Keepsake

by Kristina Riggle

  “I’m taking Jack home with me.”

  “No, you’re not!” My heart started racing like a spooked horse. I steadied myself on a nearby plastic storage bin. “If you try to take him out of here, I’ll call the police!”

  “That would be quite the scene, now, wouldn’t it?”

  “You would forcibly try to remove my son?”

  “I would invite my grandson over to visit. It’s been a while. He loves Ellen’s cooking.”

  “You will not. In fact, you better get the hell out of here. I don’t need you coming in here to take over everything like I’m not even here.”

  “I’m not leaving here without Jack. It’s not safe here for him. He was hurt already, and now that all this stuff is getting moved around, it’s only going to get worse.”

  “He’s fine!”

  “Now that I’ve seen it with my own eyes I cannot in good conscience leave him in this mess. He is coming home with me.”

  “Over my dead body.”

  “I’m sure the doctor reported this, didn’t he?”

  I couldn’t reply. I was concentrating on not folding like a lawn chair again.

  “They’re mandated reporters so I have to assume they did.”

  He paused, and I still couldn’t answer. Swells of nausea were rolling through me. He might as well knife me as take my son away. My own father. And I knew him well enough to understand that he would do what he said. He would take Jack home with him, even if Jack caused a tearful scene, even if I called the police to say he’d run off with my child. And if I really did it, if I called the police, it would be more official eyes on my house. Another report for Ayana the social worker.

  He had me in a corner, and he knew it, the cold, self-righteous bastard.

  “I have no choice,” I croaked out. “But after this, you’re dead to me.”

  My father’s stern expression cracked open.

  I said, “What, you thought I’d fall down at your feet and thank you for taking my youngest son away, the only person in this world who still loves me? And I’ll have to beg you to get him back, I know. I’ll have to prove to you that my house is in perfect condition. It’s not much different than if a government bureaucrat came in here and took him, only it’s you, my own father, my last living parent.”

  “You think I don’t love you?”

  “Spare me the heartbroken parent shit. You had plenty of chances to be a father to me, and you gave up on that by moving out when I was fifteen, when I most needed my dad.”

  “Not true,” he said softly. “You were the one who shut me out.”

  “I’m not the one who abandoned my mother to die in an inferno.”

  He flinched again, and I worried I might have gone too far. But the next thing he said wiped away any remorse.

  “I’m making sure that doesn’t happen to Jack.” He grabbed a trash bag and snapped it open. “We gonna do this or what?” He grabbed something. “Keep or sell?”

  I could barely see through a haze of rage and didn’t answer.

  He shoved it in front of my face. It was a dusty clear glass vase that had once held flowers Ron had sent to me on my birthday. I grabbed it from him and threw it past his head with all my might toward the kitchen, where it smashed against the sliding patio door. The sound of raining glass was like wind chimes.

  Chapter 12

  Drew slouched low in his seat, texting. Based on his tragedy-mask frown, it was a fair bet he was texting with the absent beauty, Miranda.

  “Everything OK?” I asked.

  He snorted in reply.

  Jack was stirring the ice in his water glass and looking more worried by the moment. We’d picked an all-day-breakfast-type diner after ruling out Mexican, pizza, and McDonald’s. I was not in the mood for heavy, breakfasty food. I wasn’t hungry in the least.

  The waitress came back to top off my coffee. I tried to put my hand over it to stop her and nearly got scalded. The kids ordered pancakes, I ordered an omelet.

  Jack scowled at the table. In our bubble of silence in the busy restaurant, I scanned the paper placemat with its local advertisements for auto salvage, a charity golf outing, propane, an excavating service.

  “What’s on your mind?” I finally asked Jack, and he shook his head.

  Drew was no help, still deep in whatever conversation he was having, hands below the table.

  “How’s school?” I ventured.

  “Fine,” Jack answered.

  “You could draw on the back of your placemat.”

  He shrugged.

