Sleet: Selected Stories

And that just sets the waterworks going, ’cause now Lydia sits down on the kitchen bench and sobs something awful as she rifles through her handbag looking for a handkerchief. The radio dealer says he’ll just put the bag down in the cellar for the time being, and right then I come mighty close to saying I know just how many bottles should be in that bag when I check it again, but I hold my tongue, ’cause that would really open up Lydia’s floodgates. And truth be told, it ain’t so easy to keep my own feelings from coming out, ’specially when I sit down next to Lydia and she lays her head on my shoulder. But then her tears stop flowing after a while and she starts griping.

“Just as everything was beginning to go so good for us. Just when we got to where we could think of opening our home and having him come live with us, when we could’ve started helping him out with money, Dad has to have his life cut short.”

Yep, she sounds pretty damned inconvenienced that the old man went and died on her before she had a proper chance to do him a good turn. So of course it’s a shame for Lydia, a crying shame. And I tell her so.

“You’ve always had bad luck, Lydia,” I say to her. “When it finally got so you could afford a place in the nursing home for Mamma, she went ahead and died on you. And now at last when you could have taken the old man in, he up and dies. It’s a queer thing, Lydia, how anybody could be so damned unlucky as you! Now when you finally get so goddamn good and comfortable that you can maybe afford to loan your brother some money to pay for your nephew Yngve’s schooling, I imagine I’ll go and die on you too!”

Lydia’s hiccups stop all of a sudden and she glares at me — no mistaking the fury in her eyes. She’s on her feet in a flash and then out through the kitchen door, her rolls of fat quivering with rage. Going out to piss and moan to the radio dealer about what a beast of a brother she has, I’m sure.

I figure it’s best I keep my head low for a while, so I go into the old man’s room and shut the door to be on my own for a bit. Of course, this is where I had my last evening together with him two summers ago. It’s kind of a closed and dusty room. Still, right here on this very couch is where we sat side by side. I remember the window was open at first, and how he got up and shut it so that nobody could eavesdrop on us. The old man did grow more mistrustful the farther he got up there in years. Ulrik’s right about that. Feels funny now, sitting here remembering earlier times like this, ’specially when I think how I’ll probably never come back to this place. Laying on the table in front of me is the newspaper, folded back to the page with the old man’s death notice. It’s a big one, alright, so at least Ulrik didn’t try to skimp this time. He must’ve remembered how I lit into him over Mamma’s notice, which was a little piece of nothing. Practically needed a hand lens to make out the itsy-bitsy print in that little square. Ulrik, he just shirked off the blame and said, “How am I supposed to know what it’s gonna look like when the paper comes out?” But it was just plain old stinginess, that’s all.

“Oh, so you’re in here, huh?”

Ulrik has peeked his head inside the door, looking a bit suspicious. Probably thinks I’m hiding out in here so I can steal a few swigs from my pocket flask on the sly. And Lydia is right on his heels, though I don’t get as much as a glance from her. She got more than she bargained for already, I figure. Not like they’re coming in here looking for me anyway. They’re looking for the old man’s clock, the cuckoo clock he carved by hand when he was younger. It’s hanging right here over his sofa bed. He was always so proud of this clock. First-time visitors that stopped by always had to come into this room and admire it. And he always wound it himself. The key he kept locked up in a cupboard so no one else could get their hands on it. It was only ’cause he liked me so much that I once got to wind it up when I was little. But he was drunk then, and just before I wound it I remember him saying: “Listen good! You wind that too tight, you little bastard, and believe you me — you’ll be sorry!”

It ain’t like Lydia can brag that she’s ever wound the clock before, nor Ulrik for that matter. And to be honest about it, neither of them is saying anything like that. But Ulrik is telling Lydia — and me too, I suppose, if I care to listen — how that clock stopped the very night the old man died. “If you can believe that. At just the minute he stopped breathing.” All three of us look at the clock. Half-past one. Or twenty-three minutes past one, to be exact.