Jim Daniels

Chris Conroy

Jack Helbig

Closing Costs

Eric sat at the ornate dining room table they'd inherited from the house's previous owner. It came with six chairs, one with big arms on the sides. "For the man of the house," Sammy had told him with a wink. His wife Josephine had died the year before, and, alone in that big house, he no longer needed the big chair to establish his position. Eric wondered if old Sammy missed that uncomfortable chair, if he sometimes lowered his heavy arms in anticipation, only to have them fall dangling to his sides, just another body in another chair at Sterling Gardens, the retirement home where he now lived.

The problem with the chair was that the arms bumped the table so you couldn't pull it in close. You ended up either bending over and lunging at your food, or watching it fall off your fork on the long journey. If that's what being the man of the house meant, Eric didn't want any part of it. What were they thinking, buying a house? There was no one to ask just now, 2 a.m., sitting across from the big chair that he refused to sit in. The stress of the move had caused an increase in the dosage of one of Ellen's pills. She was upstairs sleeping her drugged sleep like a large immovable rock, leaving him to ponder the mistake of the big stupid house they could never imagine filling together.

With no one around to frown or grimace, Eric slurped his cereal noisily. The last time he'd gone home to visit his family in Detroit, he'd had breakfast with his ninety-three-year-old grandfather who was staying at his parents' after nearly burning his own house down. They were in a holding pattern—what to do with grandpa? He sat at the kitchen table, half-deaf, eating his cereal with a variety of slurps and snorts that finally forced Eric from the room.

"I say put him in a home. How can you stand it?" he'd said to his father.

"You can't institutionalize someone for bad table manners," his father said. His mother was reduced to a permanent, teeth-gritting grimace. It wasn't her father—he'd had the wisdom to die before he became so much trouble. Eric cut his visit short. He had to get back for the closing on the house in Flint. His mother was anxious to visit once they settled in.

"And next you're getting married, right?" she shouted as he drove away.

Ellen rarely visited his parents with him. They wouldn't let them sleep together "under their roof," though he and Ellen had been living together for five years. She'd stay with her sister and join them for an awkward dinner before they headed back to Flint. Eric vowed to look up the laws on common-law marriages—maybe he could convince his folks to let up a bit. After all, he and Ellen were homeowners now, and that should count for something.

"Sammy, Sammy," Eric sighed as he scooped out the last few Golden Nuggets from the bottom of the bowl, "I'm slurping cereal like an old man." Sammy and his wife had no children—no one to fret over him now. He was enormously obese, and Eric guessed that the distance from the chair to the table would have been perfect for him. "Sammy, I can't even fill up your chair." He liked hearing his own voice in the big, spooky house. He had taped a pair of sunglasses on a ceramic vase of a woman's head that Sammy had left behind. He called it Marge. It sat on the window ledge in the kitchen. They were hanging on to all of Sammy's junk to keep the place from seeming like their own.

Eric and Ellen were both in their mid-thirties and beyond the years in which marriage was even discussed—they simply weren't in love enough anymore. Everything was already cemented into dull routine, and if the routine had cracks, they had learned to step over them. Ellen had been married once, right out of high school. She'd moved to Toledo with her husband, and he had abused her till she fled back to suburban Detroit. The idea of any kind of wedding made them both shudder. It bound them stubbornly together. That, and their decision not to have children. Eric had come out of college thinking he was unconventional—the romantic outsider, the rebellious joker, the life of any party. One thing about being unconventional, it doesn't put bread on the table. After college, no one indulged him anymore. All his druggie friends were cutting their hair, putting putty in their nose-ring holes, covering their tattoos with long sleeves, getting jobs. After seven years of off-and-on study, a double major in philosophy and English got Eric a job selling cars. He stopped calling himself a Marxist.

He'd met Ellen at a large party thrown by his cousin Ned, a mid-level drug dealer. When the police arrived to break things up, Eric and Ellen, stoned and drunk, left together and spent the night at his apartment. Soon, they were living together and throwing lively parties of their own. He loved to watch her argue. She'd take on anybody on anything, and she was smart—smart like someone who'd escaped a death sentence. She acted like she knew more than the rest of them, and Eric believed she did.