  I looked up at the ceiling, searching my mental files for anything that would amuse and distract a seven-year-old. My old college friend Seth came to mind, probably prodded out of my gray matter by the eggy smell of the diner. We’d spent many a Sunday morning at Denny’s laughing at the hungover specimens we saw dragging in for eggs and coffee. I didn’t go in for excessive drinking, and neither did Seth. He was too busy studying.

  “Hey, Jack, watch this.”

  I picked up a liquid creamer cup and stabbed through the foil top with a fork. This action caused Drew at last to pull his eyes up away from his phone screen. I turned the container upside down over my coffee and squeezed rhythmically, the creamer shooting out in white streams.

  “Cow,” I explained.

  Drew allowed himself a smirk that almost, not quite, barely reached the level of smile, before returning to his phone. Jack tore loose with laughter and made me repeat the trick with every creamer on the table until my coffee was a sickly beige. I drank it anyway, happy to have done something useful at last.

  Once Jack’s giggles subsided and our food arrived, we ate in silence for several minutes until Jack unloaded with a question that caught me with my mouth full of egg.

  “Am I gonna have to get a new family? People I don’t even know?”

  Drew had finally put away his phone to eat, so he started to answer while I choked down my food.

  “No,” Drew said. “No way. If anything, you might have to go stay with your dad for a while.”

  Jack’s face crumpled up. “I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?” I asked, finally able to speak.

  “It’s boring there. He’s always working. We go to Grandma’s a lot, but she never plays with me.”

  Drew and I traded looks again.

  “That’s why we’re helping clean up,” I said. “So you can stay put.”

  “I want to stay put. I love my mom.”

  “Of course you do.”

  Drew shifted in the booth so he could address his little brother. “Buddy, you know you can love Mom and not live with her for a little bit.”

  “You only say that because you’re always at your girlfriend’s.” Jack pouted, and as he slouched down, he looked so much like a pint-size version of Drew it was a time warp.

  “I kinda have to be. I can’t even see the bed in my room anymore.”

  “If you really loved her, you wouldn’t leave her.”

  “I didn’t leave her,” Drew said, turning back to his plate. “She drove me out.”

  “She did not!” Jack insisted.

  A few heads nearby swiveled toward us. The waitress at the next table glanced our way as she set down someone else’s coffee mug. My skin prickled under my shirt at all the attention.

  “Jack,” I said, “if he didn’t love her, he wouldn’t be spending his weekend sorting through garbage—”

  “It’s not garbage, it’s her things. And my things, like my coloring you tried to throw out. Why does everyone else get to be in charge of our stuff!”

  Drew put his arm around Jack. “Come on, pal, let’s go outside a minute.”

  “I don’t want to go outside! I want to go home! Take me home!”

  More waitresses had paused in their serving. I was aware how obvious
ly I was not his mother.

  Drew was telling Jack he hadn’t eaten nearly enough, but Jack was dissolving into hiccupy crying and tears. Finally our young, ponytailed server hustled over, and with impressive authority Drew asked for the check and to-go boxes.

  The boxes and bill appeared with miracle speed, the staff no doubt wanting to be rid of us as fast as possible.

  I had to wrestle with Drew for the bill. I couldn’t let a teenager pay for me. I finally sent him out to the car to get Jack buckled in. I balanced three to-go boxes of still-warm food and my coat and scrambled to pay at the register.

  “Rough night?” said the gray-haired woman behind the counter, peering at me over wire-rimmed reading glasses.

  “I’m his aunt,” I said, stupidly.

  “Kids are tough,” she replied, fingers flying over the keys.

  “I noticed,” I mumbled, leaving the warm diner for the cold March night and the disappearing sun, my two nephews already seated and sullen in Drew’s beat-up car.

  Jack and I walked back into the house alone. We’d finished our meals in the car on the way back, and Drew stayed in his car to finish his and, I suspected, to call his girlfriend.

