Hope: A Tragedy Read Free Page B

veranda with wide plank floors, turned columns, and a small metal chime that was never without a soft breeze to encourage its gentle song. There were two original stone fireplaces, one in the living room and one in what was now one of the two downstairs bedrooms; both of the hearths had been sealed when the forced-air system was put in, but they were charming, despite their lack of utility. There were two bedrooms upstairs, as well as the two downstairs; originally, the southern half of the downstairs had been a dining room, but as part of the remodel it was converted into two small bedrooms, which the Kugels decided could be rented out to help cover the mortgage; once they settled in, Bree could use the attic as her writing studio; it wasn’t clean, she remarked, but it was reasonably well lit. Best of all, Eve informed them, Mr. Messerschmidt, the elderly owner who lived there with his middle-aged son, was asking far below market value.
    Why? asked Kugel. Is there something wrong with it?
    Of course there’s something wrong with it, Eve had said. I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it, Mr. Kugel: The stairs creak when you step on them. There are flies in the summer and mice in the winter. Some of the windows stick, some don’t open at all, and there’s a funky smell in the spring that gets replaced by an even funkier smell in the fall. It’s old, Mr. Kugel, that’s what’s wrong with it, just like I’m old, and you are going to become old. It’s imperfect in a world that demands perfection, its flaw is that it has flaws. Full disclosure, Mr. Kugel: it’s real. You want fake, I can show you fake. I’ve got a fake version of this farmhouse five miles up the road, costs ten times as much. The stairs are new, the windows are double-glazed, and the natural swimming hole was drained, dried, dug up, and turned into an unnatural swimming pool—heated, chlorinated, backwashed, and skimmed. The soil in the backyard was trucked in from up north, the grass came in great green rolls on the back of a flatbed truck from down south. There’s a patio made of concrete that was made to look like stone, a deck made of plastic that’s made to look like wood. There’s a chef’s kitchen that’s never used because the couple that built it never cooked. It’s insulated so well that you won’t know if it’s winter or summer without looking out the window, which you wouldn’t do because it’s precisely what’s outside that window that the house is insulated from: reality. Fake’s going to cost you these days, Mr. Kugel. Reality’s on the block for cheap.
    Kugel looked to Bree, squeezed her hand and smiled.
    What about that smell? asked Bree.
    What smell? asked Eve.
    You don’t smell something? asked Bree.
    Kugel sniffed.
    I smell something, said Kugel.
    It smells, said Bree, like something died.
    Eve smiled.
    That, said Eve, is the smell of honesty, Mrs. Kugel. That’s the smell of someone not trying to pull the wool over your eyes. That’s what truth smells like, folks, which is why you don’t recognize it. Suck it up, Mrs. Kugel, fill your lungs. The way the world out there is going, this may be the last time you smell it.
    Mm-hmm, said Bree.
    Kugel looked to Bree, squeezed her hand again, and smiled. They moved in four weeks later. Kugel’s elderly mother joined them soon after.
    You’re kidding, said Bree.
    She’s dying, said Kugel.
    We can’t afford it, said Bree, vacillating between shock and rage. We need that rent to make the mortgage. What’s the point of moving to a place with no past if you’re going to bring your mother along?
    They’ve given her two weeks, said Kugel.
    But that, they both knew, had been well over six months before.

4.
     
    IT WAS HOT in the attic when Kugel climbed up into it, stiflingly so.
    Kugel didn’t like attics, he never had. The roofing nails overhead like fangs, waiting to sink into his skull; the cardboard boxes and plastic crates and leather trunks—tombs,