Stuff the Vacuum Doesn’t Pick Up

There were always stray ornament hangers that turned up the week after they put Christmas away. The hangers clattered around inside the vacuum head until BD fished them out and lined them up on the coffee table. The ornament hangers were his, the coffee table was Autra’s from a Craigslist ad. “Only missed three this year,” BD said, then sealed them into a zip top bag and walked them into the bedroom. Autra heard the drawer of his bedside table open. He called the drawer purgatory. It was for things that did not have a present but had a future. The hangers would stay there until next Thanksgiving when they’d put the Christmas tree up again. It was February.

They kept their six-foot artificial tree—a rare joint purchase—up until February to ease them into the post-holidays winter. Minnesota was a wonderland in December but unforgiving in January. And dark. So they also kept the tree up for the glow that the string lights provided on Saturday nights when they watched a double feature. The light was just bright enough so you could get up for another drink without stumbling on that strip of wood that was meant to smooth out the height differences between the living room floor and the kitchen floor.

That year, the corner of the living room felt empty without the Christmas tree. For days after it was gone, Autra walked around the space as if the tree was still there.

“You’ve got phantom tree,” BD told her. “Like phantom limb.”

She’d laughed. But it was true that the tree removal had felt morbid. They had bought a new cover that zipped around the fully assembled tree so they could store it upright. Carrying it out to the garage felt as though they were carrying a body, Autra at its head, BD at its feet.

The color of the cover—dark red—added to the morbidity. The tree stood next to Autra’s ice chopper and the dark red matched the traces of blood on the blade. BD didn’t like to use the ice chopper for ice—he preferred prompt, efficient snow removal—but he did like to use it for finishing off the mice caught on the sticky traps he set around his garage.

After the tree, they carried out the boxes of decorations, which they stored in the garage rafters. Autra helped BD clear a path to his ladder.

“Don’t we need ice melt?” Autra asked as she moved a bucket of calcium chloride (BD’s). It was last year’s and nearly empty. BD usually bought a new one in January to prepare for the ice dams that built up along the roofline. There were already icicles forming around the back door, dripping onto the landing. Autra had nearly slipped while carrying the tree.

“Probably.” But BD didn’t turn around, his way of telling her to mind her business. He was responsible for the ice melt. It wasn’t her name on the mortgage.

BD set up his ladder in the center of an ornate compass he’d painted on the garage floor when he bought the house. He had painted murals after college to pay for the down payment. He was just twenty-four then, years before Autra’s arrival. Murals were also how they met—Autra’s aunt hired BD to paint her hallway.

One of the ladder’s legs found a crack in the floor, and the ladder shifted as Autra began to climb. She paused.

“Okay?” BD disliked heights.

“Okay.” And she continued climbing. But she remembered a time when he would have insisted on repositioning it.

He handed her the boxes: two were hers, one was his, and the smallest was labeled “Autra + BD.” It contained their joint decorations: the angel tree topper that Belle, BD’s oldest sister, bought them; the tree skirt Autra’s parents gave them; and a pair of pine-scented flameless candles that BD and Autra split the cost of. Afterward, Autra waited while BD put his ladder away, though she could have returned to the house, as her mother or BD’s sister Belle would have. Autra reminded herself that the interstices of the day, those small moments together, mattered so much.

Sticky notes in the vacuum sound like a piece of plywood in an airplane propeller.

“Turn it off!” BD yelled. But Autra was already pressing the power button. The sticky note had slipped off the wall just as she was vacuuming underneath. It was BD’s vacuum—a Miele canister. He had splurged on it three years before, after he’d been laid off for eight weeks and then rehired. He bought it specifically for the HEPA filter—Autra’s allergies were terrible in the fall. It was as romantic a gesture as BD made.

BD was a graphic designer, and his company was an events company that had dead time in the early part of the year when people took a break from eventing. Since that first time, BD had been laid off and rehired by this same company twice more. He was in another layoff cycle at that moment.

