The Wrong Stuff Read online

  “I’m still not understanding. I’m sorry, but…,” Jane began, and Nick interrupted.

  “They said it was because of insurance. If they didn’t have the signed permission slip, they couldn’t…” Nick stopped and looked away again.

  Jane’s thoughts cleared immediately. The permission slip. Nick had brought it to her two weeks ago and asked that she sign it immediately so that he could put it right into his backpack. Jane had been filing her sale notes from the last month and couldn’t find a working pen. Hundreds of vintage advertising mechanical pencils in a basket on her desk, but not one working Bic. She told Nick to put the slip on the kitchen counter. He reminded her at dinner and she had nodded, seeing the light blue slip under a bag of vintage picture books she had picked up that day at a thrift store. She noticed it again after dinner, but her hands were wet from washing the pans and she asked Nick to move it into the dining room so it wouldn’t get anything spilled on it. When she carried in a box of heavy, restaurant-style Buffalo China from the garage to look for a particular size platter that Miriam had called about, she had dropped the heavy carton down on the dining room table and noticed that the slip was now partially covered by the box. She wrote herself a note on a yellow Post-it and stuck it on her purse to remind herself to sign the slip and write a check and give it to Nick. The next day, when Nick saw and asked about the Post-it note, now floating on top of her purse when she dropped him off at school, she promised to go home and get it and bring it back—right after she stopped at the post office and mailed packages to Ohio.

  Jane was still standing in the doorway to Charley’s study, and she turned and looked at the dining room table. The box of china was still there. She had also put down two more boxes—linens for later sorting. Even with the entire table almost covered, however, she could still see the corner of the blue slip peeking out from under the heavy cardboard carton of dishes.

  Jane badly wanted to wake up, to have this whole scene part of an anxious mother’s nightmare. She longed to swoon, to pass out and come to and realize it had all been a terrible hallucination. But there is something in the turned head of a child you love so fiercely and whom you have disappointed so thoroughly that doesn’t allow you more than a moment of self-saving fantasy.

  “I am so sorry, Nick,” she managed to say. She was crying, tears were falling, but she managed to keep her voice steady. She knew that it would be unfair to claim any pity, any sorrow. The anger and frustration and disappointment and embarrassment that crowded the airspace in this study belonged to Nick. They were rightfully his, and Jane did not deserve a tearful catharsis right now.

  Her own mother, Nellie, a maniacally clean and meticulous little woman who had never found a dirty floor she could not polish, a burned-out pan she could not scour, or a filthy load of laundry she could not whiten, had perpetrated evil in Jane’s young life. She had forced Jane to discard her favorite stuffed bear, Mortimer, because it had become torn and dusty. She had failed to attend the second-grade dental hygiene play when Jane played the lead role of the “tooth” and her friend Tim had played “floss.” She had told Jane that she looked fat in her prom dress. All horrible maternal crimes, to be sure, but Nellie had never lost one slip of paper, never allowed one homework assignment to remain on the floor, nor had she ever allowed a wedge of cheese under her care to grow mold. Not on Nellie’s watch. And now Jane, struggling daily to not be Nellie, to not give Nick any of the hang-ups, fears, phobias, and neuroses that Nellie had so carefully planted and watered in Jane’s particular little brain garden, had lost the battle. No, she hadn’t become her failed mother, Nellie. So much the worse, she had become Nick’s failed mother, Jane.

  “Is there anything I can do?” Jane asked. “I could drive you…”

  Nick shook his head.

  Charley, speaking softly, explained to Jane that Nick had also called him at his office, and the department secretary had tracked him down at a meeting. By then it was too late. The buses had to leave and they couldn’t make an exception for Nick without the permission slip. The vice principal had been most apologetic.

  “I don’t know how I’ll ever make this up to you, Nick, but I swear I will spend the rest of my…”

  “It’s okay,” Nick said, shrugging.

  “Of course it’s not. I understand,” Jane said.

