and sell more quickly. I have charts and statistical evidence I’ll show you. They’re right outside in my car. You’d be amazed!”

  We shook our heads. “No thanks.” She wasn’t going to carry literature with her that made her profession seem less than a basic necessity of life.

  She was alive with energy and excitement about making this home look better. I would not have been surprised if she suddenly broke into song, or tap-danced.

  “What do you do with the things you pare down?” Sasha asked.

  Toy lifted both carefully sculpted eyebrows. “You—or Dennis—do whatever you want with them. Take them, give them to charity, keep them as souvenirs, burn them, store them. If you have no interest in so doing, we’ll dispose of it all for you, but there is a charge for hauling it away.”

  She did a few more slow pirouettes, opening her arms in the Evita pose, embracing the house with her vision as she spoke. “My concern is what this area will say. Right now, I’m envisioning it empty, and then I will slowly envision filling it back up. Think of this as my stage. Literally. As if you were in the theater, and the curtain went up and you saw this house up there; and it was set up and painted and decorated so that before the play even started, before anybody walked onstage, you’d know that this was a good house, a happy house, a house to be proud of, though not pretentious.”

  Sasha turned and looked at me, deadpan, then turned back to Toy, who continued her narrative with great gusto. “Right now,” she said, “it’s filled with tiny things that don’t make a statement; they chatter. The feeling is decidedly busy, busy, busy! No breathing room. One or two significant pieces would be much more effective than all this clutter. As for the disposition of what’s in here now—well, I don’t have it in writing but Dennis for one didn’t sound that interested in any of it.” Without asking for permission, Toy walked around the dining room. “Oh my!” she squeaked, sounding like a startled Disney mousekin.

  “What is he thinking?” Sasha whispered to me. “He tells me to take care of things, then he sends her here? Doesn’t he trust me? Or did he tell her to throw everything of his mother’s away? I haven’t even had time to think about half of it. Plus, God knows what she charges, and am I supposed to pay it out of my half because I’m taking care of this sale? I won’t; but even if it’s out of both of our shares equally—who wants this?”

  I felt it wise to stay out of this altogether.

  “Well, some of these pieces might work,” Toy said when she’d recovered from the shock of Phoebe’s dining-room collections. Every surface was covered, but not the way Ramona’s had been. No plastic here, only objects. Lots and lots of them. The center of the dining-room table had a wide runner on it holding candleholders. Some were beautiful, some were silly, but you didn’t have to be a professional stager to know there were too many of them. If all had been in use, the house might explode from the heat they’d produce.

  “I wouldn’t keep much,” Toy now was saying, “that’s for sure. Maybe that breakfront, and we could put a few important pieces in it if there’s anything that—”

  “I know, makes a statement,” Sasha muttered.

  “—sings to me,” Toy said. “And let me check out the kitchen, not that we can do too much in there, unless Dennis is up for some remodeling. But even something like colored place mats, and clean counters, and—”

  “I’d have to be up for it, too,” Sasha declared loudly from the living room.

  “Sorry!” Toy trilled. “Of course I meant both of you.”

  “I vote no remodeling,” Sasha continued. “Also, I need a whole lot more information before you talk about painting and finding things that sing to you. Furthermore, I haven’t heard from Dennis, and he should have let me know. He put me in charge of this house, and I’m not ready to sign off on expenses and decisions I know nothing about.”

  “But,” I whispered, giving up on my decision to stay out of this, “You don’t want to do this yourself. You were complaining about it when I got here. This place is a mess—not dirty, but I’ve never seen more clutter.”

  Sasha’s mouth tightened. “Don’t give me common sense, Amanda. If there’s one thing I hate when I’m pissed off it’s logic! Why did he hire somebody behind my back? Doesn’t he trust me to do a decent job? His high-handedness is the point!”

  “The man’s a jerk. Why be surprised when he does something jerky?”

  Toy came back into the living room. “I’ve promised Dennis a solid guesstimate ASAP. So as soon as I’ve seen the rest of the house and crunch some numbers, I’d be happier than happy to give it to you, too; and then you and Dennis can decide whether it’s worth it. I can tell you right now—it absolutely is. Without me, this house won’t sell for what it’s worth. Not close. With all due apologies to the deceased, she wasn’t thinking about market value, curb appeal.”

  “Right. She was thinking about living in it,” Sasha said, “about having it appeal to her own self, not the curb.”

  Toy was already on the third riser of the staircase, ignoring us. “May I?” she said as she went upstairs. “The bedrooms are relatively simple to freshen up. Shouldn’t take me but a minute to evaluate.”

  “What are you really afraid of?” I asked when Toy was out of earshot.

  “She lived with us—I lived with her. Some of her memories are mine, too. I don’t want some stranger stomping through everything.”

  “Then, instead of deciding what has to go—let’s go through the place tonight, or however many other nights it takes, and tag each thing you want as a keepsake. There has to be less of those than there are of the get-rid-ofs, and it shouldn’t take that long. It’s not that large a house. Do you think there’s lots you’d want to keep?”

  Sasha shrugged. “Not really. I remember some things from way back when we were, officially, family. They had sentimental attachments for her, so now they do for me as well. But I really resent Dennis,
and this makes me wonder if he wasn’t the surprise visitor that night.”

  “Are you honestly saying he killed his own mother?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him.” She looked serious, and the expression on her face and what she was suggesting frightened me. “He’s screwed up most of his life and he’s still not exactly a roaring success, and the money he’ll get from this house is going to matter to him a lot. Not that it won’t matter to me—it definitely will, and I’m probably poorer than Dennis. But even so, it won’t matter in the same way. There’s always something desperate about Dennis.”

  I thought I understood at least enough of what she was trying to say.

  “No love was lost between them,” she said. “You heard the way he talked at her memorial service.”

  “Good thing is: He’s in Chicago and we’re here. Take all the time you need to go through this house. Then, maybe, Toy can get rid of the things you don’t want. Let her worry about getting Dumpsters and trucks. We can start taking the small things home with us tonight.”

  “Well, well, well,” Toy said, clunking down the stairs in her boots. “You aren’t going to believe this place when we’re finished with it. It will be a doll’s house, a little showplace. It has decent enough bones. Now we have to give it a chance to shine. A little powder and lipstick, or if you will, a little face-lift. Let me work up my estimate and get back to you. I think I could have it ready by tomorrow, but I may need to get into the house one more time first. Maybe during the day? With good light? Then meet here and talk over each idea?”

  “Fine,” Sasha snapped. “I’ll see you at five P.M.”

  She made it sound as if the appointment were for a duel.

  Eight

  * * *

  * * *

  We didn’t make much headway, or maybe there isn’t much headway to make,” I said to Mackenzie. “Sasha’s digging in, literally and figuratively, but after yesterday, I’m calling quits to the sorting and packing up. Friendship goes far, but sifting through junk in search of other people’s memories gets old fast.”