Chapter 69

Po: "Time is carving you, Grasshopper. Let yourself be shaped according to your true nature."

They first give up the luxuries, of course, items they once considered essential: nights out, new clothes, DVDs, the Internet. He trades his iPad and iPod for credit at the gas station. She keeps her Surface, in anticipation of next year, when the trial will be over and he can reopen the shop and reclaim his rental income. They say "when this is over," but they stop saying, "when things go back to normal." When this is over, there will be no return. As the newscasters say of the sputtering economy in the rest of the country (and no, Belle argues, misery does not love company) they're living "the new normal."

In the second month they give up his phone. One phone is enough. They give up cable TV and CDs and borrow their entertainment from the library. Belle's birthday comes and all he can give her is a bouquet of wildflowers he picked in the woods. She cries when Henry brings her a gift, the new Margaret Atwood. He paid for it out of earnings from his after-school job.

That night when she's in bed, Gold attacks a couch cushion with his cane.

He stops driving the gas guzzling Caddy. He'd like to trade it in for a Smart car, but the Caddy isn't his to dispose of. He imagines some gray-faced IRS accountant seated behind the Caddy's wheel, driving it off to a federal property auction. Will the agent look in the glove compartment and take notice of the flawless maintenance record, and by it know that this car was owned by someone who took pride in it?

Early on, he stops wearing suits; who's to see, anyway? As the third month fades into the fourth, he stops shaving. He sometimes wears the same shirt for two or three days. How dirty could it be, he argues with himself, when he doesn't do anything but watch broadcast TV and sleep.

It's infomercials and talk shows he watches, though he falls asleep on them. Not his westerns. Not Kung Fu. He doesn't have the energy to think.

After months of searching for a job that doesn't exist, he stops going out. It sneaks up on him: one morning he just decides his ankle hurts and he'll skip the Development Committee meeting as well as the job search for that day. He does the laundry and vacuums, and he has a meal waiting for Belle when she returns from the library that night. He's too ashamed to eat with her: all he can provide for her is hot dogs, paid for out of her salary. After setting the table, he retreats to his study and closes the door. He waits until she's fallen asleep before he climbs into bed beside her.

It becomes a routine. He doesn't eat with her; he seldom eats at all. He starts going to bed later and later, and then he stops going upstairs at all. His ankle hurts, he mumbles; he doesn't feel like navigating the stairs. She knows it's a lie but she's too tired to argue. She's working seven days a week to keep hot dogs on the table.

He goes fishing sometimes, not to relax but because they need the meat. Where they used to eat coconut chicken and pot roast and mushroom risotto, they now eat ramen and macaroni and peanut butter. He learns an interesting fact: it's easier to gain weight when you can't afford fresh food.

Bae calls, inviting him and Belle to Sunday dinners: neither Bae nor Emma can cook, but the Golds go anyway, to keep the family together, they tell each other. They always make it potluck, because the Swan-Golds are living on one paycheck too. But as the weeks pass, those Sunday dinners become Gold's only appearances outside his house.

Bernie comes to see him at first, bearing messages from the kids at the hospital and iPhone recordings of her shows. But her bubbly reports depress him, so quietly Blue advises Bernie not to visit Gold any more. It isn't long before the children he knew are replaced by others, just as he was replaced by Bernie, and soon no one remembers there was a Gold the Great.

Without a phone, he can't call Archie any more. Without the Internet, he can't Skype with Won-Que. He gives up his lame attempts at meditation.

At first he works as diligently at maintaining the house as he used to the shop, but gradually he pares back, especially as they fall behind in the mortgage payments. He calls the bank to try to refinance, but his old good buddy John Nichols, president, seems to always be out of the office whenever he calls. "Funny," he growls at the receptionist, "for thirty years he never once was out when I called." "Sorry, Mr. Gold," is the receptionist's only answer. He finally gets through by altering his voice and using an alias. His request for a reconsideration of his mortgage is turned down. Nichols is no longer afraid of him, now that he can't leave Bell County.

Belle takes a day off work and drives into Storybrooke with Blue. She wears her best dress and her warmest smile and she's armed with a refinancing plan Gold has drawn up, but even with all that and a nun, she fails to convince Nichols. "They smell blood," she complains. "A chance to buy back our house for pennies, once the IRS confiscates it."

Gold prepares her a cup of tea and retreats to his study.

She comes to him that night, rattling the door knob, then knocking when she finds the door locked. When he opens the door, he fails to invite her in. She stares at him with eyes full of hurt. He doesn't know what to say to her. She stares a long moment, then walks away.