  “No, it is okay, it’s just…” Nick started then stopped. Jane waited.

  “There’re always kids, you know, who forget or don’t remember the money or, you know, don’t care anyway, and…” Nick hesitated again. “I just don’t want to be one of those kids.” He looked at his mother dead on for the first time, and she felt her heart crack.

  “I know,” Jane said. Her mother had cut Jane’s long, beautiful hair into a choppy-looking bowl cut when Jane was in the second grade because Nellie didn’t have the time to brush it every morning. There were other cropped heads in her class, and Jane recognized them as kindred spirits of a sort. Their mothers worked, too, or had so many other children at home that a braid or ponytail every morning was an impossible task. Yeah, Jane knew they should commiserate in some seven-year-old version of group therapy, like jumping rope to some mother-bashing rhyme, but instead, Jane avoided them. She knew exactly what Nick meant. No, she hadn’t wanted to be one of those kids. Instead, for her best friend, she sought out Tim, whose mother cut his sandwiches into animal shapes and made homemade treats for the class on his birthday. She became Tim’s shadow, and when her hair grew long enough, he taught her how to braid it herself.

  “You’re not one of those kids, Nick,” Jane said. “I’m just one of those moms.”

  Jane moved all the boxes from the dining room out to the garage only to discover she was out of shelf space. She stacked the cartons into towers, scrawled contents on the sides, and went in to tackle the kitchen, where boxes were both under and on top of the kitchen table.

  “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way,” Charley said, putting down a small and, Jane was sure, neatly and efficiently packed duffel bag, “but I’m not sure just moving the stuff around will do it.”

  “What?” Jane asked.

  “What you want it to do,” Charley said.

  Jane shook her head. “I’m just cleaning, that’s all, just organizing.”

  Nick came in and sat his equally small and, Jane was certain, neatly and efficiently packed duffel next to his father’s.

  “Moving stuff around again, Mom?” Nick asked.

  He hadn’t meant it as a dig of any kind. He was feeling better—great, in fact—and had become downright philosophical when Charley told him he would wait until after school when the field trip bus returned so Nick could collect his best friend, Parker, and the three of them would head for Rockford, where Charley would give his Saturday symposium and the boys would have a blast at the indoor water park at the resort hotel where Charley had just reserved a small suite.

  Nick had even patted Jane awkwardly on the shoulder and told her it was okay, that it was probably for the best. Rockford would be better than the aquarium, and his dad’s lecture would be far more interesting than any old volunteer’s canned speech to middle schoolers. Charley had promised them a behind-the-scenes tour of the natural history museum and unlimited water slide passes.

  Jane was delighted that Nick was happy about the weekend, although she didn’t believe for a minute that she was off the hook. She knew that this gaffe wasn’t so easily remedied, even though Charley had, for the moment, bailed her out. It was, she knew, one of her major problems—her refusal to be bailed out. She needed to suffer, do some penance, and be absolved in a slower and more torturous fashion. Jane was grateful to Charley, but gratitude did not untie the knots of guilt.

  “Try not to put yourself in solitary for too long,” said Charley, knowing the only person who could punish Jane to her satisfaction was Jane herself. “Call Tim or something.”

  “Oh, right. Tim will kill me when he hears this one,” Jane said. “He already considers
himself a better mother than I am.”

  When the two had left for Charley’s office to pick up his lecture notes, Jane lifted a set of forties’ nesting mixing bowls off the top of the small kitchen television she and Charley kept for news watching during dinner preparations. Jane knew she was depressed. Only when she felt hopelessly blue did she allow herself to wallow in daytime television. She stacked the boxes from the kitchen table onto the floor and heard a loud, officious female voice.

  “Are you just moving it around? Because that won’t solve the problem.”

  Jane looked behind her. No one. She was alone in the kitchen. The voice she at first thought was either her mother or her conscience came from a tall, thin blonde on television who was sitting next to Oprah, holding a book in her hand.

