Chapter 17

In early April, Will hired a real estate agent out of Bangor to put the house in Ellsworth on the market. He had tossed around the idea of selling the place since Claire's tentative agreement to move north together, and he made the final decision when he realized that he hadn't been back to his own house in over two months. The bills were paid by automatic deduction from one of his accounts, and he could have afforded to keep the place empty for an indefinite amount of time, but he wasn't particularly attached to the house anyway. Besides, he had talked to Claire about having something that was theirs jointly from the start, and for them to set up their first joint residence in his house would have felt all wrong. So he hired a real estate agent over the phone, and gave her free hand in selling the property for whatever she thought would be an attractive price. Not one week after he had signed and faxed the contract to the real estate office, they had six purchase offers, and Will suspected that the agent had made no secret of the identity of the seller.

In mid-April, he flew back up to Bangor by himself to attend the closing, which was a two-hour affair that involved a stack of paperwork and more signatures than one of his signing sessions at the bookstore. When he walked out of the real estate office, the house in Ellsworth was the new property of a star-struck dentist from Brewer, and Will had a freshly-issued cashier's check for a quarter million dollars in the pocket of his sport coat. On the way back to the airport, he stopped by at his bank to deposit the proceeds from the house, and he wasn't surprised to find that seeing the place change hands didn't bother him in the least.

Well, technically I'm homeless now, he thought when he checked in for the return flight, carrying only the little laptop bag he had brought with him from Knoxville. He had paid a local moving company to clean out the house and put his personal stuff in storage. The buyer had offered an extra ten thousand dollars for the furniture, and since everything in the house was generic Ethan Allen stuff devoid of personal history, Will had accepted the offer gladly. The rest of his belongings fit into a nine-by-nine unit at the local self-storage with enough space left over to park a motorcycle.

"I didn't mind that house at all," Claire said as they were leaving the airport in her Beetle. The airport parking lot wasn't expensive, and Will could have left his own car for the night, but Claire had taken to picking him up from the airport whenever he returned from an out-of-town trip.

"It was alright, I guess," he shrugged. "Way too big for one person, though. I don't know what I was thinking when I bought it. I mean, three bedrooms and two baths?"

"So who bought it?"

"Some dentist from Brewer. He'll need all the space, that's for sure. They have three girls. They were playing in an empty office at the real estate place when we did the closing. Rambunctious."

"Well, good," Claire said. "At least it'll be a nice home for someone."

"It was never really a home to me," Will said. "It never felt like a home. It was just a place to store my things. When I signed the deed over, I didn't feel a thing. It was like selling an old barn or something."

"So no regrets?"

"Nope." He smiled at her and closed his hand over hers on the gear shifter. "No regrets at all."

When they walked into Bob's house, the familiar clatter of his clicky keyboard came drifting down from the upstairs office, although Will noticed that the keys chattered at a slower frequency than the rapid-fire staccato Bob had produced before the head injury.

"I hear the master is at work again," Will said to Christa when they stepped into the kitchen.

"Yeah, he's back to his old schedule. I suggested he ought to take it easy for a few months, but he wouldn't have any of it."

"Life's short," Will shrugged. "Can't blame him for making the most of it. I'd say he got a pretty good reminder of the fact that we're all mortal in the end."

"We all did," Christa said. "Nothing like having the hospital priest asking to perform last rites on your husband to drive that point home, let me tell you."

"Where's the kid?" Will asked. "I didn't see any lights on in her room when we pulled up."

"She's over at the library," Christa said, and then chuckled. "With a boy, I think. They're studying for some exam next week. Biology, she said."

"Biology, eh?" Will chuckled. "Let's hope they don't delve into the subject too deeply. Did you meet him?"

"Yeah, he came to pick her up. Nice kid, very polite. Josh is his name."

"Josh from Vermont," Will mused. "He finally got off his duff."

"What's that, Will?"

"Oh, nothing," he told his sister-in-law. "Hey, we can discuss Erica's birthday, then. I have no clue what to get her."

"I think that laptop you gave her a few months ago should be good for Christmas and her birthday, don't you think?"

"Oh, come on. I'm not going to show up on her sixteenth birthday empty-handed."

