I drove to Seattle in August of ‘97 to talk it over with her.
“No problem,” Mary said. “I’ve got plenty of room here, and Ren and I get along just fine.”
“You do understand that she’s just a little—” Les groped for a suitable word.
“Screwball, you mean?” Mary asked bluntly. “Yes, I know all about it. I’m used to screwballs, Les. Half the people I work with aren’t playing with a full deck. Renata’s going to be fine here with me.”
“Well,” he said dubiously, “I guess we can try it for one quarter to see how she does. But if it starts giving her problems…” He left it hanging.
“I’ll be here, too, boss,” I told him. “I’ll get a room nearby and, between us, Mary and I can keep Twink on an even keel.”
“You’re going to have to let go, Les,” Mary told him. “If you try to protect her for the rest of her life, you’ll turn her into a basket case. I love her, too, and I won’t let you do that to her. She comes here; and that’s that.” Mary wasn’t the sort for shilly-shallying around when it came to making decisions.
The chore of moving Twink to Seattle fell into my lap. Her father had a business to run, and I wasn’t doing anything important anyway. There was a lot of driving back and forth between Everett and Seattle involved in easing Twink into her new situation, and the whole procedure took the better part of two weeks. There are people who can move halfway across the country in less time, but we all wanted to take it a little slow with this move. Stress was the last thing Renata needed.
“Why’s everybody so uptight about this?” she asked me while I was driving her back to Everett to pick up some more of her clothes. “I’m a big girl now.”
“We just want to make sure you’re not going to come unraveled again, Twink,” I told her.
“My seams are all still pretty tight,” she said. “Actually, I’m looking forward to this. Les and Inga keep tiptoeing around me like I was made out of eggshells. I wish they’d learn how to relax. Mary’s a lot easier to be around.”
“Good. Let’s keep it that way.” I hesitated slightly, but then I sort of blurted it out. “Your dad’s got a real bad case of protective-itis, Twink. He’s not happy about this whole project, but Doc Fallon overruled him. Fallon believes it’ll be good for you—as long as we can keep the pressure off. Your dad would much rather wrap you in cotton batting and keep you in a little jewel box.”
“I know,” she agreed. “That was my main reason for suggesting the university instead of the community college. I’ve got to get out from under his thumb, Markie. That house in Everett is almost as bad as Fallon’s bughouse. I need to have you somewhere nearby, but Les and Inga are starting to give me the heebie-jeebies. Whether they like it or not, Twinkie is going to grow up.”
That caught me a little off guard. Twink had been kind of passive since she’d come out of Fallon’s sanitarium, but now she sounded anything but passive. This was a new Twinkie, and I wasn’t sure where she was going.
It was a dreary Sunday in early September when I went cruising around the Wallingford district to find a place for me to live. I stuck mostly to the back streets, where older houses that had seen better days. Almost all displayed that discreet ROOMS TO LET sign in a front window. Generations of university students had fanned out from the campus in search of cheap lodgings, and property owners all over north Seattle obligingly offered rooms, many of which took “cheap” all the way down to the flophouse level.
The thing that attracted me to one particular house was an addition to the standard ROOMS TO LET placard. It read FOR SERIOUS STUDENTS ONLY with “SERIOUS” underlined in bright red ink.
I pulled to the curb and sat looking at the self-proclaimed home for the elite. On the plus side, it was no more than five blocks from Mary’s house, and that was fairly important. It wasn’t in very good condition, but that didn’t bother me all that much. I was looking for a place where I could sleep and study, not some showplace to impress visitors.
Then a bulky-shouldered black man came around the side of the house carrying a large cardboard box filled with what appeared to be scraps from some sort of building project. The black man had arms as thick as fence posts, silvery hair, and a distinguished-looking beard.
I got out of my car when he reached the curb. “Excuse me, neighbor,” I said politely. “Do you happen to know why the owner of this house is making such an issue of ‘serious’?”
A faint smile touched his lips. “Trish has some fairly strong antiparty prejudices,” he replied in a voice so deep that it seemed to be coming up out of his shoes.
“Trish?”
“Patricia Erdlund,” he explained. “Swedish girl, obviously. The house belongs to her aunt, but Auntie Grace had a stroke last year. Trish’s sister, Erika, was living here at the time, and she put in an emergency call to her big sister. Trish is in law school, and Erika just finished premed, so they weren’t too happy to be living in the middle of a twelve-week-long beer bust. I’ve lived here for six years, so I’ve more or less learned to turn my ears off, but the Erdlund girls aren’t that adaptable. They announced a no-drinking policy, and that emptied the place out almost immediately. Now they’re looking for suitable recruits to fill the place back up.”
“I don’t want to be offensive,” I said carefully, “but aren’t you a bit old to be a student? You are a student, aren’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” he replied. “I’m a late bloomer—I was thirty-five before I got started. My name’s James Forester,” he introduced himself, holding out his hand.
“Mark Austin,” I responded, shaking hands with him.
“What’s your field, Mark?”
“English.”
“Grad student?”
I nodded. “Ph.D. candidate. What’s your area?”
“Philosophy and comparative religion.”
“How many people do the Erdlund girls plan to cram into the house?”
“We’ve got two empty rooms on the second floor. There are a couple of cubicles in the attic and several more in the basement, but they’re hardly fit for human habitation. Auntie Grace used to rent them out—el cheapo—to assorted indigents who always had trouble paying the rent, maybe because they routinely spent the rent money on booze or dope. That’s where most of the noise was coming from, so Trish and Erika decided to leave them empty and concentrate on finding quiet, useful people to live in the regular rooms.”
“Useful?”
“There are some domestic chores involved in the arrangement. I’ve got a fair degree of familiarity with plumbing, and I can usually hook wires together without blowing too many fuses. The house has been seriously neglected for the past dozen or so years, so it falls into the ‘fixer-upper’ category. Have you had any experience in any of the building trades?”
“I know a little bit about carpentry,” I replied. “I’ve spent a few years working in a door factory up in Everett. Let’s say I know enough to back off when I’m out of my depth.”
“That
