This Old House

The interoffice line rings. The sharp, annoying ring shoots through Braylon as if he were biting down on aluminum foil.

“Can you come to my office?” Daryl asks.

“…Now what?” Braylon mutters as he trudges down the hall.

In his two years at Cache Money Advertising in Bristol, Rhode Island, Braylon Payne has always felt like a salmon swimming upstream toward a cannery. The employees at Cash Money are tethered to timelines, conference calls, team building, and retreats, and have overdosed on technology. Braylon gets along with his supervisor, Daryl Claypool, on a personal level, but knows that in an office full of ravenous Type A personalities, Daryl wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice him for a raise.

A bearded, burly conservative, Daryl takes offense to criticism, telling his employees to take responsibility for their assignments while micromanaging them.

“I know it's been a rough year for you, what with your mother’s health and all,” Daryl begins. “But I don’t see any improvement in your work. I’ve told you that I need you to work faster. I had to get an extension for the Adamson Apples campaign because of you, which was an embarrassment to the company and me. As you know, our motto is…”

“Fast, efficient, and creative...”

“Your last two campaigns haven’t been fast or efficient. You’re a creative guy, Braylon, but your ideas for those campaigns feel flat. Let me ask you something, are you happy here?”

Braylon squirms in his chair. He can practically feel his hair falling out.

“Most of the time…Sometimes…”

“When you came here, you were enthusiastic and efficient, a guy who happily took on more. That guy’s gone. I’ve come up with a plan to get you back on track and increase your productivity.”

Daryl pushes a stack of papers across the desk at Braylon.

Braylon glances at it. There are verbose paragraphs with percentages and timelines indicating what he’s expected to do.

“Am I on probation?” Braylon asks.

“No. Think of it as a way to focus and improve your performance,” Daryl replies, grinning falsely. “You’re to follow the plan for the next thirty days. If we don’t see some improvement, I’m afraid we’ll have to terminate you.”

The more Braylon reads the plan, the more the words begin to run together into an unintelligible mishmash.

“I’ve heard you talk with the guys in security about how much you enjoy playing softball and what music means to you. If you can capture that spirit and put it toward your work, you can be a top dog around here. Everybody likes you, but that doesn't make a profit. So, what do you say?”

“You’re setting me up to fail.”

Daryl feigns surprise. “What? We’re giving you the tools to succeed.”

“You want me to work faster. I have to be honest with you and myself. The faster I work, the more mistakes I’m going to make, and I’m sure you don’t want that.”

“I’m confident you can turn things around in thirty days.”

“I’m glad you are. I’m not. Rather than develop more of an ulcer than I already have and still end up getting fired, I’m going to resign right now.”

“I think you’re making a mistake, Braylon.”

“The mistake I made was in thinking I could fit in here.”

***

It takes several seconds for Braylon to adjust to Aida’s heavily accented voice. Aida is the latest in a long line of caregivers for his mother. The former teacher from Ghana is knowledgeable, resourceful, and, above all, genuinely likes his mother, whose pill-induced mood swings could test Jobe's patience.

“Can you come home? Your mother is sick again. She’s in the hospital.”

“How does it look?”

“Not good. The doctors say she doesn’t have much time left.”

“Is it her diabetes? Her diverticulitis? What happened?”

“She took her Xanax and went to bed early. She had ten pills left in the bottle. She cried out at night, saying her stomach was hurting. I looked in the bottle, and there was one pill left.”

Braylon makes the three-hour trip from Bristol, Rhode Island, to Mount Kisco, New York, knowing he must stay by his mother’s side until she recovers. The idea that a seventy-nine-year-old woman known throughout her hometown for her energy and toughness could actually die never occurs to him. The thought of facing their festering relationship scares him much more.

Connected to IVs, feeding tubes, and medicine ports, his diminutive mother looks like a macabre marionette caught in its own strings.

“Well, if it isn’t the prodigal's son,” she rasps. “You’re losing your hair, and you’re getting fat.”

“Can you put the knives away for once, Mom? How do you feel?”

“How the hell do you think I feel? I’m dying, you idiot. Did you bring the grandkids?... Oh, wait a minute, you never got married, so I never had any.”

“I told you that those six summers I spent as a camp counselor convinced me never to have kids.”

“But what about a wife? All those nannies you dated…”

“Just for fun, Mom.”

“You had your fun at my expense. Your sister cared more about family, and she was only six.”

Braylon thinks his mother’s medicated mind must be playing tricks on her.

“I don’t have a sister.”

“No, not now. Do you remember the portrait of the flower girl in the living room? That was painted from memory by your uncle. Your sister, Anna, was the flower girl at his wedding. She died from meningitis four months later. She was the perfect child. Then you came along.”

