Isabel & Leo - Short Stories

Renovations

"What about those?" I ask, pointing to the dozens of technical magazines and journals stacked in unstable piles that look like balancing tricks about to go wrong. The basement wall has somehow maintained the zigzag accumulation for years.

"I need those," Leo's voice is flat.

I roll my eyes. "They're old technical magazines. Why do you need them? Everything is online now."

He walks towards the boxes of toys we've packed up for Goodwill and lifts one up. "This one is still good." He pulls out an old pink Nerf gun that juts out of the top of a box and places it on the floor. He glances back toward me. "Don't throw them out, okay?"

"Not okay." I take a magazine off the top of the first pile. This one is dated May of 1997. 'How to Master Windows 97?' Come on Leo. Really? You need this?"

"Yes, I need it." He marches upstairs with the cardboard box full of toys.

I flip through the magazine and shake my head. "The paper is wrinkled from all the moisture down here."

"Don't throw it out!" He yells.

Leo is a hoarder, and I haven't the heart to throw out any of his things against his wishes because I would hate for him to do that to me. Yes, the Golden Rule. I live by it; I am cursed by it. Damn the Golden Rule!

So, I have to make room for his 20-year-old magazines and textbooks and t-shirts from high school and toys from his childhood and a ton of other knick-knacks from his youth. But now, we're emptying the basement for a remodeling project—to build a moisture-free office and family room. So everything down here is being donated, thrown out, or packed into a storage bin in the garage.

Everything.

From a basement corner that I've been neglecting for at least a decade, I lift a rusty metal lamp, possibly bronze, with fake diamond gems dangling from the square shade's corners. The electrical wire is wrapped around it as if it's holding it together in a protective embrace. Four bronze palm tree leaves stick out from the middle of the lamp's base and droop downward as if saddened by its own pathetic state. "What about this?" I raise my voice so Leo can hear from the first floor. "This lamp is garbage."

"Which one?" He shouts back towards the basement door.

Please don't tell me there are more lamps like this. "It's bronze. It looks like a Hawaiian theme lamp. It's atrocious."

He walks back down the stairs and stops cold when his eyes land on the lamp. "You can't throw that away."

"Why not?"

"I need it."

"I've been with you for twenty years, and you've never used this lamp."

"It's sentimental." He picks it up and inspects the wires and fake diamonds.

"It's a broken lamp that probably doesn't even work. I mean, look at it. It's garbage."

"It doesn't matter."

"Honey, you can't keep every single thing you've owned in your life. Look at all of this." I wave at what must be six to eight large cardboard boxes of vases and frames and statues. "Are we really going to use up garage space for this junk?"

"It's not junk; it's sentimental."

Before I say anything else, Leo takes an empty plastic storage box and begins filling it with his junkyard treasures. With unprecedented care, Leo wraps each object in packing paper and places them gently in the box. Several bronze vases with dents and cracks, some unable to stand on their own due to missing or cracked bases, find a home in the first storage box.