They'd left that apartment long ago. They didn't dance anymore. Loud music hurt Eric's ears. Ellen wanted to stay home, but she didn't know what she wanted to do there. Many of their friends were becoming parents, and Eric knew what they were doing at home—changing diapers, getting spit on, staying up all night with sick kids. Who needed that? But Ellen needed a new something. He needed a new something. To collect. To pursue. For a while, it had been the house, days spent wandering the city in the real estate agent's car while she prattled on about the features of this or that house.

The big chair asserted its presence across from him. Eric could imagine his arms strapped to it, getting electrocuted. Slurp, slurp. His last meal. He lifted the bowl and drank the rest of the milk. It dribbled down his chin. He wiped it with the sleeve of his robe, then rose and went back to bed. "Goodnight, Marge," he said, patting her head as he passed through the kitchen.

"I had the flying dream again last night," Ellen said as they lay together in bed the next morning. For weeks, she'd been dreaming she could fly. Eric had never, ever once dreamed he was flying. Not that he could remember, anyway. He half-sneered, "Where'd you go this time?"

"Nowhere. Just from room to room, up and down the stairs."

"See, we've got it all here—you don't need to fly anywhere."

"It wasn't this house."

"Oh," he said. He knew she wanted him to ask more, but he wasn't biting.

"I dreamed I was building a deck," he said, though it wasn't true. Building a deck was something they talked about to make conversation. It was like watching a half-amusing sitcom—it got them through the silence of the house some nights. The truth was he'd dreamed he was moving again, struggling unsuccessfully to fit a lot of little boxes into one big box. An old girlfriend, not Ellen, was helping him.

"Eric, it's cold in here. Maybe the furnace is out." Ellen wrapped the comforter tightly around her. Winter had come early to Flint—not even November, and it'd already snowed a half dozen times.

The furnace had been a sticking point. It was old and needed replacing. Sammy wouldn't budge. He threw in the table and chairs, which he didn't need in his furnished condo anyway, but the furnace was nonnegotiable. Eric and Ellen didn't have enough money for a furnace after the down payment, after all the closing costs and moving expenses. What was Sammy going to do with all that money—their money—in Sterling Gardens?

Eric got out of bed and held his hand to the radiator beneath the window: hot. Relieved, he sat down on it and warmed his skinny butt. "Furnace is on," he said firmly.

"Listen, all I know is it's cold in here," she said.

"It's an old house. It's drafty," he said. He wanted to stop being mean to her, to try and understand why life both wasn't enough and was too much for her. He wanted to have a good argument with her just to see her animated again, confident and not afraid. It seemed like they could barely talk in that house, much less be intimate. He wanted to bring in an exorcist to clear the air. He was cold, even sitting on the radiator, so he went downstairs to check the thermostat. At the bottom of the stairs, he felt a chill of panic at the broken window on the landing.

Though they’d been in the house for six months, they'd left most of their belongings in boxes in the living room. Upstairs, they'd unpacked clothes and filled closets, but they were slow to unpack all the stuff—the books, knickknacks, Ellen's stack of paintings from when she used to paint, Eric's beer can collection from his college days.

He stepped into the disorder of their living room and didn't know where to begin. How would they ever figure out what was missing? Beer cans were strewn everywhere. He couldn't believe he hadn't heard anything after he’d gone back to bed. Maybe he had—he wasn't used to the house's noises and wouldn't know what to be alarmed by. Nothing could have roused Ellen.

"Ellen," he said evenly, "come on down. We've been robbed."

She rushed down in her old ratty robe, then saw the broken window and ran back upstairs. He sat in the dining room in the big chair, his hands firmly gripping the armrests, the jolts rushing through him.

"They're gone. It's safe to come down."

"Don't touch anything," she shouted down the stairs. "Call the police. I'm getting dressed."

"Shouldn't we figure out what's missing first?" he asked. "What's the protocol here? I mean, won't that be the first thing the cops ask?"

"Call the cops," she said. "I'm getting dressed."