“I felt your disappointment in the cold way you treated me. Dad was never like that. We loved each other.”

“You always idolized your father. Let me tell you what he was really like,” his mother says venomously. “He left me after Anna died and lived with some waitress for two years. We were both still grieving over our little girl’s death when we accidentally met again. You were a whim, a replacement, a night of passion. Did you ever notice that your father and I never hugged or kissed one another? We were a corporation, not a married couple.”

“I tried to be a good son. I got good grades. I had several prestigious jobs, and I came home to help you when Dad got sick.”

“All of which was expected of any son. You were always so meek, so indecisive. You let other people pull you along. You abandoned your muse. When you were young, you used to run around the house strumming a toy guitar. We gave you lessons. You played as beautifully as Segovia.”

“Are you saying I should have been a musician instead of working in advertising?”

“We’ll never know. I remember how happy you were when your music teacher made you the soloist for the school pageant in junior high. You played ‘Classical Gas.’ You were so good, they gave you a solo spot the following year. Then the boys started making fun of you, and you stopped playing, hoping to fit in with a bunch of lunkheads who never amounted to anything. Your bright light was extinguished before you reached high school. Ever since then, you’ve drifted, you’ve settled.”

***

The next day, Braylon leaves his parents’ house early to run errands, planning to see his mother that afternoon. Something inside of him says he’ll never see his mother again.

An hour later, Aida calls him on his cell phone, calmly telling Braylon that his mother passed away, and that she’s better off because she’s no longer in pain.

Braylon feels that his pain has just begun.

***

His adrenaline gets him through the wake and the funeral. The sympathy cards are barely opened when Braylon decides to sell his parents’ house. Within days, groups of families tour the house with a real estate agent while he’s out moping in Starbucks.

Braylon begins throwing out his mother’s possessions, surprised that she had so many news clippings about his advertising awards. He delays taking down the collection of family photos decorating the den, disappointed that he recognizes so few of the people in them. He keeps his dog-eared music books and the video his father shot of him playing guitar.

Memories bubble to the surface. He remembers listening to WVIP, the local radio station, and the smell of cinnamon as his mother made French Toast. His mother’s co-worker, Lynn Ratelle, was married to the station’s top reporter. A Susan Pleshette lookalike down to her shoulder-length raven hair and sultry voice, Lynn was ten-year-old Braylon’s first crush. He was happy to fetch her soda or iced tea whenever she visited.

He shudders when he remembers the blood draining from Lynn’s face when the phone rang, and his mother told Lynn that her husband had just died from a heart attack at the age of thirty-three. Lynn dropped her iced tea on the shag carpet.

He remembers his dad and grandfather building the garage. It’s the same garage that the building inspector told him yesterday should be knocked down if he wants to sell the house.

He reminisces about the day Jimmy Jones, his father’s friend, brought a parachute to the house for him and his friends to play with. They threw it up in the air, trying to run through its massive billowy expanse before it drifted down to the ground.

Jimmy Jones would die six months later in a car accident while on his way home after being discharged from the army.

He remembers the cicadas chirping the summer day he was chasing his friend, Peter, through the house. Peter pushed open the front door and ran into the yard. The door swung back, and Braylon put his arm through the glass. He recalls screaming, looking at his slashed and bleeding arm suspended in the glass. His father had to break the rest of the glass to free him, and he got five stitches to mark the incident.

Braylon laughs to himself, recollecting one day as a teenager when he was lighting off M-80s with his friends. He dropped one in a garbage can just as his mother came outside and told him to “Stop playing with explosives.” The M-80 went off with a sonic boom, and the lid flew ten feet in the air – landing on his head.

Then there was a nerve-wracking period in his thirties after his father died, when the house was robbed twice in a month. It never would have happened if Braylon had gone back to Rhode Island after the funeral, but he thought he was being a good son by staying with his mother for a few weeks while she adjusted to being a widow.

Braylon didn’t realize anything was amiss until he checked his desk drawer, where he was keeping $3,000 in cash. A few days later, the cigar box he kept his change in was emptied. The brazen robber had entered through the back porch’s stylish but easily broken French windows, a luxury his mother had insisted on. She reacted to the break-in by putting bars on the basement windows and installing a complex alarm system, turning the house into a prison.

The thief turned out to be the visiting fourteen-year-old son of a family friend who had been running around the house and had seen Braylon put the money in his desk.

***

Braylon stands in the living room, looking out of the picture window with his arms crossed, the same way his father did the last day Braylon spoke with him…

“I know I’ve been a burden to you lately, son. It’s a long trip to come from Rhode Island to New York every time I get sick.”

