28 Hearts of Sand Read Free

move in.
    “I’ll be right there where I can stay on top of things,” she’d said.
    Gregor thought that the reality was that they were right here where things could stay on top of them.
    He went into the kitchen and opened the small, square “mini fridge” Bennis had bought to do for them until all the new appliances were delivered. The new appliances could not be delivered. The appliances could not be delivered until the kitchen was renovated. The kitchen would not be renovated until it was thoroughly gutted and then refloored. They also needed to find a new stamped tin ceiling and restore it over their heads.
    Gregor sometimes had the feeling that a war zone would be less logistically problematic than this place.
    He got out a small carton of cream and put it on the round table they used for everything. There were no kitchen counters left. He took a coffee bag out of a box on the table. He found his clean cup in the drainer next to the sink. The sink didn’t look entirely bad. It was porcelain, and very old. It had stains and nicks all across its surface. Still, it looked like a sink.
    He got the plug-in kettle from the same round table where he’d found almost everything else. He popped the lid open and held it under the high, curved faucet that reminded him of his elementary school. He turned on the cold water tap and watched as the entire fixture started to shake. A second later, the cap at the top between the two knobs flew off, followed by a geyser of water that reached up almost as high as the twenty-foot ceiling.
    Gregor turned the water off and stared at the faucet. The metal cap had fallen to a clanking halt in another part of the room.
    “I forgot to tell you,” Bennis said from behind him. “We’re having some plumbing done. The guy was here yesterday. Anyway, you have to hold the cap when you turn on the water or it, you know, does that.”
    “This was something we had done yesterday?”
    “You were out doing whatever. Talking to the people at the Philadelphia FBI office? Something like that.”
    “Something like that.”
    “I should have told you,” she said again. “I thought this would be a perfect time to do it. You know what I mean. You’re going off tomorrow. You’ll be away a week, you almost always are. Or longer. I thought it would be a good time to get some of the serious work done.”
    “What did you intend to do if I didn’t go off somewhere?” Gregor asked. “I don’t always go out of town to work. Are you going to be able to live in this place on your own if there isn’t any plumbing?”
    “There will be plumbing,” Bennis said. “It just won’t be elegant plumbing. I know this seems like a lot of work, and a monumental inconvenience, but it really will be wonderful when it’s done. It’s hard to find places like this right in the middle of the city. There are only a couple of them right here on Cavanaugh Street. It’s just a matter of putting up with a little inconvenience now so that we have something better later. Deferred gratification. You’re always talking about deferred gratification.”
    “It helps to know how long you’re deferring it for,” Gregor said. “The last I heard, this was going to take a couple of months. I think we may be past that by now.”
    Bennis ignored this, and took the kettle out of his hand. She put it down on the table and looked around, squinting her eyes in the dim light cast by the floor lamp she’d picked up at IKEA to make do until real lights could be restored. Then she said, “Aha,” crossed to the other side of the room, and picked something up.
    “Here it is,” she said, coming back with the cap. “It would be a really good idea not to lose this if we could possibly manage it.” She put the cap back into the center of the faucet fixture, held it down, and then started the water running. “Hand me the kettle,” she said.
    Gregor handed her the kettle. Bennis stuck it under the flow of water, waited until it was as