  Belinda St. Germain was the author of Overstuffed: An Addicts Guide to Decluttering. She had also written Breathing Free and Stop Kidding Yourself—It Owns You! Jane spent most of the next hour listening raptly as Oprah’s guest described Jane’s personality, Jane’s house, and Jane’s rapidly crumbling self-esteem.

  “What’s wrong with you,” St. Germain barked, “that you need stuff to validate who you are? Get rid of it today before it suffocates you, before it takes over your life.”

  “Okay,” Jane whispered. Feeling slightly hypnotized by her new guru, Jane slipped on her blue jean jacket and decided she should run out and buy St. Germain’s books immediately. Of course that would mean bringing in a few more things, additional objects, and the first rule was no more new things; but Jane felt pretty certain that Belinda excepted her own books from the rest of the “rubbish,” as she called it.

  “What do you really, really, really need?” she asked. “How many pairs of shoes, toothbrushes, tubes of lipstick? How many cans of soup do you need to hoard in your pantries? Do you really shop less when you buy more? No, my friends, you shop more, you buy more, you store more, you are smothered by more, you can no longer breathe in your own space, can you?”

  Oprah was nodding, the audience was nodding, and Jane was nodding with them.

  When the phone rang, she jumped, and contemplated not answering so she would not miss any more of Belinda’s wisdom, but she knew better. Not hearing, not answering the phone, was part of the behavior that had delivered her into Brenda’s hands in the first place.

  “Mrs. Wheel?”

  “Detective Oh?”

  “Yes,” said Oh.

  Jane waited. Oh was always a man of few words and even the few took a while forming themselves.

  “Have you considered my offer?”

  “Yes, but…,” Jane said, “right now, I…”

  “My wife, Claire, is curious about your decision.”

  It was unlike Oh to interrupt and also surprising that he brought up his wife. Jane knew that Claire Oh was a highly respected antiques dealer and, according to Oh, quite happy that he had decided to quit the police force, teach courses in criminology and sociology, and open his own consulting business. According to Oh, she was successful enough, her business profitable enough that she would be happy for Oh to teach and not even bother with the consulting, which she and everyone else knew was a detective agency and to her was simply police work without the backup.

  Since Jane had had a few adventures in her new “picking” career, it seemed that everyone wanted a piece of her. Tim Lowry was ready to make her a partner in T & T Sales, claiming to have trained her eye since they met in first grade. Tim was still Jane’s best friend, and she saw him regularly since he still lived in their hometown of Kankakee, Illinois, where Jane went almost weekly to visit her parents, Don and Nellie.

  Tim had even introduced her around at his flower shop, another of his many ventures, bragging to his customers that Jane’s taste was almost equal to a gay man’s, if not quite equal to his. “Because,” he said, waggling his finger at Dr. Bernardo’s wife, “I’m not just any gay man.” The woman had left the store giggling, buying twice as much as what she had originally intended. Tim explained to Jane that his success as a florist and antique dealer was largely based on the extraordinary stereotypical act he put on. It was, he often told her, the bane of his existence, to be a well-adjusted and contented gay man in a small town whose residents wanted him to be their town eccentric—“Or village idiot, one of the two,” he had added.

  Detective Oh’s offer was the most intriguing, though, and Jane was still mulling it over. She did love the resolution of solving a crime; the utter satisfaction of it was so intense. As good as finding the Bakelite bracelet in the bottom of the box of junk jewelry? Close, it came close to that. And besides, she had been thinking lately, why do I have to decide? Can’t I do both?

  “Your wife?” Jane asked. “I’m not sure why Claire would care about my decision, Detective Oh.”

  “I am so sorry. I haven’t really explained myself. Claire thinks you would be the perfect partner on my new case, so she suggested I call rather than wait for you to call me.”

  Curiouser and curiouser, Jane thought. Although they knew a lot about each other, Jane and Claire had never met.

  “Which is?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Your new case?” Jane reminded him.

  “Yes, of course. My wife, Claire, has been arrested.”