  Jack’s face was still shiny wet, as if he’d sobbed quietly the whole drive home.

  I worried Trish would see how upset he was and blame me for it.

  Trish hugged Jack when she saw him but didn’t question his tears. She was down on her knees so they could be nearly level, and she had her arms wrapped around his waist, away from his injured shoulder.

  She rocked him in that stance, and he sniveled on her shoulder. Jack seemed young then, more like a toddler than a kid in grade school. He was so brittle—so quick to spin away into crying.

  In seeing their bond, I imagined it broken, that Jack called someplace else home—unwillingly—leaving Trish alone in her hoarded cave.

  It would kill her.

  It would be physiologically impossible to die of heartbreak, of course. But someday we’d get a call. A fire, or perhaps a collapse of stuff on her head. Or she’d take to pills or drinking to numb the grief and go too far. She could trip going down her basement stairs and break her neck. For that matter, she could lie trapped and broken on the steps, alone and away from her phone, until she starved or bled to death.

  Then Jack, as he matured without his mother, would cope with the pain in the ways that teen boys do, something poisonous or dangerous. And I’d get another call.

  Trish finally released Jack and wiped the tears off his face with her thumbs. “Pal, listen, I think it would be a good idea if you stayed with Grandpa and Ellen this weekend.”

  He shook his head, looking at the floor.

  “Because this is a ton of work here, pal, and I’m afraid that one of these piles could fall again, or you could trip, because you can’t balance as well with one arm, right? And Grandpa will make it fun. He said he’d take you to see any movie you want.”

  “Any?”

  “PG or less, anyway.” Trish smiled, but her eyes were dead. “And you can have popcorn and stay up late. It’ll be a lot more fun than working here.”

  “I guess,” Jack said, his face showing how torn he was between the hedonistic fun he was promised and his attachment to his mom. “But . . . will I get to come back?”

  “Absolutely,” Trish said, pulling him into a hug again. “I promise. I swear, in fact.”

  “Pinky swear,” Jack said, holding out his good hand.

  They wrapped pinkies and smiled at each other.

  My dad finally appeared from a back room, carrying a Spider-Man backpack and a ratty old stuffed cat. Good-byes were managed with just a few tears, and soon my dad’s Chevy puttered off in the night. Trish never looked at our father during this exchange, and she never said good-bye.

  “I think this is a good idea,” I told Trish after their taillights had disappeared down the rural road. “We’ll be able to go faster if we don’t have to worry about Jack underfoot.”

  “Fuck off,” Trish spat, storming past me to the farthest corner of her living room that her hoard would allow.

  Chapter 13

  Drew stood before me, his hair limp with sweat from hauling my crap around. He’d spent the last half hour putting tarps over my stuff outside and moving some valuable Keep things into the garage.

  “So. I’m gonna go, then.”

  “Back to Miranda’s.”

  He kicked at the gravel in the driveway with his Converse sneakers. He’d drawn an anarchy symbol on one toe, and a pentagram on the other, in black permanent marker. I was surprised that the parents of perky Miranda weren’t upset by this. Maybe they thought they could do a better job of parenting him. Save him from his Satanic punk doom.

  He turned away as I was getting ready to hug him, striding over the drive with his lanky legs, just like his late father. I felt guilty once again that I’d been even a tiny bit relieved about Greg dying in an ATV accident before Drew’s first birthday. Greg and I hadn’t even liked each other, really, and he definitely didn’t want to be a dad. He rarely saw the baby and usually just dropped off some diapers or formula as his half-ass form of child support. He had only come to the hospital for the birth because his parents dragged him there. I thought they’d keep in better touch with Andrew themselves, but they faded away after some strained and formal visits. They still send birthday cards. I suppose after losing their son, seeing his young doppelgänger might have been too unsettling.

  This meant Drew never got to have his biological dad in his life, but it also meant he was spared the effects of Greg’s deliberate absence.

