The Sequel to Charlie

Charlie was a good landlord. He would do about anything we asked around the place. Sometimes his absentmindedness proved irksome. We had a little enclosed back porch on the house that led to the door of our kitchen. The door knob on the porch was loose and kept falling off so I asked him if he would fix it. That night when we came home from the office we found Charlie with his tool box at the back of the house and he told us he had just finished fixing the door knob. He went on home but we didn’t have the heart to tell him he had fixed the wrong knob. He had worked on the inside door, which was perfectly fine, and left the loose knob alone.

Charlie was not that good of a driver, either. He wasn’t sure about all the knobs in the vehicle so he would use them all as he backed out of his garage. He would have the clutch (this was before automatic transmissions were common) half way out, the engine revving and the windshield wipers going full blast in bright sunshine. He had to replace the clutch in his car quite often and couldn’t figure out why.

Some years later, we visited Stanton, we found Amelia had died and Charlie was in the state mental hospital in Norfolk. We visited him there but he didn’t know who we were. He spent his days putting a table together and taking it apart. The staff provided him with a rubber hammer so he couldn’t hurt himself but he was content being the master carpenter he could never be in his real life.