“It’s fine,” Autra assured BD as he knelt down and flipped the brush head over.

Sighing, BD took out the yellow pocket knife he always carried and scraped the remnants of the note off the roller. Autra wondered how much of his irritation was from the assault on his vacuum and how much was from the sticky note itself.

The sticky notes were from a trip to Milwaukee they’d taken over MLK Jr. weekend because Autra thought they needed a vacation and BD went to school there and knew the town. More importantly, it provided them with a long car ride to stimulate deeper conversation, a trick Autra’s mother had used on teenage Autra. It hadn’t worked on BD. After an hour he put on a comedy podcast.

They drove Autra’s car, and she paid for the gas and hotel room. She was the manager of a private physical therapy group and made decent money. But BD wanted to split the cost of the food, and though they were nearly forty, they ate like college students. BD was being especially frugal. She wondered if they had cut his pay in the last year. He seemed to have less money than usual.

The sticky notes were orange three-inch squares with the words “Thank You” in laser-cut letters at the top. Autra had the thought in a flash of brilliance: thank-you notes stuck all over the house for BD, detailing things she was grateful for. Gratitude filled up emotional bank accounts that were running in the red. And since they had no joint real banking account, Autra imagined it was their joint emotional bank account that she was filling, the sticky notes like deposit slips.

BD, however, was puzzled by them. “Thank you for doing the dishes last night?” he asked after he found the first one stuck to the refrigerator (hers, because Autra wanted to spend the extra money to buy stainless steel). “I always do the dishes when you cook.” Which wasn’t often; BD did most of the cooking.

“I know. But Gareth doesn’t do them unless Belle asks. So I appreciate that I don’t have to.”

“Gareth is from Little Falls.” BD was an evolved man from St. Paul. He held the note, stuck to his finger, as if it was a booger. “You’re welcome?”

“You don’t have to say anything.” And he didn’t say more. She gestured toward the wall opposite the sink. “I thought maybe we could hang them all up.” As a collective they would have more impact. She reached for the note and in the transfer tore some of the lettering. It now said “Than You”—gratitude transformed into competition. “How about above the table?” (BD’s, along with the chairs.) She centered the note over the left chair and reconstructed the letter K as best she could. “There.”

BD patted her shoulder.

Only a few of the twenty or so notes Autra left around the house made it to the wall, and after the vacuum incident, BD took those down. She was inwardly relieved. She had run out of new material.

The BD school of vacuuming required pants or shorts with two front pockets. The left pocket was for things you found on the floor that needed to be saved. The right pocket was for things that needed to be tossed. After Belle’s youngest daughter was over, there were always Cheerios—Angel’s favorite snack—everywhere. Following an especially egregious visit, BD put the cereal into his left pocket to save and show Angel at her next visit.

The following Saturday, when Belle took Angel’s sisters to their basketball game, Autra entertained Angel alone for a couple of hours while they waited for BD to come home. The day before, he had driven up north to a friend’s cabin to check for burst pipes. His friend was out of state. It was a four-hour drive, and BD had spent the night there, which Autra encouraged. He hadn’t been sleeping well, and she didn’t want him driving the two-lane highways in the dark. But he had gotten on the road later that morning than he expected.

He looked sheepish when he finally arrived. “Sorry, Angel. Sorry, Autra.” They were sitting at the kitchen table. BD’s left eyelid started twitching from sleep deprivation, but Angel thought he was winking. She blinked both eyes in return, until BD touched his eye to quell the spasming. “It’s fine,” BD told her. And Autra said, “We’ve been fine.”

He retrieved the bag of Cheerios he’d saved, and Autra let him take her place across from Angel. She sat on the counter, watching BD count out cereal. “Seventeen. That’s the food you’re wasting, Angel.”

The near-three-year-old grinned. “Okay.” She adored her uncle. It made Autra wish she wasn’t an only child. She would never have blood nieces or nephews.

“Now.” He smiled as he pulled out a spool of floss and broke off a length. “Let’s make a necklace to remind you.”