“You’re my father. That’s what sons do.”

“Have I told you how proud I am that you’re my son?”

That was the opportune time for Braylon to return the compliment. To his regret, he stayed silent.

“You may not know it, but there were so many times I was proud to call you my son. I kept poking people at your college graduation, telling them you were my boy when you made Summa Cum Laude and gave the commencement speech… Then there was the first time one of your commercials was on TV, then your Clio awards for the best advertising campaigns… But you know what would make me even happier? If you and your mother were closer. I’m not going to be here forever…”

“You’ll outlive me, Dad…”

His father smiles, wheezing as he chuckles.

He looks out the window at their picturesque surroundings. A smile crosses his face, as if he’s memorizing every blade of grass, every leaf on the trees, and every fence post.

“What are you staring at, Dad?”

“Home.”

***

Braylon takes a load of cushions to the curb, adding to an already mountainous load of trash.

He pulls a fistful of letters out of the mailbox, harrumphing when he sees more of his mother’s never-ending medical bills, the electric bill, and a gentle reminder from the town that his annual school tax bill is due.

A twittering “Hello, neighbor!” grabs his attention.

Cathy McCarthy runs to him, giving him a vigorous hug. She was one of the original tenants when the apartment building next door was built decades ago, and to Braylon’s surprise, she still lives there.

There was a time when they were more than friends, when Braylon was a randy, muscular twenty-seven and thirty-five-year-old, and Cathy was a shapely, smiling, mass of blond hair and long legs. She’s heavier now, with streaks of grey in her hair, and smells of Marlboros.

“It’s so nice to see you! You still look the same!”

Since Cathy was kind enough to lie, Braylon returns the favor.

“And you’re just as beautiful as ever. I remember when we met. You were sunbathing on the lawn.”

“I was out there every day for a week hoping you’d notice. I was beginning to feel like a baked ham. We had great times together, didn’t we? Just the two of us cozying up on the couch, watching movies, drinking, dancing until dawn,” she says with a glint in her eyes. “Then we got rug burns. Why’d we stop seeing each other?”

“Because it was a lot harder being a couple than being friends.”

“So, I see by the for-sale sign that you’re leaving the neighborhood for good. First, Mrs. Amuso, now you.”

“Mrs. Amuso, West Street’s yenta. She knew everyone’s business. She saw my father taking a walk one day when his emphysema and bad heart were close to killing him. She noticed that when he sat down on the corner, he didn’t move for a long time. He was having a heart attack. If she hadn’t called for an ambulance, he might have died there and then. Has something happened to her?”

“She was fine one day and forgetful the next. Her daughter finally had to put her in an assisted living facility. She died a few months ago. She loved telling me the story about when a snowstorm unexpectedly hit on Halloween, knocking out the electricity for a week, and how you saved the day. She saw the Con Ed truck come down the street, then they started to leave, thinking everyone’s lights were already restored. She said you ran after that truck like Jesse Owens, and caught up to it, and because of you, we got our lights back… Have you gotten any offers for the house?”

“Three.”

“Promise me you’ll come back and visit me.”

“I promise.”

They take a long look at each other, knowing they’ll never see each other again.

***

Braylon holds an estate sale, wondering if it was worth it when one happy antiquer scrapes the wood in the hallway trying to pry a couch through the door. Another buyer, absorbed in a conversation on her cell phone, trips over a glass table, and a millennial managed to clog up the upstairs toilet.

Braylon walks through the empty rooms of the house, noticing that Anna’s picture is gone. So is his mother’s rocking chair, which the Mayor gave her when she retired after 30 years as Mount Kisco’s Town Clerk.

He thought his parents’ possessions were just fifty years of out-of-date knick-knacks.

As he watches the cars pull away with the couches, chairs, paintings, and rugs, Braylon realizes he’s sold fifty years of memories.

***

Braylon settles back into his apartment in Rhode Island, unsure of what to do with his life. A few days later, a letter festooned with pictures of hearts and flowers arrives. He doesn’t recognize the sender's name but is familiar with the West Street address.

The letter is from the Newburghs, the family now living in his parents’ house:

Dear Mr. Payne:

We knew the moment that we toured your house that this was where we wanted to raise our kids and spend the rest of our lives. The house had a warm, cozy feeling. We could tell how tight-knit your family was from the pictures on the walls. Every piece of furniture, every decoration, spoke of the love and respect you had for one another. We hope we can fill our new home with as much love as your family did.

Sincerely,

Dan, Dot, Jim, and Janey Newburgh

The next day, Braylon goes to the music store and buys an acoustic guitar.