I shake my head. “Mom told Grandma Nora that she wants to clean the house.”
“Really?”
I nod. I want to believe that things can change for the better, but I don’t think I’ll believe it until I see it. So just in case Mom’s bout of sanity is short-lived, I add: “Really. They’re going to work downstairs, and I think we should make it a surprise that we’re starting on the upstairs.”
“A surprise?” She sounds doubtful.
“Dad will love it. He told Mom to clean out the house while he was gone.”
“Well, I guess that’s true,” says Leslie. “Did Mom really say she wants to clean up?”
“She really did.” I’m smiling again.
This time Leslie smiles back.
“Okay,” she says.
I hand her Creepy Doll. I’m still holding Demon Bear. “On three,” I say. “One, two—” I pull my right arm back, ready to fling it forward with all my strength. When I say “three,” Creepy Doll and Demon Bear soar in graceful arcs, landing in a dirt patch near the garage.
The kitchen is a disaster when Leslie and I come down for breakfast. I haven’t even been upstairs all that long, maybe a half hour or forty-five minutes … I mean, no one ever accused Grandma Nora of being slow. But still. This is ridiculous. She’s like a hurricane.
In the short time since Mom agreed to clean, half the pickle jars have been taken down from on top of the cupboards and are scattered everywhere. The egg cartons have been taken down from the counters and are all over the floor. Every single drawer and cupboard is wide-open. One drawer, the Drawer o’ Sharp Things, has been pulled completely off its track and is dumped out—in the dishwasher of all places.
The breakfast nook isn’t any better. Mom has dismantled several of the newspaper towers, and they’re spread across the room: over the table, the chairs, the floor … Hurricane Nora, meanwhile, is storming through the pantry, emptying it of every milk carton in sight. Leslie and I watch the containers as they fly from the pantry, one after the other, in a series of perfect parabolas before crashing in a haphazard heap in the middle of our kitchen.
Chad is nowhere to be seen. I wonder if he went back to sleep or if Grandma Nora successfully bullied him into doing something. Grandma Nora is whistling, so maybe she won her little showdown with her grandson.
Or maybe she’s just in a good mood because she feels like she’s fixing something. She and Mom aren’t talking, but they seem to be getting along—working side by side like this. I can’t help but wonder how long it will last.
“Good morning!” Leslie says, recovering more quickly than I do. She’s in her nightgown and there’s sleep goo in her eyes, but she’s smiling like we’ve just won a billion-dollar lottery. She must have mistaken the dismantling of our kitchen for progress. But I know better. Nothing has been taken outside or thrown away yet. Rearranging the mess does not a cleanup make. I’m not sure Grandma Nora knows what she’s doing.
Mom is crawling around her newspaper forest. She barely looks up at Leslie’s greeting. She is so focused on her job that she just grunts a short “Morning” and keeps rearranging. I wonder if the papers are still ordered by their weather reports, or if she’s working on a new system. I guarantee that—even on the off chance she is actually planning to throw them away—there will be an order to how she does it.
Unlike Mom, Grandma Nora stops working. She sticks her head out of the pantry. “Good morning, Sunshine,” she says, chucking a last milk gallon into her heap and wading toward us through the knee-deep mess.
I stare at the milk cartons. They are way grosser than I ever realized. We’ve been living in a house with a closet full of this? I haven’t given the milk containers much thought before. They’re normally just one more piece of the clutter to ignore. If your brain couldn’t tune out background details like crusty milk jugs, then people’s heads would explode the instant they walked inside our house. Not that we let people inside our house.
But when the milk gallons are in a giant heap in the center of the kitchen, they’re kind of hard to ignore. Mom usually rinses the gallons out before cramming them in the pantry (odd-numbered expiration dates on the right side, even-numbered expiration dates on the left) but some gallons weren’t rinsed well. They’re caked with thick yellow crusts. Others are worse. They have grayish-green lumps growing up the sides. Half the jugs are bulging with built-up pressure; they look ready to burst. And it could be in my head, but this morning, I swear our kitchen smells like spoiled milk.
