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January 01, 2005
Fiction -- 'The Remembrance Box'
One of my resolutions for the New Year that I hope to keep is to start writing fiction again. So I offer up my first new story of the year, something I just finished today. There's a note at the end on the genesis of the story, too, you may find interesting. Enjoy!
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She reached out across the desk and stubbed out her cigarette in an already overflowing ashtray and for one brief moment was startled that the hand doing the deed was really hers. It was leathery, spotted and roped on the back with heavy blue veins.
"When did I get so old?" Ruth thought.
Days rolled into weeks into months into years. Ruth could just glance across the office to the bookshelf where her bound ledgers were silent sentries to the passage of time. Each December she bought new one, taking a measure of delight in the clean, crisp green pages. Her eldest son had offered, still offered, to get her a computer for the business’s bookkeeping, but Ruth always waved him off.
“This has worked out just fine for your father and I all these years. Why should I change now?”
She didn’t know how to tell him how calming it was for her to see the figures all neatly entered, the numbers lining up in column after column. The security she felt in actually touching the paper, balancing the entries, drawing yet another Pilot razor-point pen from the boxes she bought when she purchased the ledger to add accounts in her concise printing. Her office smarts and pragmatism were the foundational success of Captain Buddy’s Storage.
Ruth glanced up, gazing out of the window of her office across the desert scenery. She didn’t want to short her husband, Buddy. It was his dreams that got them here.
She met him in San Diego, during the War. Theirs was one of those hasty whirlwind romances, heady and desperate with the times. She was born and raised in that Navy town and Buddy had been cooling his heels waiting for orders to ship out. The nineteen year old Ruth had been dazzled by the gregarious Richard (Buddy to his friends) who laid his eyes on her and pursued her and courted her until they wed, she with an orchid corsage, him in his Navy uniform, in front of a justice of the peace within a few weeks of their meeting.
Their marriage survived separation, war and years where so many of their contemporaries failed. It thrived and endured through children and moves. Buddy was always full of dreams and energy. They opened and operated numerous businesses, moving from home to home. He considered strangers friends he hadn’t met yet, was involved with each local Chamber of Commerce, coached the Little League teams their sons played on, organized charity drives. Many of the businesses failed, but it never fazed Buddy who always saw the next big thing ahead and embraced life as a great adventure to be savored in big bites.
Ruth caught the sight of her smile in the reflection from the office window. Over fifty years of marriage and just remembering the early years brought sweetness to the day.
After the boys were grown and married and settled, Buddy’s last dream was this business. Far from the beaches she grew up on, she followed him to the high desert where they built row and row of storage units. Ruth had been skeptical, as she always was. Her role had always been to ground Buddy’s plans in reality. It was always one area of contention in their marriage – Buddy’s big dreams and Ruth’s pragmatic skepticism. Through the years had been fights and tears and nights with one or the other on the couch. And his plan that would take all their savings for a retirement business had been one of the biggest fights of their marriage. But his plans had included a second story area that was a two-bedroom home, with a large patio and as they sat on that patio on moonless summer nights never tiring of the black sky filled with stars from horizon to horizon, Ruth had learned to love the area almost as much as she loved her husband.
So her old-fashioned bookkeeping was not just stubbornness on her part, but a daily reminder of her life with Buddy, now several years gone.
A knock on the office door brought Ruth out of her reminiscence. She opened it to a young woman who nervously shifted from foot to foot.
“Mrs. Sterling? Are you Mrs. Sterling?”
Ruth stepped back and opened the door wider, “Yes, that’s me. Come on in, Miss…?”
“Gordon. Pat Gordon. You can call me Pat.”
Pat flitted by Ruth. That’s what Ruth thought, “She doesn’t walk, she flits.” Pat was an agitated bundle of colorlessness. Ruth couldn’t even get a real gauge on her age. From dishwater blonde hair to faded, grayed clothes that hung on a thin frame, Pat could be anywhere from 25 to 45. Good lord, couldn’t she just stand still? Ruth was beginning to feel itchy just watching the fidgety Pat. “What can I do for you, Miss Gordon?”
“Pat, you can call me Pat. Uh. Mrs. Sterling, I need to, I mean I’m wondering if, well, you know I’ve had a place here and …” She thrust her hand towards Ruth offering up a crumbled letter, “I mean I’ve come about this.”
Ruth took it, immediately recognizing her own signature on a form letter she sent out to those renters who have seriously lapsed in payments. She crossed to her filing cabinet and opened the second drawer where she had her “red files.” Thumbing through them she found the file labeled “Gordon, Patricia” and as she pulled it out she saw she had already stamped the outside of it "closed".
“Well, Mrs. Sterling? I’ve got to get into my space, Mrs. Sterling. I’m sorry was late with the rent, really I am. But I have to get in …”
Ruth held up her hand, hopefully to stem the chatter, as she spread the file on her desk, “Miss Gordon …”
“Pat, you can call me Pat.”