Eric called 911 and began to take stock. Their laptops. The TV, VCR, DVD, the CD player and CDs—everything with initials, that would be easy enough to remember. They didn't have much else of value. Eric had a lot of books from when he used to read philosophy and poetry. Those heavy boxes sat untouched in a corner. He wished they'd hauled them away—he knew he'd never look at them again.

When he looked around, all he saw were remnants of who they used to be. Things that meant something once. Sentimental attachments. A box of all the gag gifts they'd given each other. Eric remembered the plastic banana that turned into a dildo he'd given Ellen back when they both had a sense of humor—he hoped the cops weren't going to go through everything. A jack-in-the-box from the old toy box his grandfather used to keep for him when he came to visit. His old gold-plated cocaine kit, a birthday gift from Ellen, was probably somewhere in the chaos. If he could find it himself, maybe he could scrape together enough residue for one snort. His mind was cluttering with all the junk—he wished they'd taken everything.

Ellen came down the stairs, still shivering. Eric stood and grabbed a tablecloth from the floor and covered the broken window with it.

"Should we clean up the glass?" he asked.

"Wait for the police," she said. "You did call them?"

"Yeah, I called."

"What's missing?" she asked. She was dressed in work clothes—a navy skirt and white blouse—as if she wanted to insist it was going to be an ordinary day. But then she suddenly pulled him to her and hugged him tightly. Eric didn't know what was in that hug, but he squeezed back just as tightly. All he felt was a stifling numbness.

"They got all the electronic stuff." Eric leaned back and rubbed his hands over Sammy's fuzzy red wallpaper. Ellen continued clutching his waist.

"What else did we have?" she asked. "What’s in all these boxes, anyway?"

"They took everything," he said, just to say it, to be melodramatic. Lately, he'd felt like there wasn't enough drama of any kind in their lives, and when something did happen, it was like he was seeing it through a filter, as if he too were on drugs that numbed the senses. Moving had given him a backache, but even that went away quickly. What was their excuse? Could they write each other notes for emotional absence? "What's with the wallpaper?" she asked. He immediately brought his hands back to his sides. He shrugged. "It's fuzzy," he said.

"You're fuzzy," she said. "I see they left your beer cans," she almost sneered. He pulled away from her and picked one off the floor to crush it in his hands, but it was one of the older, thicker cans, and all he could do was bend it in half. Was he really someone who had a beer can collection? Would he be remembered for that?

"Yeah, I know. It's pitiful," he said. "What was I thinking?" he asked aloud.

"What were we thinking?" she asked.

"When?"

"When we moved all this junk. Let's just take it to the curb."

Moving from an apartment to a big house, they hadn't felt they needed to go through and weed things out—they'd just tossed everything in boxes and brought it here. They were young when they'd packed, and hadn't needed to take stock.

Some boxes had been dumped, some untouched, and others just opened and left. Ellen went into the kitchen to make coffee. Eric went upstairs to dress. If the police came soon, maybe they could both get in half a day of work. He put on his blue suit, and the red tie his brother had given him for Christmas. A power tie, his brother the engineer had called it, appreciating Eric's new conformity, rubbing it in a little.

Ellen taught at the neighborhood preschool. Their friends thought that was funny, since they had no interest in having kids, but Ellen said she felt safe there. Eric had always wanted to go to work with her, to watch her with kids, but she refused to let him.

They would both have to call in soon. Let their bosses know what was up. Eric's hair was thinning, though he could still comb over what would soon be a bald spot. He was too young to be having a mid-life crisis, unless he was going to die pretty early. He wondered if it was a relationship crisis, or simultaneous personal crises.

"Didn't you hear anything? Remember when we used to take drugs because we wanted to, not because we had to?" he shouted, angry at their sad boxes of junk rejected by thieves. Ellen had saved all her old high school and college papers, all with A's on them, in an old xerox-paper box he rested his feet on.

