“Right, so quit interrupting me!”
Drew held up the cell-phone flier over my head, grasped the top of it in his fingertips, and tore it right down the middle. “Andrew Michael Dietrich!” I shouted at him, but he didn’t move. He brought the two halves together and tore again.
“No! Stop it!”
I heard it in the trees before it happened. It whistled through the branches, and I looked up and saw the trees swaying. The March wind grabbed my papers and scattered them across the driveway, as if Drew had planned it that way to spite me.
I shrieked and started running after them. Mary started scrambling too, and from the corner of my eye I saw Jack doing his one-armed best to pick up scraps.
When the gust died away and we returned to the torn bag with what we managed to grab, I could see even Miranda had picked up some paper, though she looked at me sideways, like how she might regard a snarling, frothing dog.
I sat down next to the bag, pinning the papers I wanted to keep under my knee. From the corner of my eye, I could spy bits of paper clinging to bushes, tree trunks. I resumed combing through what we’d saved. The stillness around me caught my attention.
“Go!” I shouted without looking up. “If you’re not going to help me with this bag, just . . . go. Do something else.”
I heard shuffling, and then Jack squatted down next to me. “I’ll help you, Mama.”
He held the papers down I wanted to keep as I combed through the contents. I found a birthday card from an old college friend, a receipt for some lampshades I would be able to return once I found them.
“Mama?”
“Yeah, pal?”
“What did Drew mean when he said, ‘Is it worth losing Jack?’ ”
I stopped sorting and looked him in the face. His chin was tight and lips pursed, like always when he tried not to cry.
Chapter 8
I sorted through a pile of shopping bags near the couch, paying closer attention now to things I’d ignored at first: random envelopes, a half-crumpled small shopping bag. I hadn’t yet turned up $100, but I didn’t want to be the one to throw away Trish’s money.
When I’d first walked in today, the musty smell nauseated me again and I worried about an encore performance of the hives and the heaves. However, I’d loaded up on Benadryl preemptively in case of hives, and I concentrated on sipping slow, deep breaths of cool outside air. Then I’d plunged inside quickly, as if jumping into a cold lake.
I was gradually acclimating to the cavelike darkness in the house. With the curtains drawn and the piles reaching high, little outside light penetrated. The dust was making me cough, though I didn’t want to resort to the mask yet. I could just imagine Trish’s face if we all started suiting up like hazmat workers. Even though she’d bought the masks herself.
To say she was a little touchy would be to say a land mine was a little dangerous.
Murmuring voices floated by me. I glanced up to see Drew and Miranda in conference on the couch. Miranda was squirming, tossing her hair, looking at the ceiling as she talked.
I looked back down to the bag I was working on and tried to tune them out. But it’s not like there was privacy to be had in Trish’s cave.
“Bye, Mary, nice to meet you!” Miranda called out and almost skipped out the door and down the driveway.
Drew started banging things into bags.
“Careful,” I said.
“Like I’m going to break her old Reader’s Digests? This is so fucked up.”
I felt like an aunt should address the language, but authority over children was new to me. I was never the one in the bookstore telling kids to stop climbing the shelves. George was great at that; he could always get them to stop without making them cringe or cry. They were usually laughing by the time he convinced them to stop using our store as their personal playland.
“Where did Miranda go?”
“She was feeling uncomfortable, she said.”
“I know the feeling.”
“But you’re still here, I notice.”
“This is pretty major to deal with.”
“God, stop sticking up for her.”
I recognized this conversation suddenly. Countless times Trish and I would fight and she’d be angry, so angry, but in her eyes you could read the hurt if you dared look her straight in the face.
I looked at the papers on my current stack. Purple crayon scribbles swirled all over a coloring book page from a Disney movie that came out years ago. Jack’s old handiwork, doubtless.
I’d just put it in my trash bag when I became aware of Jack’s feet running toward me. “No!” he cried.
He yanked open the bag with his good hand, started digging down inside it, but as a flexible trash bag it swayed under his reach and his fingers scrabbled above the paper.
“Aunt Mary, those were mine!”
He yanked the bag down hard, throwing it to the floor and scrambling around inside it, trying to hold one side with the immobilized arm braced to his side. “Ow!” he said as he must have moved his shoulder when he shouldn’t.
“Jack, those pages were from preschool, must be . . . years and years ago.” I crouched down to try to take the bag from him, because I didn’t want him to hurt himself more. Maybe he’d even rebreak the bone if it had started to heal.
He spotted the pages and snatched them up with his good hand, crumpling them as he did so. He clutched them to his chest and sat down on the floor as Trish came back in through the front door, her cheeks pink from the brisk air outside.
“They’re mine,” Jack said again. He was panting with effort.
“Slow down your breath, honey; do you need an inhaler?” Trish said.
“She’s a thief,” he announced, turning away from me as if I’d mug him for his coloring book pages.
Now Drew reached for the pages. “Jack, you were, like, four when you did those.”
“So? They’re special!”
“Why?”
“Because they are! They remind me of Miss Kelly and how nice she was!”