“Miss Gordon, you were not just late with your rent, but over three months late when I sent you that letter two months ago.”
“Oh. Well, yeah, you’re right, Mrs. Sterling. I know. I let it slip. It hasn’t been easy lately. Not easy at all. But you see, I have the money now. I could make up the back rent now.”
“You don’t understand, you were more than three months late. I sent you other letters, certified letters telling you of what would happen.”
“I don’t remember those, Mrs. Sterling. I don’t remember them at all.”
Ruth sighed. How many times had she been through this scenario over the years? She pointed down at the open file, “Look here. Here is your signature for the certified letter telling you that the contents of your storage space were going to be sold at auction.”
“I signed that?” Pat stepped up to the desk and peered down, her pale eyebrows knit, “Oh. Yeah. Looks like it. But I’ve rented here for three years. Doesn’t that count for anything?”
“I sent you the letters. I put notice in the newspaper as required. I’m sorry but it’s been sold. It belongs to someone else now.”
“No!” Pat reached out and grabbed Ruth’s arm. Ruth gasped in surprise. Pat was strong! Her grip on Ruth’s arm was like a steel trap fully belied by her gray and frail appearance. Pat must have realized what she was doing. She dropped her grip and stepped back, her hands now tangling with each other. “You don’t understand. You don’t understand why.”
Ruth sat down heavily in her chair, her heart racing, “What?”
“Robert left us, Mrs. Sterling. My husband left us. Three years ago. I got three kids, Mrs. Sterling and it hasn’t been easy. You know, raising them by myself. He left us. Oh, some nice memories. And that’s why I gotta get in there. I don’t want anything, anything that’s valuable, Mrs. Sterling. I’m not trying to cheat or anything. Can you understand? My husband’s just gone and all I got for the kids to remember him is in that space.”
Ruth swallowed, listening to Pat’s rambling, trying to make sense of it. Hadn’t Ruth herself been caught up in memories earlier? Hanging onto her old ways, staying on in this business because it helped her remember Buddy.
“Look, Miss Gordon,” Ruth cleared her throat, still seeking a bit of calm “I’ve already sold the contents. I’m sorry. Legally, there is nothing I can do. However, I can get you in touch with the owner. I’m sure if you explained to her you just wanted some personal mementoes she’d be more than happy to give them to you.”
Pat was shaking her head, backing towards the door, “I don’t know, Mrs. Sterling. I just need to get in there and get those things, those last things that my husband left. It's all I got left of him.”
Ruth turned toward her desk, reaching out and pulling the Rolodex towards her, “Miss Gordon, I know the woman, I sold the contents to,” Ruth thumbed through the cards, “Janet Tyler. She’s a good egg. I’m sure if you talk to her she’ll set aside anything personal and …”
The banging of the office door brought Ruth around in a start. Pat was gone.
Ruth related all this to Janet a few days later when Janet showed up with her nephew, Hal, to inventory the space she had bought.
“It was just strange, Janet” Ruth shook her head, “That Gordon was just so dead set on getting the things of her husband’s out of the storage unit. And then she disappears and didn’t even wait to get your name.”
Janet laughed, “Ruth. How many years have we known each other now? How many really strange things have we seen people store here? I certainly don’t get rich doing this bidding on a pig in a poke, but once in a while,” Janet’s grin grew, “Remember the antique sideboard I discovered last year? My, oh my. I sold that one for a nice tidy profit!”
“Aunt Janet! I’ve got it open.”
Janet and Ruth moved to the storage unit, eyes adjusting from the bright sunlight to the dim interior. It looked like a lot of storage units, a jumble of U-haul packing boxes, a few broken pieces of furniture. Janet opened the first box closest to her. Hal started moving the boxes out into the sunlight for inspection.
“Ruth, look at this!” Janet pulled out a large silver frame, a couple in wedding attire posed within its boundaries. Ruth squinted a bit.
“Yeah, Janet. That’s her. That’s ‘Pat, call me Pat’ Gordon.”
“Looks like she wasn’t lying about storing personal things about her husband. Must have just packed up all the wedding stuff when he left,” She pulled a wedding veil from the box, “Guess she’s having her regrets now that the kids are getting older. I’ll put this aside for her and give her a call myself …”
“Aunt Janet? Ruth?” Hal’s voice sounded so different both Ruth and Janet immediately turned towards it. He was standing over a small wooden crate he had just moved out of the unit, “What was that you said about Pat Gordon? That all she had left of her husband was in this unit?” Hal looked up at them and stepped back, letting the lid of the crate clatter to the ground, “She wasn’t lying.”
A breeze stirred a flap of cloth visible from where Ruth and Janet stood. The cloth fell away and a clawed, mummified hand was starkly revealed in the bright desert sun.
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Note: this is a fictionalized account of a case from my office we dubbed, in typical black-humor fashion, "Bob in the Box."
Posted by Darleen at January 1, 2005 03:42 PM
Comments
Great ending! Really had me going there.
j
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