It’s moments like these that remind me why the Five-Mile Radius is so important. It’s bad enough that my grandmother has seen this, but if a non–family member ever got a peek at this dump, I think I would literally—and I am not exaggerating—die of embarrassment. And if death by mortification isn’t a thing on WebMD, then I guess it’ll become one. I’ll be the first.
I’ve never even met one of Chad’s girlfriends. He hasn’t ever brought one home. It’s a good choice. If Grandma Nora doesn’t get this cleaned out, we’re all doomed to be alone. None of us will ever have a serious boyfriend or girlfriend or get married. Or, maybe, I’ll just tell my husband that my parents live in Timbuktu.
Grandma Nora plants a kiss on Leslie’s forehead, and then squeezes me in a quick little side hug. Meanwhile, Mom continues crawling among her newspapers. She always did tend to block everything and everyone else out when she gets super focused on a project. It won’t last. Something, probably leg pain, will distract her before too long. Prediction: She’ll be camped out on the couch with an ice pack on her knee by noon.
“What’s, uh, what’s going on?” I ask. This is my diplomatic way of saying that while I know they’re cleaning up, it doesn’t look like much of a cleanup.
Mom ignores me. She fans through a pile of newspapers on Dad’s chair.
Grandma Nora answers: “You know perfectly well what’s going on. You were there when we decided. But, Leslie, you’ll be glad to hear that your mother and I have agreed to fix up some of the mess around here.”
I can’t seem to stop myself from saying: “This is fixing up the mess?” I’ve seen news footage of national disasters that looked better than this.
“If you can’t pitch in with a good attitude, then just turn that little tushy right around and get back upstairs.” Grandma Nora twirls her pointer finger in a few tight circles.
“But Annabelle is pitching in.” Leslie comes to my rescue. “She’s going to help me cl—”
I give her a soft kick in the shin and small shake of my head.
“Oh, right,” says Leslie. “It’s a surprise.”
Mom doesn’t notice. She’s muttering something about “precipitation levels.” Grandma Nora, though, softens her expression. I don’t care if she knows what we’re up to, just so long as she doesn’t clue Mom in too soon.
“Anyway,” I say, “Leslie and I are going to grab some breakfast.”
Grandma Nora looks around the kitchen as if she’s just now realizing what a mess they’ve made. With a rueful nod, she says, “Okay, but you better eat in the other room.” Leslie and I have a little trouble locating clean bowls and spoons, and digging out the milk and cereal, but eventually we get everything together and settle in the linens room.
When I was younger and there were still rules, it was a hard and fast one that we couldn’t eat on the couch, and for some reason that always stuck with me. The rules you learn when you’re little have a habit of doing that. So Leslie and I swaddle ourselves on the floor in a pile of old quilts next to the blocked-off window seat.
“All right,” I say, leaning forward to look Leslie in the eyes. “How’re we going to do this?”
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“How do you want the cleanup to go?”
“You want to make a plan?” she asks between large mouthfuls of Cap’n Crunch. “Why? Can’t we just start?”
“You saw the kitchen, didn’t you?”
“Oh,” says Leslie. She swallows. �
��I guess you’re right. Wait a second, okay?” Leslie sets her bowl on the wood floor, and I watch the pink bottoms of her feet disappear around the corner. A minute later, she returns with her markers and a notepad. Leslie resettles herself in the quilts and opens the pad to the first page. She writes “Leslie and Annabelle’s Cleanup Plan” at the top of the page. It takes her forever because she alternates between the pink and yellow markers for every letter and draws a lot of lopsided hearts around our names. Her face gets this serene look while she draws. For a while, I just let her decorate the page as I eat. Her expression reminds me of the way Mom used to look when she held a paintbrush. Leslie’s Cap’n Crunch slowly turns into giant soggy squares. I’m on my third bowl before I finally stop her.
“It’s good enough,” I say when she pulls out the blue marker and is about to start adding clouds between the hearts.
“Oh, sorry.” She recaps the blue marker.
“It’s fine if you want to take notes.” I actually really like the idea of someone writing down everything I say. “Let’s just get started.”