After they threaded the Cheerios onto the floss, BD tied the ends together and went over to a narrow drawer near the stove that Autra rarely opened. He pulled out a box of food coloring. “This is what—” His eyes rested on something at the back of the drawer, and he stopped speaking. When he recovered, his tone was overly animated. “This is what we want.” But as he took out a small chipped plate from the cupboard, Autra could see he was distracted. She could see that part of his mind was still on the drawer.

“Long drive?” Her mind was on the drawer then, too.

“Yes.”

BD laid the necklace on the plate and Angel squirted food coloring over it. The plate was one Autra had taken to college and never returned to her parents. Her mother had two full sets of dishes and didn’t miss it. The food coloring was left over from Easter.

After the necklace dried, BD lifted it over Angel’s head and they went upstairs to the one bathroom, which had a full-length mirror. They would be awhile—Angel loved mirrors. Autra packed up the food coloring and opened the narrow drawer. She set the box on a notepad advertising a real estate broker. But her attention went to the back. There was BD’s yellow pocket knife, the one he always carried on him.

She picked it up, somehow expecting it to be body temperature, but it was cold. He must have seen it. Why hadn’t he taken it out? He never left sharp objects in reach of Angel. Autra was still contemplating these questions when Angel and BD returned.

“Thanks for cleaning up,” BD said. His eyes went to the drawer.

Autra made an agreement with herself that she would believe any reasonable explanation BD offered if only he showed some relief or surprise at the knife. She watched him as she spoke. “I have your knife. I didn’t want Angel getting it.” She took it out of her pocket and reached it toward him.

But he looked neither relieved nor surprised. He looked caught. “I must have set it there yesterday when I was checking for food coloring.”

BD wasn’t normally a liar, and she could have let it go. She didn’t call him back until he was out of the kitchen. But she had to know. “You didn’t see it when you opened the drawer?”

He returned and his face was pained. “No.”

Angel was the darling of the family, though there were reservations when she was conceived. Belle was forty-two then and there would be eleven years between Angel and her older twin sisters. “We were always on the fence about having a third,” was the official line, “so we left it up to fate.”

BD’s mother called bullshit. “They’re just saving face,” she told Autra. “It’s embarrassing, not managing your contraceptives at their age.”

But Angel was born normal and healthy. The family had celebrated her second birthday the previous summer with all three of BD’s siblings and Gareth’s two brothers in attendance. The cake was frosted to look like a giant Cheerios box. In the kitchen afterward, Autra did dishes and BD’s mother wiped, and BD divided the leftover cake into containers for people to take home. Belle didn’t want the sugar in the house.

“BD was an accident. I didn’t want a fourth,” BD’s mother said.

Autra assumed the Mother, as they sometimes referred to her, was being dramatic, as BD’s mother was prone to when the attention wasn’t focused enough on her and she had consumed a couple glasses of wine. “No,” Autra replied firmly. And she didn’t mean it in the sense of “I can’t believe it.” She meant it as a refutation. The comment would be hurtful to BD.

But when she flicked her eyes to him, his face was passive.

“Oh, he knows,” his mother said.

Autra rested her wrists on the sink and waited for them to laugh at her and admit the farce.

“It’s true,” BD’s mother assured Autra. “I think that’s why he and Angel get on so well. Both accidents.”

“You know, BD’s going to be the one who takes care of you in your old age,” Autra told her. “You should stay on his good side.”

BD’s mother laughed a long, chortling laugh. “I don’t have to, honey. I’m his mother.” She laid a hand on BD’s arm. He let it rest there while she leaned toward Autra. “The question is, who’s going to take care of you?”

“Mom,” BD said.

Another mother might have meant the comment as gentle pressure on Autra and BD to get married or have children. But there was no mistaking the malice in BD’s mother’s face. What she meant was, BD would take care of her, but not necessarily Autra.

