Part Nine.
One morning I returned from my walk in particularly high spirits. I'd toted my walk-man along and found that running was much easier while jammin' to Shania's "Man I feel like a Woman." I popped some focaccia in the toaster and sat down to rest.
Today we'd wage battle against the garage. A rented, full-sized dumpster now sat in the driveway, waiting to be fed.
Our first project was the campaign posters for California State Treasure Ivy Baker-Priest. There were hundreds of them. Across each one stretched Ivy Baker-Priest's smiling portrait, eerily larger-than-scale. A tasteful beehive of pure-white hair, pearls circling a tan-but-not-too-tan neck, a stylish Jackie-O suit, giant brown eyes gleaming hawkishly. Her expression was difficult to pin down, but I think it could be described as hungry. Hungry for California's fiscal well-being, perhaps.
No matter how noble, a human head scaled larger than a human head is unsettling. To add to the weirdness, the stack of posters had fallen and fanned out through the garage, creating a Warholian army of smirking Ivys.
As I planned the most efficient means of her demolition, I listened to the morning hum: the whirring of Mother's hair drier, the rasp of the air vents, the thump of towels in the laundry spin, the light ticking of toaster-wires. The rosemary in the toast perfumed the kitchen. Everything felt rhythmic and warm.
Then I heard a howl from the bedroom. It sounded sort-of like an expletive, but I knew it was not. It was just a howl. After the howl, silence. Too much silence. No whirring, no humming, no thumping. My mother entered the kitchen, curly head half-dry, half dripping. Ratted up, curly tendrils beamed out and extended inches in every direction, her face still red from the shower. She looked like a cartoon sun.
"We blew a fuse."
I nodded absently, my full attention absorbed in a rescuing my fragrant slice of focaccia. I wedged a fork between the still-glowing toaster coils.
"You'll get electrocuted doing that," she observed.
"I won't...that's the problem, right?" I popped the toast out, "cause we blew a fuse?"
She pulled the cord out of the wall absently.
"I should have thought about this," she sighed. "This house is so old. I guess we'll have to call Gus."
"It might just be too hot to work much today," she added as she reached for the phone. "I hope he's around."
----
Gus was my grandpa's handyman. He was, by trade, a barber, but he'd served as a sort of general pal to Grandpa during his last days in Sacramento, and when Grandpa finally abandoned independence and moved to Pasadena, Gus had agreed (for a small fee) to pick up mail, look in on the property, and see to the gardening of 2772 Harkness.
Mother and Gus were not, shall we say, cut of the same cloth. He signed off every conversation with, "Welp, sees ya in church," a strange and untrue colloquialism which rubbed her so completely the wrong way that it took half an hour to regain her inner peace.
Still, he knew about the fuse situation. He was probably the only one who did. And the cool of the morning was definitely not going to be sticking around. Whether or not we would ever see him in church, I hoped to see him at the house, tool-box in hand, asap.
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