Grandma Nora’s raised voice interrupts us. “Be reasonable,” she’s saying.
“Okay,” Leslie says, a little louder than necessary. She pulls out the purple marker and writes: “Step #1.”
“Don’t be sentimental.” Grandma Nora’s voice booms.
I don’t hear Mom’s reply. I don’t want to. Instead, I start outlining my ideas for Project Catacomb Extraction. I talk just loudly enough and just fast enough that Leslie and I both have to concentrate on what I’m saying rather than on the squawks coming from the kitchen.
We won’t try to do everything at once, like Mom and Grandma Nora are doing in the kitchen. We’ll sort through each pile, one at a time, and we’ll divide each big pile into three smaller ones: garbage, giveaway, and keep. I’m going to make sure that the keep pile is tiny. Minuscule. Infinitesimal. We’ll put the garbage in black bags, and I’ll get Chad to drive it into town. There’s a Dumpster behind the high school where we take Mom’s stuff whenever we manage to smuggle a load out, and there’s a Goodwill in Chatham. The giveaway pile can go there. And whatever doesn’t fit in Leslie’s closet when we’re done, well, I’ll just send it out the window.
“Get it?” I ask. “No nonessentials. You can only keep what you have room for. If it doesn’t fit, it has to go.” Like Mom, Leslie can get sentimental over things. She has a shoe box full of old movie-ticket stubs and programs from school plays, and birthday cards. If it fits in the closet, she can have it. Otherwise …
Leslie stops writing. She nods, looking very serious.
By the time we’re done, Leslie’s cereal is way past soggy. She may have to skip the rest of her breakfast anyway, because the voices from the kitchen are getting harder and harder to ignore.
“You can’t be serious!”
“It’s my house. Just let me do it my way.”
“But there are dozens of milk jugs here. It’ll take forever.”
Mom mumbles something. I can’t quite make out her words.
Grandma Nora is in grizzly mode, though, and I can hear her clear as a bell: “Expiration dates? Why? The gallons are empty. Gone. Finished. Who cares when they expired?”
Mom’s reply is still fuzzy, but I swear I hear the words special dates.
“We’re not saving any of them!”
I hear the clunking of dozens of milk jugs being shuffled around. Mom better watch out if Grandma Nora is in arm’s reach of a newspaper. More clunking. More raised voices.
The morning’s fragile truce is officially over.
“Let’s go upstairs,” I tell Leslie.
She nods, and we scamper away, leaving the remnants of our breakfast on the ground next to the pile of quilts. I hope Grandma Nora finds it before it gets too warm. The last thing we need around here is more spoiled milk. We’ll have to risk it, though, because I’m not about to go back in that kitchen. Not even for the winning ticket in a billion-dollar lottery.
The cleanup gets off to a smooth start. For me and Leslie anyway. We begin by sorting through Doll Mountain, and the catacombs start slowly, oh so slowly, to transform. I am half-hopeful that after years and years of living in a toy sepulcher, Leslie will have a normal bedroom by the end of the week. But it’s only a half hope at best, because downstairs World War III is in full swing. And that sort of thing tends to put a damper on your outlook.
I wish I could say that Mom and Grandma Nora were waging their war on the house, but they’re too busy fighting each other. I’m not really sure who’s winning. Most of the time it sounds like they’re both losing. Like we’re all losing.
We’ve barely seen Chad. It’s not unusual for him to disappear when things get rough. He’s almost as good at the Disappearing Act as Dad. But while Dad most often disappears under the flaps of his deerstalker, Chad is usually off with his friends. He’s super popular.
I’ve only got, like, three real friends. Plus Amanda, I guess. She’s always around. We’re just not as close as we used to be. I don’t even know who she has a crush on. Amanda and I didn’t have a big fight or anything. We just kind of drifted apart after Rae moved to Colorado. Last year, I barely even saw Amanda at school. Someone, I think it might have been Jenny, told me she thought Amanda was reading in the library at lunch most days. Then, this year, Amanda asked if she could eat lunch with us, and now I think we might be learning how to be friends again.