Autra looked at BD. He looked at the floor. He knew his mother wasn’t wrong. It was the question and was quickly rising on Autra’s horizon. Everyone, no matter their independence, needed care at some point. Who would that be for Autra? She didn’t plan to have children. Even if she and BD got married and she became a legal aunt to BD’s nieces and nephews, it meant nothing. Legal easily became unlegal. It had been less than five years since Autra’s Uncle Harold divorced his husband, and she rarely even thought of Uncle Kelly anymore. Would she be willing to take care of him?

Autra washed the remaining dishes slowly to let BD’s mother get ahead of her in wiping. When the dish drainer was empty, BD said, “We’ll get the rest, Mom. You can take the cake container to the garbage.”

His mother draped the dish towel on BD and saluted. “Aye, aye.” She nodded at Autra.

BD leaned against the counter and sunk his hands into the long pocket of his hoodie. It was called a kangaroo pouch, that type of pocket. There was no left or right, just a single space where what was to be saved and what was to be tossed mingled together. BD’s hands were relaxed and flat inside, not as they usually were, formed into fists and the knuckles pressing out against the fabric: there was no fight in him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He was, she knew.

From the living room there was the crash of the plastic cake container and Belle saying, “Mother—” and BD putting the dish towel down and grabbing the roll of paper towels off the counter. The loose end waved like a white flag as he carried it to the living room entrance and rolled it across the floor.

Prevention was Pillar One of the Midwest Life Philosophy. Ice dams were under this pillar: they were preventable, generally caused by an inadequately insulated attic. Ice dams formed when snow on the warm part of the roof melted and hit the cold part, the eaves, and froze. As this cycle repeated, the ice dams grew. Large icicles appeared. When the ice dams got wide enough, the melting snow backed up behind them and found its way as water into your ceilings and walls. In the southern Minnesota town of Rochester, where Autra grew up, the old Victorian houses had spectacular ice dams and icicles every winter.

“I’d be terrified to step outside,” Autra’s mother commented annually. “If one of those icicles fell on you, you’d be dead.”

“Imagine their heating bills,” her father would add. Dead or not, wasted money was a crime.

Autra’s parents had mentioned BD’s ice dams annually since Autra moved in with him, which made eight years. But BD was happy with his work-around: knee-high pantyhose filled with calcium chloride and swung from the second-floor windows onto the roof, where they melted channels in the ice. The past fall, Autra had renewed her offer to pay half the cost of reinsulating, but BD wouldn’t accept her money. He was like that with all major repairs—he wanted to pay the whole bill.

Talking to Belle, Autra had couched it as evidence of BD’s consideration and ethics. “He doesn’t want to take advantage of me, since I’m not benefiting from the investment in the house.”

There was a mixture of pity and anger in Belle’s answer. “I think you’re giving BD too much credit.”

And maybe she was. But the alternative was that BD saw her more as a tenant than a partner.

By March, BD had not employed his work-around. He’d never bought the supplies. When the water spots appeared on the ceiling, BD ignored them, ignored Autra’s offers to help, ignored Gareth’s admonishments. He’d taken up vaping, and when he stood on the back step, he didn’t look up at the roof. He looked straight ahead, as if daring the future to a staring contest. The future was water stains and black mold, and BD didn’t blink.

Autra didn’t realize how much this weighed on her until a Wednesday night when she pulled into the driveway after work and the pantyhose was up. It was as if she had been tensing her whole being, waiting for an impact, and instead the old BD had resurfaced. Routine had prevailed.

But as she turned off her car, she didn’t feel relieved. She stared at BD’s Honda, in the driveway ahead of her, where it was always parked. She stared through it to the garage, full of things besides cars. BD’s things. And she saw a future, in ten years and twenty and thirty, scraping her windows in the morning with arthritic hands. Maneuvering the driveway with diminished balance. An old body settling into a frozen car seat.

The motion detector lights came on next door and their neighbor Duane appeared. He was wearing only a flannel shirt though the temperature was in the teens. Autra pretended to look through her bag while she waited for him to return inside. But he wanted to talk to her.

