Thirty-One
A Conversation with Sophie Littlefield
Chapter One
On Jen Glass’s Saturday to-do list, she scheduled an hour to visit the apartment her father died in, and another for the morgue. Only half an hour for the funeral home, since you could make just about anything go faster when you were willing to write a big check.
And Jen was willing. With every passing mile of frozen fields, every tinny song on the classic rock station, every time her sister snapped her gum, she was growing ever more willing.
The to-do list was written in her neat handwriting in the fabric-covered notebook in her purse. On the page before were the notes she’d taken at the parents’ association meeting. On the page before that, a list of tree services that had been recommended by friends. Both of those lists were written before she knew her father was dead. But according to the police, he had been dead for several days when the landlady found him. So it was entirely possible that while Jen wrote down ArborWorks (Margeurite) ask for Gerald, he had already taken his last breath. When she was sitting in the library at Teddy’s preschool, writing Teacher appreciation, Thursday, two dozen cupcakes (carrot? cream cheese frost?) his corpse could well have been beginning to smell.
Tanya always made fun of Jen’s list making, so she had kept this one hidden away. But what Tanya didn’t understand was that when you wrote a list, it forced you to organize your thoughts, so when the time came to act, you didn’t waste time on false starts and dead ends. A list could make an unpleasant task go more quickly. And this day, attending to the details of the passing of a man Jen hadn’t seen or talked to in almost three decades, couldn’t go quickly enough.
* * *
They reached Murdoch in the early afternoon, after a stop at a roadside Subway because Tanya had a coupon. She paid for lunch. Jen was paying for everything else, and that knowledge sat between them like a screen that muffled what they wanted to say. But it was an inescapable fact: being a Calumet housewife of a global management consultant—even a laid-off one—paid far better than being a single mom with a high school education and a call center job.
Jen exited the highway when the phone app told her to. There wasn’t much to look at. A couple hundred miles north of Minneapolis, the land was flat and gray. Murdoch had no visible means of support, no smokestacks or office parks or hospital complexes. A cluster of motels and fast-food restaurants gave way to a depressing little town that spilled out on either side of a straight-shot four-lane road littered with strip malls and auto shops. Jen estimated that a quarter of the businesses they passed were boarded up.
“Jeez, this place isn’t much,” Tanya said, yawning. “Guess Sid didn’t exactly move up in the world.”
The phone took them into a neighborhood of shabby bungalows. Sid’s apartment building was a run-down two-story sandwiched between a vacant lot and a squat little cinder block bar whose neon Budweiser sign struck a jarring note in the colorless afternoon. No one had bothered to shovel the sidewalk leading up to the apartment building’s entrance after the last storm, and the snow had melted unevenly, dirty banks of it giving way to icy patches. One of the units still had Christmas lights up around the window; the strand had come loose from the nails and dangled against the building.
Tanya dug the keys out of her purse. The management company had overnighted them to her. Monday, they were hauling away whatever was left in the apartment.
“Ready?” she said, opening the door.
Jen steeled herself to face the residents they might pass in the hall. She imagined men in threadbare wool coats, old ladies with cats for company and the TV on all day long. But inside the building it was empty and still, the carved wood moldings and newel posts in surprisingly good shape. Someone in the twin cities would pay a bundle for them, Jen couldn’t help thinking. Up here in the sticks, people didn’t know what they had.
“One-oh-one.” Tanya read the numerals on the doors. “One-oh-two. Where the hell is apartment one?”
“Can I see?” Jen took the keys from Tanya. The little round tag had a number one printed clearly on it.
Tanya glared at her as she took the keys back. She was older, by almost two years, and even though they were in their forties now, she still sometimes seemed to need to be in charge. “Satisfied? Maybe next time trust me to read a number? I bet it’s downstairs.”
A narrow staircase at the back of the hall led to the basement. It smelled of both mold and bleach. There was a washer and dryer up on blocks, splintery plywood cupboards with padlocks. The light from a naked bulb overhead and a few narrow windows near the ceiling wasn’t enough to cut the gloom. At the far end of the basement was a door set in unpainted Sheetrock that blocked off the rest of the basement.
“No way this is a legal apartment,” Tanya said. She tried the key, and the door opened.
Inside, the odor of bleach was stronger, but there was another faint smell underneath, ripe and awful and somehow sweet. So that’s the smell of death, Jen thought.
The apartment was a single room. A bank of cabinets and a sink anchored one wall; a tiny bathroom and closet were built into the other. A high, cobwebbed window looked out on a dead shrub. There was a bookcase, a table under the window covered with a patterned cloth, a soiled couch facing a television set on a pressboard console. A bed stripped down to the mattress, which looked none too clean.
“I bet he died in the bed,” Tanya said. “Otherwise the sheets and stuff would still be on there.”
“Um.” Jen felt faintly nauseous. “They didn’t say when they called?”
“They hardly said anything when they called. I think it was just some secretary or something. She was, like, when was the last time you saw your father? I wanted to tell her to shove the death certificate up her ass.”
“Tanya,” Jen said reprovingly. “She didn’t mean anything.”
“How do you know? You weren’t there.”
Jen let it go. They were both on edge today. Tanya just said whatever she was thinking, a trait that had always gotten her into trouble. Jen had learned a long time ago to think before speaking, to filter out the emotions first.
Tanya picked up a glass that had been sitting on top of the television and inspected the contents. “There’s nothing in here that’s worth anything. Look at this. The Salvation Army probably wouldn’t even take it.”
“Well, then I guess it’s good that we don’t have to deal with it.”
“I asked the management company if there was a security deposit,” Tanya said, putting her hand on the metal headboard and giving it an experimental