"Savings bond," Bob said from the foot of the stairs. "She'll need all the cash she can get when she's accepted into college. I saw her application list for her senior year. It has every single Ivy League school on it."

"They'll throw scholarships at her," Will said. "I'll be shocked if you have to shell out a penny for her four-year degree. She's had a perfect GPA since her freshman year in high school."

"They better," Bob said, walking past Will and Claire to get to the fridge. "'Cause if they don't, she'll have to take on enough student loans to finance another moon landing. You know how much Harvard charges for admission per year these days?"

"I know," Will replied. "My entire four-year degree at Orono wasn't as expensive as a single year at Harvard. She gets accepted there, you might as well take out a second mortgage."

"Hell, no," Bob snorted. "That's an awesome way to lose your house. There are some folks in this subdivision that took out home equity loans when it was like getting free cash, and now they're looking at foreclosure. I'd rather do without the extra money and keep the palace, thank you."

"Well, don't worry about it too much. She'll get scholarships, and if not, mom's going to fight me about who gets to pay her tuition."

"You meant that, didn't you?" Claire asked him later in the living room, when Christa was preparing snacks in the kitchen, and Bob had retreated to his office once more to finish up his work of the day.

"What, about the tuition? Of course. The kid doesn't belong in a community college. If they accept her into a good school, what's wrong with giving her a head start?"

"Nothing at all," she said. "That's a lot of money, though."

"Hell, I have more than I need. Unless I adopt some rock star habit like snorting coke or buying Ferraris, I could pay for four years of Harvard ten times over and still not feel the pinch."

"Not that it's any of my business, but how much exactly does that book of yours make you?"

"I guess it is your business now, too," he said, and then studied the ceiling as he added numbers up in his head.

"Let's see, there's the savings account, the retirement account, the investment portfolio, the other odds and ends ... now, this is just a rough guess. I'd have to ask my accountant what the exact figures are, but last time I checked, it was around two and a half."

"Million?" she asked, and he nodded with a smile.

"Oh, boy," she chuckled. "Did I ever fall in love with the right guy, huh?"

"Yeah, well, luckily mom raised us to not be wasteful with money. I get the royalty checks every quarter, and they're way more than I can spend anyway, so most of it gets distributed across the different accounts. Put some in the IRA, stick some in low-yield savings, invest some—the accountant does all that stuff. He just sends me statements every quarter or so. I just get a general idea of what I have whenever he does my taxes every January."

"Have you ever thought about taking some of that cash and doing something with it? Like, maybe set up a scholarship for young writers or something? You could hold an essay contest, or just pull letters out of a hat. There must be a few Ericas out there who don't have Nobel Prize winners for uncles."

"That's a thought," Will said.

"The William Liebkind Scholarship for Creative Writing," she said, forming an imaginary headline with her hands. "Bankrolling the education of the future Pulitzer Prize winners of America."

"I like the sound of that," he said. "I really do."

Erica returned from the library at nine o'clock, artfully seeing her date off in the driveway before any of them even realized she was back.

"What, did you have him roll into the driveway with the lights out and the engine off?" Will asked when Erica walked into the living room, canvas bag over her shoulder and a somewhat distant smile on her face.

"Of course," she said. "Like I want the lot of you to rush to the kitchen window."

"She learns fast, that one," Bob said, and raised his beer bottle in a curt salute. "Definitely college material."

"And how was the study session?" Christa asked. "Get anything accomplished?"

"You could say that," Erica smiled. She walked over to the coffee table and plucked a cookie from the snack bowl Christa had put out. Then she sauntered back out of the room, giving them a brief little wave over her shoulder.

"'Night, everyone. I gotta print out some stuff and then hit the hay."

"No fair," Bob called after her. "We're supposed to grill you for details. Stay and face the tribunal, will ya?"

He smiled at Will when Erica walked on as if she hadn't heard him.

"And this is where the trouble starts."

Will had never minded working in public. Back in college, he had dragged his notebooks around with him everywhere he went, and he had written countless paragraphs and chapters in the middle of crowded lecture halls, cafeterias, and student lounges. Paradoxically, he was far more likely to be distracted when he was locked away in a quiet room at home than when he was sitting at a table in a packed bookstore cafe.