“Hey,” he called, as she got out. “BD ever going to get his roof insulated?”

She grimaced. “You know, you just can’t push BD.”

“Him and that pantyhose. His heating bills must be outrageous.”

Yes, Autra thought. His heating bills.

“Say. You two thinking of moving?”

Autra startled. “No,” she said. “Did you want us to?”

Duane laughed. “No, no. My buddy ran into BD at the airport a couple weeks ago. BD said he was flying out to look at houses in Milwaukee. I knew you were there in January, too.”

Their driveways were only six feet apart, but the snow kept Duane from getting closer. Autra was glad for the space. She counted back—a couple weeks ago was when he went up to the cabin. “You sure it was BD?”

“Oh, it was BD. My buddy knows him. BD painted a mural for his granddaughter’s room a few months back.”

Autra felt another pang of surprise. BD hadn’t painted in years. “Did you say a few months ago?”

This was the second piece of information she hadn’t known, and Duane’s jocularity began to fade. He rubbed his forehead with his thumb. She could see his consternation. He’d stepped in it, her father would say.

“He was flying to Milwaukee?” Autra clarified.

Duane forced a laugh. “Right? Why wouldn’t he drive?” He started backtracking, trying to step out of it. “Maybe he was kidding. Who flies to Milwaukee? And you live with the guy. I mean, you’d know.”

But it was increasingly clear she didn’t know. Autra thought back to the afternoon in Milwaukee when BD went to visit his old professors. Had he really visited them? Or had he looked at houses? Maybe he’d flown back for a second showing. He worked remotely. He could live anywhere.

Duane put his hands in his pockets. “Geez it’s gettin’ brisk. Probably time to head in.” He exaggerated a shiver.

“Yeah.” But Autra didn’t go.

Duane took half a dozen shuffling steps. “Say, I hope . . .”

“It’s fine.”

Autra locked her car and walked slowly to the house. A scenario was emerging. BD late to the airport, stashing his pocket knife in the narrow drawer, relieved he remembered it before airport security. The expenses he’d been cutting. The extra money he was making painting again. The conversations with BD’s mother and Belle.

As Autra opened the front door, BD called from the back. “I thought I heard you pull up.”

She removed her boots but left her coat and hat on. The house felt cold or maybe just she did. “I was talking to Duane.” She checked the thermostat and saw it was set five degrees lower than usual.

At the back door, BD was shaking out the rug. “Calcium chloride everywhere,” he told her. “Miele can’t pick that up.” He set the rug down and smiled. “I got rehired today.”

“Oh. Congratulations.”

She went back and turned the thermostat up to seventy-four.

The snow in Belle’s yard, with her three kids, was completely trampled. The snow in Autra and BD’s yard was mostly untouched, so it was noticeable to Autra when she came home the next week and saw that the snow around the perimeter of the house had been disturbed. Had Belle’s kids been over? But then she saw glimpses of pantyhose and realized that the ice dams had started breaking loose.

BD’s car was there but the house was dark, which was odd. Usually by this time, BD had the television on. Autra got out and headed toward the back, where she expected to find BD vaping.

On her way she pried out a knee-high stuck under a piece of fallen ice dam. Autra was surprised at the weight of the ice. She thought of her mother—“If one of those fell on you, you’d be dead”—and went several steps farther out so she wasn’t beneath the roof line. The pieces of ice got larger as Autra approached the back door. And then, just before the landing, it was no longer just ice. There was red mixed in with the snow. And red in drops. Red on the landing. BD’s phone frozen in a snow bank. The glass storm door ajar.

“B?” she called. And then louder, panicked, “BD.” There was blood on the door handle. BD was lying a few feet inside. He had made it almost to the landline. The landline that she had insisted they get for emergencies. She called his name once more, by how she’d known him when they first met. “Bradley!” And then there was blood on her hand, too.

