Dom never accepted invitations to neighborhood cookouts and card parties. Friday evenings in their pod meant a cocktail party in somebody’s driveway—to which you brought your own folding chair and drink, and Clemmie loved how convivial and easy it was—but Dom didn’t participate.
She breathed through her mouth to avoid the smell, which was probably just the odor of musty old man but seemed more pervasive, more pungent.
The kitchen and hall opened into the living-dining room, very dark because Dom kept the heavy drapes closed. Clemmie almost never covered her own sliding glass doors because she loved to look out on her tiny screened porch and the trees beyond. She turned on Dom’s ceiling light, and the ceiling fan also came on, slowly rotating, the only thing alive in the whole place.
A brown recliner and a tan sofa faced a huge television fastened above the gas fireplace, where the pilot light provided a blue flicker. A floor lamp stood next to a substantial coffee table, on which lay empty pizza boxes, a charger but no device, the TV remote, and an old-fashioned heavy, glass triangle ashtray, half full. There was no body sprawled on the floor, however, which was good.
“Dom! It’s me, Helen!”
No answer.
The guest room was closest, so she poked her head in. It was a tiny space with a twin bed, made up as if somebody actually stayed overnight now and then. The poor guest had no bedside table, no lamp, and no dresser. It couldn’t be for Wilson, the only relative and, in fact, the only visitor Clemmie had met, because Wilson didn’t usually stay more than an hour. Clemmie gave him full credit for that hour, however, because she could hardly be around Dom for five minutes.
Clemmie forced herself into the master bedroom and found the king-size bed unmade, wrinkled, and empty. The print of Dom’s curled-up body was overly intimate. The size of the bed was overly intimate too, because it implied that Dom sometimes shared it.
Dom was also not unconscious on the floor of his walk-in closet or bathroom.
It dawned on Clemmie that he had simply gone out on his golf cart and forgotten to text her, though why he wouldn’t answer his cell phone, she didn’t know. Perhaps he couldn’t hear it. Perhaps he was going deaf and didn’t even know because he so rarely spoke to or listened to other people. With his friend the television, he could just keep upping the volume.
She walked through the back hall, exactly large enough to hold a washer and a dryer and be called a laundry room, and opened the door to the windowless garage. She flicked on the overhead light.
All garages in Sun City held two cars, but Dom had only his golf cart. Even his doctors were in the medical building between the library and the grocery. If he needed to go farther afield, he waited for Wilson.
Wilson was part of that crowd of young people with last names for first names, like her own grandnephew and grandniece, Bentley and Harper, which sounded like a law firm. Whatever happened to the sweet girl names? The cuddly ones ending in y or ie? Nobody nowadays was named Connie or Nancy or Janie.
She wasn’t sure how Wilson was related to Dom. Not a son, certainly, because he didn’t call Dom “Dad.” Wilson was not particularly attentive. Not that Clemmie’s young relatives were attentive. She texted them every week or two so they’d remember she was alive.
To her relief, Dom’s garage was empty, which meant he was okay; he’d just gone shopping.
In fact, his garage was remarkably empty.
Most people moved here with tons of stuff from previously acquisitive lives and then installed garage storage shelves on which dozens of cardboard boxes and plastic containers rested, full of memorabilia, Christmas decorations, extra china, former hobbies, seasonal clothing, and the million other things they refused to part with. Some men packed their garages with tools for woodworking or plumbing. Many garages were so full of stuff the owners couldn’t fit in one car, let alone two, and had to rent storage units in one of the massive facilities along the highway.
Dom’s garage held his garbage wheelie, his recycling container, a broom, and to her amazement, an interior door. Not the door in which she now stood, which connected Dom’s garage to his house, but a door cut through the far side of his garage, which could only open into the adjoining garage of the third unit—the one belonging to the couple she never saw.
All these times she’d thought Dom sat home alone… Had he actually zipped through his secret door and hustled over to eat with that couple, and they all hid behind closed drapes so nobody would know that Dom actually had friends?
A thousand things were prohibited in Sun City. Sheds. Excess front-garden decorations. Doors painted colors other than black. Fences not approved by the landscape committee. More than two bird feeders. It was surely prohibited to cut a door between yourself and your neighbor. The door was oddly placed, because the bottom of the door was not level with the floor, but up six or eight inches, probably to avoid damaging interior wires or pipes, although what wires and pipes might be channeled along the garage floor she didn’t know. Normal, non–Sun City garages often had side doors, but there was no such variation on the Sun City housing and garage scheme. And yet she had never noticed this. A door in a garage is so acceptable that the eye does not analyze its presence.
Clemmie went carefully down the two steps from Dom’s utility room (carefully because of her fear of falling) and into his garage, walked over to the peculiar door, and tested the knob.
It wasn’t locked. Paranoid Dom didn’t lock his custom-made exit?
She didn’t think the people on the other side were here, but if they were, perhaps Dom was visiting them right now. But no, since his golf cart was gone, he was also gone.
She couldn’t think of their name. It was probably a year since she’d even waved at them. Forgetting names was a constant in Sun City, a precursor to senility, and everybody was quick to comfort each other: Oh, I always forget names! friends would cry.
Clemmie went back into Dom’s house, out his front door, across his tiny strip of grass, and under the little front door overhang of the third unit. Marcia and Roy Cogland, she remembered, relieved. People hadn’t named their children Marcia or Roy in decades. It dated them. Nobody had ever named a daughter Clementine, so Clemmie’s name was both rare and dated. She rang the bell.
If they came to the door, she’d ask if they’d seen Dom today.
But nothing and no one inside stirred.
She rang again, and then a third time, and if they did come to the door after all and asked why she was so persistent, she’d say, I thought Dom was here, and he’s very deaf, you know.
Since the living rooms of Sun City houses opened onto backyards, not front yards, any residents who were up and about were almost certainly not facing the street. And because everybody here had invested heavily in drapes, plantation shutters, shades, and curtains, the three units across Blue Lilac, which were oriented to the east, kept their single front window covered in the morning. It was highly unlikely that anybody had spotted Clemmie’s perfectly ordinary activity of ringing a neighbor’s front doorbell.