ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching
Book Two, Chapter Four: Unsettled
Joshua’s been back almost two weeks.
At first, he repeated to himself, over and over: I’m okay. The doctor says I’m okay. At first, he got dizzy going down steps. At first, he couldn’t walk very far without resting or needing to turn back. At first, he stayed in the car while I grocery-shopped. At first, he avoided his uncle Rich and his uncle Joe, who shares the house with Rich. At first, he woke me in the night, when he couldn’t sleep, to talk.
Now, he seems more like himself. At the Christmas party yesterday, he played Frisbee with his cousins. This morning he bought sixty dollars in food at the grocery. He doesn’t sleep well yet, even with the futon’s new mattress, but one big reason is the house on Charles Street.
We’re on a walk now, to a nearby park. It’s been raining, but the rain has stopped.
“I feel as if my chain’s been yanked for six months,” he says. “Charles Street is a fixer-upper in a blue-collar neighborhood. I got into a bidding war and bid the absolute maximum I could. We won the bidding war. Then you sold all Daddy’s stock and I beefed up my account so we could show the available funds, which we barely did. Then I had to raise funds to repair the place. Sold my Dare Devil Number One comic I loved. Bought, restored, and sold two motorcycles and two P-1800 Volvos. Sold a pinball machine I loved. All this for Charles Street. Then I find out the title isn’t even cleared. I’ve signed five extensions while the bank yanks me around. Now they’re asking me to sign the sixth extension. I feel disrespected.”
Halfway up the hill, he suddenly stops.
“What is it, Joshua? Are you out of breath?”
“Just thinking about Charles Street makes me uncomfortable.”
We rest on a fallen limb of a tree. I don’t want to influence him. He’s putting up almost all the money. He’ll be doing most of the work.
“If I felt one hundred percent, I’d do it,” he says, “but I don’t. And I don’t know when I will. The weather’s going to turn ugly. I’d have to borrow Rich’s truck to take supplies and a ladder over. Right now, I don’t even feel like climbing a ladder. If I buy the place, I’ll have twenty-four thousand left. It’ll take five thousand to replace the furnace and AC. That leaves me only nine thou to make all the repairs and ten thou to re-start my L. A. life. I don’t have a car, and I don’t have an apartment. I’ll be in a squeeze. It’s stress I don’t need right now.”
“You can have the little red car. Its battery goes down and its tires go flat because I never drive it.”
“You need a car,” he says. “I don’t want to take your car from you. Plus, Charles Street is not an especially cheerful house. It’s not a place I would want to live in. I don’t want to live here, anyway. I left this town for sunshine. My life’s out in L. A. I’m an actor. That’s my work. That’s what I like to do. I don’t flip houses.”