BD had a severe concussion. He tried to convince the doctors to send him home—an overnight would cost a fortune—but the doctors and the family insisted he stay for observation. Autra reminded BD that her father’s friend had fallen from a deer stand, appeared to be fine, and died later from internal bleeding in his brain. Or Liam Neeson’s wife, Natasha Richardson, who died hours after a skiing accident. These were stories a responsible human collected to avoid similar fates. “Learn from the mistakes of the easily avoided dead,” Autra’s grandmother advised. But it was so hard to recognize your own situation in someone else’s, to see the tracks that ran off the cliff that were parallel and adjacent to yours.

Autra left the hospital that night with Belle and Gareth and BD’s mother. As Autra turned to go to her car, Gareth said, “Maybe BD will do the responsible thing now and get that attic insulated. I mean, it could have been you.” Responsibility was Pillar Two of the Midwest Life Philosophy. And by responsibility, it was meant that everything that happened to you was your fault. It was BD’s fault he was injured, especially because his injuries were a direct result of neglecting Pillar One, Prevention. But the same applied to Autra. If Autra had been hit by a piece of ice, it also would have been her fault. If she wasn’t able to convince BD to insulate the attic, she could have moved out to avoid getting hurt. This now seemed an indisputable truth.

“Maybe,” Autra agreed. “Or maybe he’ll just move.” She watched their faces—BD’s sister, BD’s brother-in-law, BD’s mother, BD’s family—and confirmed that truth, too. When Belle called out to her, she didn’t stop.

There were the usual explanations to be made. BD was afraid of marriage, a product of his own parents’ divorce. He felt stagnant. He was hitting his midlife crisis and he needed a change before his mother got older and needed his care. Maybe he’d had a job offer in Milwaukee. But then there was the simplest explanation, which the romance movies didn’t touch on. Maybe she wasn’t the one for him. Maybe he wasn’t the one for her.

Back at a house that wasn’t legally hers, Autra sat on BD’s couch and turned on BD’s TV. The glass she drank from was hers. Half of the water she drank was hers. The food she heated up was also hers. Autra thought how easy they had made it to split everything into two. When Autra had first moved in, this seemed prudent. “If you buy that lawnmower together, and you split up, the lawnmower will stay with BD and you’re out a hundred fifty bucks,” her father pointed out.

“And if you multiply that by everything you buy . . .” Autra’s mother warned.

But that had been in the beginning. Why hadn’t they stopped? What if they had gone in without a plan, entangling her life and his life and not worrying about what should be saved and what should be discarded? True, if it had failed in those first years, she would have been out money. But now she was out time. And inertia suddenly felt like the most egregious of crimes.

On her way into the kitchen to put her dishes in the dishwasher (BD’s), Autra’s foot landed askew on the wood strip between the living room and kitchen. She wobbled and the glass resting on her plate wobbled and tipped onto the tiled kitchen floor, shattering completely.

Autra looked down. It was called a transition strip, that narrow piece of wood. She was next to BD when he ordered it. The name struck her as funny, as though you transitioned into a different person from one room to another. Maybe it was really that simple. She set her plate down and went to find shoes. She grabbed the broom—her broom—from the utility closet. It had a dustpan you could use while standing.

The glass was thick and the broken pieces were jewel-like, almost cubes. She filled the dustpan with them, then slid them into the trash. The cherry blossom–scented trash bags had been her purchase. The Rubbermaid trash can underneath was BD’s.

Normally after she’d swept up the larger pieces, she’d get the Miele out to pick up the smaller fragments. But the vacuum was BD’s, of course. So she started over again with the broom, sweeping in an ever-widening circle, reaching into the dark corners. She would need to learn to get by without a vacuum for a while. She would have to save up for one, and there would be first and last months’ rent and other more urgent items to purchase. Like a trash can. She emptied her dustpan again.

She swept like this, over and over, until all the tiny shards and glittering pieces, like glitter on a Christmas card, like fresh snow in December, were gone. When she finished, she felt tired. It felt late. But maybe not too, too late.