  Greg might have matured, though. Unfair to judge what he might have been, considering he never got the chance.

  Then Ron adopted little Andy and we were a family. For a while, anyway.

  Andy even started calling Ron “Pop,” though since the divorce I’m not sure what he calls him, if anything. They have made their own visiting arrangements entirely separate from what I might have to say, or whatever the court papers said, which I can’t even remember now.

  “You can sleep on the couch,” I said to Mary when I came back inside, noting that it was already past 9:00 p.m. We’d cleared a nice wide swath up to the couch. The junk was retreating to a barricade along the walls in this room. I tried not to think about the large Keep tarp outside.

  Mary looked like she’d been slapped. “What? No, I couldn’t possibly.”

  I knew from her tone what she meant by “couldn’t possibly.” And she wasn’t talking about not wanting to be a bother.

  “You’re gonna drive all the way back to Ypsilanti?”

  “It’s not Timbuktu. But, no, probably not; I’ll . . . stay in a hotel. Or something.”

  “You just lost your job you said.”

  “I won’t pick anyplace fancy. I’ll be fine.”

  I muttered, “I hope you get bedbugs,” and sat down on the couch. “I’m exhausted. I’m so done I’m like a burned turkey.”

  Mary sighed and joined me on the couch, still perching on the edge like a prissy little bird. “Yeah. I think I’ll sit for a spell before I hit the road.”

  I grabbed the clicker and flicked channels. Sitcom, sitcom. American Idol. Grisly crime show. Creeping into the cable channels we passed a cooking show, and one of those design shows where they turn a shitbox apartment into a showplace. I paused, admiring the warm peachy-orange color the designer was slathering on the wall.

  “You ever watch any of those hoarding shows?” Mary asked.

  I snorted. “No. Why would I?”

  I could feel her staring at me now. I kept pointing the clicker at the TV. Spring training on ESPN, home improvement, cooking show, some lady wringing her hands on the Lifetime channel.

  “You don’t find them . . . educational?”

  I tossed the remote to the floor and finally tu
rned to face her. She was folding her hands and staring down at them. I wondered if she was praying.

  I prayed for strength not to wring her self-righteous scrawny neck.

  “I am not a hoarder,” I said. “And those shows are exploitive trash.”

  Mary turned to me and slowly raised her eyebrows, saying nothing else.

  “Oh, shut up. I’m not like those people, and I’m not like Mom. I do not leave food lying around, I don’t have cat shit everywhere.”

  “Thank goodness for that.” Mary nodded.

  “I just got . . . overwhelmed, OK? Divorce will do that to a person. I’m sure you’ve got all the time in the world to alphabetize your spice rack, but some of us have a life.”

  “I don’t like spicy food.”

  I put my head in my hands. “Stay with me here, Mary. It’s just an expression.”

  “So I don’t have a life, then?”

  “I’m just saying when you’re single without kids . . .”

  Mary stood up, smoothing her shirt. “No, I get it. You’re right. I have no life. I would get up and work and come home and clean and go to bed. Alone. Thank you for pointing it out so carefully.” She picked up her purse from the floor near her feet. “I lead a sterile existence. But I would like to point out there are plenty of people who have busy, full lives whose piles of junk don’t crush their children.”

  “How dare you.”

  “How dare I what? Surely you can’t tell me that everyone lives this way. You’re not crazy.”

  “Oh, thanks for giving me that much.”

  “I mean, look at this, really look!”

  “We’ve made progress, here. It’s not that bad.”

  Mary set her lips in a thin, grim line. I knew that face. Mary may have been the quiet one, but she could get just as pissed off as any of us.

  She turned away from me and headed down my hall. Because I understand her weird little brain, I knew just where she was going.

  “No! Stay out of there!” I slipped on some magazines, so she was faster. She pulled open a door to the Green Room.

  There was a wall of things higher than our heads. It nearly reached the top of the door frame.