And, of course, there’s Drew. He would make a fifth friend. But, again, I’m not really sure if he counts.
Either way, it’s hard to keep friends when half your life is this huge secret and you can’t let them within five miles of your house. I can’t wait until I can drive, like Chad. He doesn’t have to wait for school to see his friends.
I bet Chad couldn’t even count all his friends. He’s always hanging with “the guys” or going out with some girl or at a party or sleeping on the futon in Will Williamson’s basement. Will is probably Chad’s version of Rae. Like me and Rae, Will and Chad have been best friends since the start of middle school. And from what Chad says, Will has a great house. His family has a backyard basketball court. Sometimes it seems like Chad lives with the Williamsons. Once I even heard Will’s mom make a joke about it, calling Chad her “adopted” son. Chad cracked up. I didn’t think it was funny.
It’s not like I blame Chad for avoiding home. Well, I might as well be honest. I do blame him. I blame him a lot. But I understand why he does it: His room is almost as bad as Leslie’s. Mom divided it into quadrants: one-fourth old exercise equipment, one-fourth used camping gear, and one-fourth unused paint cans. And I don’t mean her watercolors. I think she actually threw those out.
Near the start of her collecting phase, Mom stopped painting on watercolor paper and started stockpiling paint cans. For a while there, she really had this thing for house paint. She was always bringing it home or having it shipped to the house—mostly in dozens of shades of baby blue, light pink, pastel yellows, and spring greens. It’s been a long time since she brought home new paint, though … as far as I know.
The smallest fourth of Chad’s room (hey, I never said all quadrants were equal) is the little corner with his bed, music system, and desk. There’s also usually a pile of clothes on the floor next to his bed. I don’t think Chad has used his closet in years. It’s behind a stack of mostly broken camping chairs.
As Leslie and I work on her room, I keep thinking that, maybe, we can help Chad do something about his room once we’re done with hers. Maybe he won’t want to spend so many nights in the Williamson’s basement if he’s got a tent-free, exercise bike–less room.
I’ve never offered to help Chad before. I don’t know why. I’ve asked Leslie about a hundred times, but I just watched Chad’s room get worse and worse. It never occurred to me that I could help him. I guess I always assumed that since he’s four and half years older than me, he could figure it out for himself. I mean, I cleaned up my room when I was only ten.
“I haven’t seen you all day,” I say. “Where’ve you been?”
“At work,” he says like it’s obvious. As if I should have known, when he never even told us he was applying places.
“You got a job?”
“Yeah. How do you think I got Grandma Nora off my back this morning?”
“Did you go get a job just so she’d leave you alone?” Just so he has an excuse to get out of the house while she’s visiting?
“No, I had one lined up before she came. I’ve gotta pay for gas somehow.”
“Where are you working?”
“The Exploding Hoagie.” He skirts around me and starts walking down the hall.
“Wow!” I say, following him. “That’s so cool.”
And I really mean it. I’m not being sarcastic. I’ve always been a little obsessed with The Exploding Hoagie. For a fast-food kind of place, it’s really clean. It’s not one of those tacky, overdecorated restaurants. If I wanted to eat surrounded by clutter, I could just stay home. And it always smells like fresh bread. But my favorite thing about The Exploding Hoagie is the meat slicer. I love watching the employees use the meat slicer. There’s something mesmerizing about it: the low hum of the machine, the smooth back-and-forth motions, the giant hunks of ham being shaved into razor-thin pieces.
I’m still trailing behind Chad when he starts to shut the bathroom door.
“Hey,” I say, sticking my foot in the doorway before he can close it. This is the first time I’ve really talked to him since Family Game Night, and who knows when I’ll catch him again? “It’s been pretty crazy around here. With Grandma Nora and all.”
He gives a dry chuckle. “I can only imagine.”
I roll my eyes. Chad could do more than imagine if he would stick around for longer than an hour or two. I take a step back and try a different approach. “Have you heard from Dad yet? Like, do you know if his plane landed?”
Family Game Night and Other Catastrophes Page 8