"Grayson let me look through my old jail logs from when I was sheriff of Storybrooke. Professional courtesy. I might've neglected to tell him I resigned from law enforcement," Emma says. "Something had been bothering me, but I couldn't quite recall 'til I reread those logs. The night after my mom banished Regina, I arrested Sid for d and d."

"Dungeons and Dragons?" Gold puzzles.

"Drunk and disorderly. Poor Sid kept moaning about his beautiful queen. How he would've done anything for her. Had done everything she asked, but she betrayed him over and over."

"Nothing new there."

"But wait. He blamed you. Said you drove her away. Tricked mom into exiling her. Said if you just disappeared, she could come back and be the queen again."

"She hadn't met her garbage collector yet," Gold says dryly. "She's happy now. She wouldn't come back even if Snow handed her an orb and scepter."

"I kept him overnight so he could sober up. I remember he seemed a lot calmer in the morning. I thought he'd probably talked himself out of any notions he had of messing with you. And then the whole CUSS thing happened and I figured that was his big get-even. Now I wonder."

"Unfortunately, wondering isn't evidence."

"No, but it showed me that Sid has a habit of drinking when he's mooning over Regina."

"Emma, you're not thinking of inviting Sid out for a nightcap, are you? D and d confessions aren't admissible either."

"Did you know, Pop, I was known, in my wilder years, for drinking men under the table?"

"Emma. . . ."

"Things are happening, Pop. Expect a miracle."

Bae drops by on his way to work; when Gold doesn't answer the door, he lets himself in with his duplicate key. Gold learns this in a most disappointing way: he awakens from his morning nap (not to be confused with the mid-morning, early afternoon and late afternoon naps) to find a note from Bae taped to the study door. "Look on your desk for a present from Henry" is all it says. "Love, B."

On the desk is a neatly typed essay entitled "The Person I Admire Most." Gold grunts, giving it a cursory glance, then he looks again: the individual given that glorious distinction is "my grandfather, Rumple Gold, whose [sic] been through all kinds of crap but he keeps on keeping on."

A fable, of course.

There's an A- in red ink on the top margin of the first page; a note beneath says "It would have been an A except for the inappropriate language." The word crap is circled in red. Gold chuckles: it's the most beautiful crap he's ever seen.

Gold sits down to read the essay, aloud, in a hoarse voice. Four times. Then he kicks his desk with every intention of causing himself discomfort, because clearly, his grandson feels such a deep need to cheer him up that he lied to his teacher.

He's breaking the law. Not that he hasn't before, in much bigger ways–maybe it's the pettiness of his crime that bothers him. Or maybe it's Henry's essay, which he read aloud to Belle last night as he sat at the kitchen table with her, for the first time in a long time. She struggled to congratulate him around a mouthful of peanut butter, but a glob of jelly slid onto her uniform. He kissed her despite the mess, and for a moment they felt normal. But then as he washed dishes and discovered a leak in the dishwasher, the black clouds came back and Belle went to bed alone as he slumped on the couch, clicking through infomercials.

And now he's, sort of, stealing from the IRS. Ironic, he supposes. The levy forbids him from selling any of his property, in case he loses the trial and the IRS needs to confiscate it to recoup the unpaid taxes. He's already traded his iPad and iPod for gas, so it's no big leap to sell off a painting, a pair of cutlasses and an antique radio that he'd brought home from the shop, months before The Arrest, to work on. What really bugs him is that he has to get Bae to pawn the stuff for him, since it must be done out of county, since Gold & Dove is the only antique shop in Bell County. Bae gets a good price for the stuff, enough to catch the Golds up with the electric company and make a mortgage payment.

The trouble is, three other mortgage payments go unattended.

"Marco stopped me on the street today," Emma reports, "while I was in Storybrooke. Pulled me into his shop to show me an order he'd filled for Sid, last fall. An odd order: Sid wanted a desk drawer made, to replace a cracked one. Marco said fine, take me to see the desk. Sid showed him a photo instead, gave him measurements. Marco thought that was weird, but Sid offered twice what Marco would've charged, so he did the work." Her phone is set on speaker so that her father-in-law, seated across from her at his kitchen table, can participate in her call to Kamen.

"Let me guess: the drawer had a false bottom," Gold says.

"Sid claimed it was to hide jewelry in."

"Now we've got something I can use in court," Kamen crows. "Give me Marco's phone number."

The exasperated "really?" is an irritating habit Belle picked up from Emma, Gold thinks, and she's using it now as she surveys the dirty dishes in the sink, the crumbs on the kitchen table, the dust on the floor. "You were home all day–"

"Don't go there," he mutters, yet she goes there. Loudly.