  “Oh,” Jane said.

  “Yes?”

  “No, I just mean Oh,” said Jane, “like, oh my. For what?”

  Jane thought she heard a small sigh.

  “Oh, yes, of course. What she’s been arrested for. Yes,” said Oh, and this time the sigh was plainly audible.

  “Murder.”

  2

  Clear the mind; clear your desk. Today, right now, throw out three old files, file three documents that you must save, and remove and discard three useless objects from your purse.

  —BELINDA ST. GERMAIN, Overstuffed

  Jane tried her hardest to compartmentalize as she leafed through Belinda St. Germain’s Overstuffed. A full-size color cutout of St. Germain herself, hair pulled back in a tidy bun, wearing a lint-free Donna Karan suit with sensible but attractive black pumps, stood in the self-help section. Her cold, cardboard eyes stared at Jane. Any minute, Jane thought, she’ll start shaking her fiberboard head and picking dog hair off my shirt. Jane looked around frantically. Where was that “tsk, tsk” sound coming from? Holy Toledo, did she have an “inner Belinda”?

  Hold on. First, buy the book and get a grip on the stuff overtaking the house. Second, be a better mother by never losing anything, forgetting anything, missing anything, or being late for anything ever again. Third, become an ace picker without becoming a muttering bag lady. Fourth, become an ace PI by clearing Claire Oh of murder.

  “Hold your horses, Jane, just hold your horses,” Jane muttered to herself, scanning the rest of the self-help section, causing a clerk to respond with a “Pardon me,” and Jane to realize that the muttering bag lady role might already be too ingrained. Jane felt that it was essential she take stock of herself and see if she was up to all this organization and mothering and crime solving. Once again things had turned upside down in her world, a world that should be so much simpler. After all, she was a relatively attractive, healthy, young…well, middle-aged…well, Nick had recently taken to asking, “How old do you think you’re going to live to, Mom, because if you’re really middle-aged…?”

  Okay, she was youngish-middle-aged looking, had an attractive professor husband, and a smart (if, on occasion, smart-ass) athletic son. She was self-employed, albeit with a made-up career as antiques and collectibles picker, and had a happy, stable home—except for that little misstep when Charley moved out for a while. And the murders. Finding her neighbor’s dead body had been a tad disruptive. And then there was the murder in her best friend Tim’s flower shop. Uncovering all that stuff about her parents, Don and Nellie and their tavern, the EZ Way Inn, had set her on edge for a while. Yeah, and the severed finger. But truly, until today, until misplacing that permission slip for Nick, she had been pret
ty well grounded. This, she decided, was her personal tipping point.

  Today, for the first time, the suitcases full of other people’s photo albums, the stacks of torn quilts and happy, dancing fruit tablecloths, the dust mite–chewed old college yearbooks, and the musty old gas station travel maps seemed overwhelming. Yesterday she could cope with a house filled with what others had left behind. Today she was drowning in debris.

  But she could change. Jane could read this book by Belinda St. Germain, digest some decluttering wisdom, and simplify her home, order her life. It could happen. She could do it. Where was her wallet? Jane fished through her bag and pulled out a compact crossword puzzle dictionary, dropped it back in and pulled out an Italian phrasebook. Oh sure, to Belinda St. Germain those objects might seem like handbag detritus—but did she ever have to sit in a car for three hours waiting to get into an estate sale? After she had gotten a number? Well, a picker had to pack like a tourist, anticipating being stranded. Any weekend sale could turn into Gilligan’s three-hour tour. Diversions, food, water, clean-up supplies, first aid—all handbag essentials. But right now, standing in line at the bookstore, where was her wallet?

  Jane could become a zenlike practitioner of the spare and lean. She could organize her work. She could unpack a box of old photos from a garage sale without sitting down to dust each one and make up a story about the family picnic or the crazy uncle at the reunion. She could resist the old and broken stuff that couldn’t be resold, that could only take up space in her basement, her attic, her dining room, her heart.