Recalculating

Chapter 1

Gina sat alone on the front porch with a cigarette held between the thumb and finger of her gimpy hand. She was the one who called it her gimpy hand. It was a defense mechanism, to be sure, calling it that, but it helped. 

Her right arm tapered dramatically, ending a couple inches short in a small, withered hand with only three fingers. Two fingers, really, and a thumb. The thumb was the largest of the three digits and was missing its nail. The birth defect made some things hard. Adjusting a rear view mirror meant rising way up out of the seat. She'd never pulled the handle at the slot machines. It worked fine for smoking, though.

She was surrounded by four cardboard boxes, which contained a melange of items that had been organized not by any plan or principle, but by the simple, "how much stuff can fit in this box."

Sitting next to her were two opened birthday presents.

On the yellowing lawn were three loose piles of junk called: Keep, Donate and Sell? The question mark was essential to the sorting operation. Without the question mark, Gina would have been too overwhelmed to go through a single box. To think of how to sell such a random assortment of things gave her a tense feeling in her heart. This partial set of china, wrapped in newspaper might be worth something, but to get it on ebay was, what? An hour in searching and pricing, not to mention the posting and photographing.

The only way she could get herself to open the front door was by telling herself she didn't have to sell a thing. Otherwise the thought of going through all the junk would have paralyzed her. She also refused to think about the deadline the bank's lawyer had given her.

She had until the end of the month to clean it all out. Then the bank would take possession of the house. They had waited 3 business days after the funeral to contact her. And the bank representative had been very kind to her.

If Gina thought about the deadline, she got dizzy. Her father's house was crammed from ceiling to the warped floorboards with boxes and bags and tupperware bins. All of them filled with junk.

The worst thing was that she could see him everywhere. When she found a dumb ceramic baby on a toilet figurine, she knew he meant to send it to her with a funny post-it in his spidery scrawl. She found a pipe that she remembered him smoking when she'd been little. She had forgotten he'd smoked a pipe, and there it was. The smell of the tacky brown residue yanked her back in time so suddenly that she was surprised into crying a bit. She found a stack of photos of her and her mom and her dad that she'd never seen before. The photos were curved together, as if spooning, at the bottom of the third box she had brought out. A bottle of Old English furniture polish had been laying on the photos and some oil had seeped out, sticking the corners of the photos together.

Gina could remember the day. Central park zoo. She had loved the funny clock with the dancing animal figures. The penguin room had scared the shit out of her and from then on, her Dad had loved to surprise her by hiding penguins where she might stumble upon them. He had that kind of a sense of humor.

In fact, the first birthday gift Gina had opened had been a pair of shorts, okay, a cool and brand new pair of short shorts covered with tiny embroidered penguins from a mall store.

After her mother died, her father's hoarding had gotten worse. He had held on to all of her belongings, and that had been a great comfort to Gina, in the first year or so after her passing. Her father was a wonderful storyteller, and each object had a memory for him.

"Your mother wore that hat one time when we went to Davinci's and a hobo on the street gave her a compliment on it and after we ate she brought out her leftovers for that guy. he was so happy. You know they have the best meatballs!"