Drew glanced at his little brother, then faced his mother with a glare so hard I winced to see it.
Trish ignored Drew. She crouched down to be level with her youngest. “Pal?” she ventured. “We can save nicer coloring pages than this. These got stained.” She tried to tug them away, and he gripped harder.
“No! They’re mine!”
“Oh, let him keep the damn pages,” Trish blurted, standing up. “It’s just a few sheets of paper.”
“Right,” muttered Drew. “That’s all any of this is.”
Jack scampered off down toward his room, no doubt to hide his treasures from us.
I looked at the living room again, carefully. I detected a few more square feet of space near the front door, but otherwise you couldn’t tell we’d accomplished anything in two straight hours.
I sighed as I started scooping the papers back into the bag, and in doing so, some dust caught in my throat.
I coughed lightly a few times, which seemed to only increase the tickle in my throat. Soon my eyes were watering, spilling over, and my hacking was more pronounced.
“Oh, Christ,” muttered Trish, as if I were coughing on purpose to make her feel bad.
I heard Drew walk away from me and I thought maybe he’d given up too, gone after his girlfriend, but he returned in moments with a plastic water bottle.
I gratefully accepted it and swigged down some water, finally able to settle down and wipe my eyes.
I sat back on my heels and looked at Trish directly. She was on the floor, cross-legged, hands open on her knees like a Buddha.
“How are we going to do this?” she asked, her gaze unfocused. Sitting on the floor as we were, the piles seemed like skyscrapers.
“We need more hands,” I agreed.
“I
know what you’re going to say. Don’t waste your breath.”
“We can’t afford to be picky.”
“Not after what he did before. I won’t give him a chance to do the same thing to me.”
Drew interrupted, “Will you two stop talking in secret sister code?”
I looked up at Drew. “I was thinking of calling your grandpa.”
He brightened. His whole face looked years younger without the scowl. “Yeah! Totally! Why didn’t I think of it? It’s not like he’s all that old, right?”
Trish put her head in her hands. “I can’t do it.”
There was a knock on the door then. We all traded quick looks of confusion.
“Oh, God,” Trish muttered. “Not now, I’m not ready. No, not yet . . .” She scrambled to her feet and made for the back of the house, toward Jack’s room, and I wondered if she meant to flee through a window and disappear.
The knocking continued.
Drew’s face was grim now, and he looked old and tired beyond his years.
“Coming!” he shouted, and he stepped over me with his long legs to open the door.
Chapter 9
I came upon Jack in his room, curled up on the center of his bed, holding his drawings, faced away from the door.
Because of Drew’s big frickin’ mouth I’d had to explain to Jack that some people were worried he’d get hurt even worse in our house and that if we didn’t get it cleaned up, he’d have to go live with his dad for a while. “I don’t want to leave you,” he’d cried and I told him, “I know, that’s why we’re cleaning up.”
Then the unexpected knock. Maybe Ayana, early. Or Ron, deciding he didn’t believe my story after all. I thought of snatching Jack up and running. But footsteps were coming down the hall.
“Oh God, no . . .” I said softly, and Jack turned toward me, his face puckered up and questioning.
“Trish,” Mary called. “It’s OK. It was just the UPS man. Of course, I had no idea where to tell him to put his delivery of several boxes from Crate and Barrel.”
I braced myself in Jack’s doorway, my knees having gone weak and my legs trembly. Jack was still here, he was. My heart was still throbbing away so hard my chest hurt. I wondered whether I could survive another knock on the door.
“Trish?” prompted Mary.
“Gimme a minute,” I snapped, and I heard her footsteps recede.
Jack hadn’t let go of his drawings. I snaked along the path to the center of his room and joined him on the bed, which was partially obscured by his clothes.
I sat cross-legged and leaned against the wall. Jack wriggled like an inchworm until his head was in my lap and he could still clutch his old artwork. I toyed with locks of his hair as we sat in silence.
I pictured the room the last time it was empty, when Ron and I moved in. I hadn’t even known he was building us a house. He’d always said that we had to save up more money, that he had enough debt just operating his construction business and couldn’t take on more for a house of our own just yet. So we were living in a rented trailer, this patched-up family made of my new husband, my preschooler from an earlier ill-advised one-night stand, and me. Ron would go off every day to wield a hammer and try to build his life and business. I’d spend my days sketching and making jewelry to sell at craft shows as Andy scurried along the length of the trailer, wearing a path in the thin carpet.
The trailer had been neat. Most of the sentimental stuff I’d saved was in storage at my mom’s house. And since we were saving money for a house, I didn’t buy much, just the baubles I needed for the jewelry, and most months I could make that back selling it either at the shows or on consignment in shops.
About a year after Mom died, Ron took us for a drive. I hadn’t thought much of it, figured maybe we were going to pick up some lumber or something. I liked to go along on his errands, and in fact I always found him sexiest in his Carhartt work pants and steel-toe boots. That gear always made him look powerful and capable.
That day he turned onto a gravel road in the middle of nowhere, and I looked at him, confused. He smiled a little, kept driving, and refused to say anything else.