His newest writing implement, however, pretty much required a private room. He supposed he could have taken the newly-restored Royal over to the bookstore cafe, but that would have seemed like the height of pretentiousness. He did consider it briefly, if only for the comedic effect of someone banging away on a typewriter in the middle of a sea of laptop users, but he decided that the novelty would be short-lived.

He hadn't meant to use the old machine for doing actual work. When he bought it at the antiques store, he had intended for it to be a neat piece of desk garnish, functional enough to maybe write the occasional letter on it. It was the twenty-first century, after all--typewriters were as obsolete as the phonograph, and there was something slightly unsettling about having only one solitary paper copy of one's work. Still, when he had finished restoring the old Royal with the help of some teflon lube, an entire box of cotton swabs, and a few sinfully expensive new nylon tapes from an online typewriter store, he found that he rather enjoyed the feeling of the whole thing. There was something satisfying about the mechanical response of the keys under his fingers, and the immutable and permanent nature of the sentences on the paper once he had drummed them out. In addition, the Royal made a lovely racket when he typed along at forty or fifty words a minute, a muted yet authoritative staccato that was almost meditative. Somehow, the act of writing seemed far more real on the typewriter than it did on the computer.

Due to the Royal's lack of portability, Will had given up on his nomadic writing habits. Claire had her spare bedroom set up as an office. It was a large, quiet room, overlooking her sunny back yard and the wooded hills beyond, and he had taken to working there in the mornings, after Claire had gone off to open the store. He would have breakfast with Claire, see her off to work, make himself a new mug of tea, and then settle in the office with the Royal in front of him, and Oliver at his feet. He'd work straight through until lunchtime, at which point he usually had a small stack of finished pages on the desk next to the typewriter, and then go off to meet Claire for lunch. In the afternoon, he'd proofread, run errands, and go for a walk with Oliver at Lakeshore Park. Will liked the routine, but he didn't realize just how much the new regular nature of his work boosted his productivity until one day near the end of April, when he counted the pages of his story in progress, and found that he had written a total of twenty-five thousand words in four weeks, five complete chapters, all sitting in a neat pile of typewritten pages next to the restored Royal.

Hot damn, Will thought when he added up the word count on the desk blotter one morning. That's a third of a novel in one month.

There were drawbacks to the old-fashioned mechanical way of getting words on paper, of course. There was no handy page and word count at the bottom of that sheet in the typewriter, spell check was limited to Claire's copy of Webster's on the shelf above the desk, and a typo meant that he had to retype the entire page, but Will found that the ancient technology had advantages of its own. There was also no Internet to lure him away from his work, no chess or solitaire to beckon with a quick game or two, and no email to distract him. Before, his work sessions had been interspersed with other activities due to the multitude of other features on his laptop. The Royal offered no such temptations, only a blank page waiting to be filled.

"Looks like it was good investment," Claire commented one evening when he showed her the stack of finished pages.

"Hell, yes," he said. "If I finish that novel by the summer, and Rachel manages to sell it, I think I'm going to have to go back to that store and cut that lady a check for a percentage of the advance."

"Don't give the tool too much credit," Claire replied. "That book's been in your head all along, after all. The machine is just a conduit. Picasso didn't pay the brush maker extra money every time one of his paintings sold, did he?"

"No, I suppose he didn't," Will smiled. "You do have a way of putting things into perspective."

Erica's birthday was a shockingly low-key affair for a teenage birthday, let alone the all-important sixteenth. She had, of course, planned ahead by scheduling her licensing exam in the morning, and by noon, she was a freshly licensed driver. The family met at a steaks-and-ribs place not too far from the Department of Safety licensing station off Kingston Pike, and everyone made appropriate noises of admiration at the fact that Erica had passed her computer exam with thirty out of thirty possible points. The practical exam had gone equally well--the examiner had spent more time talking about her Army son than the subject of Erica's driving--and a short trip around the conglomeration of car dealerships on Parkside Avenue later, she had directed Erica back to the parking lot of the licensing station. Twenty minutes later, Erica had taken possession of her new Tennessee driver's license.

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A Bettered Life

Michael Lindgren

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