Eric didn't even smoke pot anymore. He thought it took the edge off, the edge he needed to be aggressive and sell lots of cars. He was good at it. He had a great spiel about how a new car could change your life. He had theories of fitting cars to personalities. The other salesmen called him Doctor Eric. He specialized in selling cars to nutcases. Business was booming. He thought Ellen needed a new car, though they couldn't afford it. He had been sure the house would work as a symbol of starting over again, together—something solid. He imagined them stripping wallpaper, painting, decorating, a deck, a garden. He never dreamed they'd be unable to even unpack.

His father said the fire had given him an excuse to get rid of his grandfather's accumulated junk. "Junk, pure junk," his father marveled. Was Eric a collector like his grandfather? Why couldn't he just sit in the room and listen to the old man eat? Eric half-wished his grandfather would die. His house stunk like an old dog. He was surprised by his own cruelty. Where would it lead him? He imagined Sammy and his grandfather sitting together, talking about his lack of gratitude. His insolence.

He decided Ellen was right. He'd throw everything away, carry the remaining boxes to the curb unexamined. "Too much junk," he shouted aloud. He had to retie his tie three times before the length was right. He decided to throw out the big chair with the arms too. Somebody else's idea of being a man. All the other chairs were armless, waiting for definition.

"Goddamn it," she shouted back, "They even had a fucking snack before they left. Didn't they know we were right upstairs? How can we stay here now? Burglars coming in and having a goddamn snack. Nobody told me about this. I thought this was a safe neighborhood."

Eric shivered at the thought of someone watching them sleep—a true violation. What did they look like together? He'd noticed with alarm that he could not fall asleep unless he lay on his side turned away from her. He thought it had something to do with which side his heart was on. Maybe his heart didn't like all that weight on it. He remembered the sweet drool at the corner of her mouth that first night they slept together. He'd woken her with breakfast in bed. He was embarrassed at how warm and vulnerable he used to be. He liked being on the edge now. Sharp. Aggressive. Taking on all comers. A fucking homeowner. He was going to pay off the mortgage early, buy a second home. Maybe a boat. He always wanted a boat. New big things, not all that trash. He thought of his own car in the driveway—he assumed it was still there—a Honda Civic, sky blue. He used to pride himself on fixing his own cars. Now, he just got a new one every few years.

"What did they have?" he asked. He was hungry with shock. He wanted to eat enough to feel permanent.

"A coke and some chips," she said. "And there's a raw egg in the frying pan."

"Maybe we spooked them," he looked down at the egg, its yellow eye staring back up at him. "Will our insurance cover that?" He laughed too loud at his own joke. They'd like this story at work. He could use it. He looked over at the Marge figurine and winked at her. Sammy was safe somewhere, probably still asleep. Eric imagined him cranking the thermostat up in Sterling Gardens, thinking of the money he'd saved by not giving in and getting a new furnace for the house. He was going to take a sledgehammer to that chair, his first home improvement project.

"Oh yeah," Ellen said, "Call the insurance company. Right away."

Instead, he turned on the burner and started to cook the egg.

"What are you doing," she said. "That's evidence." He thought she was making a joke, but she stared at him, haunted and pale in her bright work clothes.

Eric went on cooking. One pure simple thing. The police would be arriving soon, or maybe they'd take hours. He didn't know the priority given to a break-in in their neighborhood. He used to think that if he loved her more, loved her better, she wouldn't need her medication. Now, he didn't know if he had the capacity to change her in any positive way. He heard a siren in the distance, but it abruptly stopped.

Owning the house was almost the same as being married. It would make splitting up messy and complicated. Neither of them had the energy for that either. Or the desire, he thought. Hoped. Wondered. He didn’t want to be an old man alone. He was the man of the house, and he was going to hold onto—onto what? What would they replace the junk with? The egg was sizzling.

"Hey, we're alive," he said. "Do you want one?"

She shook her head. She was watching the coffee drift down into the carafe. They were lost to each other in their own simple things. "Sunny side up," he said to himself, "Or over easy?"

Jim Daniels' most recent book is Street, poems with the photographs of Charlee Brodsky (Bottom Dog Press, 2005). He also wrote and produced "Dumpster," an independent feature film currently appearing at film festivals. His next book of short stories, Mr. Pleasant, will be published by Michigan State University Press in 2007. He directs the creative writing program at Carnegie Mellon University.