He pulled up the truck to a house. I didn’t really look at it, assuming we were there to give someone a quote on siding or some such.
He turned to me, one arm up on the steering wheel, and smiled. “Welcome home, baby.”
I could still picture his reddish-blond stubble glinting in the sun and smell the burning leaves of a rural October. I stepped out of the pickup truck unsteadily, and Ron had to help me down.
It was a brick ranch-style home with an attached garage. The brick was mottled in various colors of red, an exterior I’d admired on a home I saw more than a year ago. He’d remembered. All that time, he’d remembered. The window frames and porch railings were clean, bright white. The door was a rich red, like rubies.
Andrew, by then five years old and officially adopted by Ron, was tearing around the yard in high gear, and out of reflex I was going to shout at him to slow down so he didn’t dart out into the road, or someone else’s yard, but then I realized, wait. He was still several yards from the road, or anyone else’s home. He could zoom out here until he fell down from exhaustion, no harm done.
Ron walked me through the house, explaining every detail with the pride of a craftsman. I fell in love with him again over crown molding and a bay window and recessed lighting and a master bedroom skylight.
Andrew’s room had already been painted blue and decorated in a nautical theme because he loved pirates.
There was another room painted creamy yellow. He put his arm around me and said, “For the baby.”
Baby? I’d sorely wanted another baby, this time doing it right, with my husband. The trailer was so small we hadn’t started trying yet.
He turned me around by my shoulders. Across the hall was a room in spring green. “And for another baby, someday. But for now, how about a special room just for your crafts and stuff.”
Jack’s room to this day was still creamy yellow, not that I could see it behind the boxes and piles of toys and clothes. The green room across the hall was now closed off. It had been years since I’d looked inside for more than a second.
The room Ron and I shared was “christened” in a most passionate fashion on moving day when we got Ronald’s parents to watch Andrew. We just had a mattress on the floor, cartons of Chinese food next to us. We gaped, amazed at the size of the place and wondered how we’d ever have enough stuff to fill it.
A powerful surge of longing for Ron, for my oldest son’s return, for the safety of my youngest, pulled me upward, and filled my limbs with an itchy need for action. I patted Jack’s head. “I’ve gotta get busy, pal. You can stay here and rest, though.”
He bolted up. “No! Something else might get tossed!”
He scrambled down from his bed, and together we wound our way back to the living room.
Mary and Drew each greeted me with a box of things they’d run across.
I looked in Mary’s box first.
She had a stack of scrapbooking paper with Christmas trees and mistletoe visible on some of the pieces. Once the house was clean I could get going on the Christmas scrapbook. “Keep.”
A cobalt blue coffee mug with a broken handle, and the handle itself. I love blue; it could easily be glued. “Keep.”
Some blank notepads from my bank. Always useful. “Keep.”
Votive candle holders I’d gotten on sale last Christmas season. “I forgot I had these! Keep.”
I made to look in Drew’s box, but he yanked it out of view. “Forget it. It’s all gonna be ‘keep.’ ” He stormed past me
“But this stuff is usable! Those votives will be great Christmas gifts.”
“I don’t want a votive,” Mary said, blinking at me.
“Not you, ninny. I’m talking about f
or Jack’s teacher, his school bus driver, people like that.”
“Can’t you buy them something else? Christmas is eight months away.”
“You think I’m made of money here that I can afford to get rid of good stuff?”
Mary opened her mouth, then shut it again, shoulders drooped with defeat. Score one for Trish.
I followed them out, suspicious Drew might toss the things he found into the trash can.
Instead I saw a growing cluster of things on the Keep tarp. Now that my things were spread horizontally, instead of stacked in boxes and bags, the sprawl of items seemed greater. Especially compared to the modest space we’d cleared inside.
Drew tossed the box down to the tarp with unnecessary force. I flinched as I heard things clank against each other. He cocked a brow at me and said, “Do the math, Mom,” pointing at the tarp.
“Mama!” exclaimed Jack, skipping out of the house. “Look what I found!”
He was holding up a baseball glove with the tag still on it. I’d bought it for him last year at Christmas and lost it before I could wrap it.
I sank down to the grass of my front yard, the morning’s dew now dried as the distant spring sun kept climbing the sky. I flopped onto my back and stared into the branches until my vision blurred and all I saw was a kaleidoscope of color.
Chapter 10
It’s pointless!” Trish bellowed at me.
“It’s uncanny,” I murmured in response, not realizing I’d spoken aloud at first until Trish hollered back at me asking what was so frickin’ uncanny.
She looked so much like our mother. I had just enough sense not to say that out loud. But she did look like Mom, especially with the bandanna tied over her wild hair, her full, flowing skirt replaced with blue jeans. My mother and her clutter were one and the same to my mind, and more than anything it was this setting that inspired the comparison: seeing Trish defensive of her stuff, barricaded by clutter, hands on her hips. It was Frances Granger right in front of me again.
When I didn’t answer about “uncanny,” Trish resumed her argument against calling in reinforcements in the form of our father. “You know what he’ll do. He’ll judge and yell and insult me.”
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