"–and you couldn't even wash the dishes? Or take the clothes out of the dryer? Or bring the mail in? Ten minutes of your time, is that too much to ask?" She slams the dishwasher door. "I know you're depressed, but my gods, Rumple, you'll never feel better if you don't get up off that damn–"

The door to his study bangs and clicks behind him.

Blue drops in while Belle is at work at one of her jobs (he can no longer keep track which). She adjusts the wicker basket she carries on her arm and clicks her tongue in disgust as she appraises him, his bare feet, his paint-stained jeans (the ones he wore when he painted a bedroom for Adelena, a lifetime ago), his stubble, his shaggy hair. "You look awful."

"Now, dearie, do I come to your home and criticize your choice of clothes?"

"You don't come to my home at all any more." She sounds hurt. "You've neglected the garden. You didn't show up for the class on end-of-life pain relief we were supposed to teach last week. You haven't produced a single drop of herbal medication in weeks. You're failing in your promises, Rumplestiltskin. That's not like you." She sails past him into his kitchen and he follows.

"Haven't you heard, Reverend Mother?" he sneers. "I'm a fraud, a sneak thief, stealing from the poor. I'm a leech, living off my wife now."

She sets the wicker basket on the counter. "How many years did you search for your son, Rumplestiltskin? How many spells, potions, magic mirrors, magic beans, magic shoes did you try? You didn't give up on him. Why are you giving up on yourself? Why are you letting the bastards beat you?" When he sulks in silence, she unpacks the basket. "Carrots. Lettuce. Cucumbers. Tomatoes. Onions. Snap peas." She raises a warning finger. "No. No argument. This food belongs to you as much as it does me. You planted it alongside me. You grew it. I had expected we would harvest it and share it, as we did before. I'm insulted that you abandoned our work." She collects her basket and walks back through the dining room to the foyer. "I'll be harvesting herbs tomorrow, eight a.m. I expect you there."

He closes and locks the door behind her. When Belle returns home that night, she finds the vegetables still sitting out on the counter. He can't look at her when she asks where the food came from.

The next morning, he sleeps until 10, until Blue's angry pounding awakens him, and when he opens the door and his mouth to cuss at her, she thrusts a wicker basket at his chest and drags him to her Toyota and pushes him into the passenger seat and kidnaps him, makes him drop to his knees in their garden and coax life from the soil. He says nothing to her all day, so she doesn't try to converse. At dusk when she drives him home, as he's easing out of her car, his ankle burning from the labor, he finally has something to say: "You need a tune-up."

"April's report came in."

Gold, half-asleep, manages to growl into the phone (Belle's phone, because he doesn't have one, because a man who sits around on his ass all day has no need for one), "Who?"

"April. The handwriting expert. Our number one hope."

"And?"

"The documents are a near-perfect match."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning, she would testify that the tax returns and the bookkeeping records for Treadle and the shop that were sent to the IRS–she would testify the same man wrote them. You."

"It's a lie."

"It's the best forgery April's ever seen."

"What do we do now?"

"Hire another analyst. But Rumple–"

"Our best hope is gone."

"Yeah." Kamen sighs. "Well, we've still got Marco and the fake-bottomed drawer."

"Hey, Marco always puts a craftsman's mark—"

"Sorry, Rumple, he told me Sid specifically instructed him not to brand the drawer. Guess the Bad S's were thinking ahead. . . Rumple? You okay?"

"I'd say I'm far from okay—being screwed. 'Bye, Kevin."

"Rumple—"

On the first day of the fourth month, they receive a notice of foreclosure. He can't get out of bed that day. Belle goes to Storybrooke to argue; the bank shows her that their mortgage payments are in arrears–no news there. Ironically, she reminds them of the levy–the IRS technically owns the property for the time being. The bank president admits a mistake has been made and promises to correct it, yet the next morning, when Belle leaves for work, they find a "For sale" sign in the yard. Belle won't allow him to smash it. Canes are too expensive to replace.

When Jo comes by that evening to give the Honda a tune-up ("Hell, no, I won't take no money for it! I just want something to do! I'm bored off my ass."), he takes care of the sign with his crowbar ("Oops, I thought it was firewood"). The next morning, an eviction notice is nailed to their front door.

A/N. A tip of the hat to Twyla, whose "Smoke and Ashes" reminded me to think globally, and film writer Philip Van Doren Stern, whose It's a Wonderful Life reminded me to think communally. And thanks, Cynicsquest, for "the Bad S's." Kamen now has a quick way to refer the baddies!