The Season of Us

by Holly Chamberlin

  She shook her head. She was going to go nuts standing around waiting for her brother and her daughter to get back from Harriman’s. First things first. Step by step, like Rick had said. Hunt down the cleaning supplies and make a list of what additional supplies she would need.

  Oh, Dad, she thought, peering into the cabinet beneath the sink where the Windex and the dish detergent and the Clorox was kept, what have I done? Because in spite of her husband’s reassurance, she didn’t quite believe that she wasn’t at least partly responsible for the sorry state of affairs at Number Nineteen.

  CHAPTER 7

  Gincy had prepared their dinner, making do with her mother’s ancient and battered kitchenware and appliances. When, she asked herself, was the last time the knives had been sharpened? Dull knives could be as much of a hazard as sharp ones. She had looked briefly around the kitchen for a sharpening steel, but had quickly noted that the drawers hadn’t been cleaned (several drawers were littered with crumbs) or organized in an age. There was no way she was going to unearth a particular tool without launching a major and time-consuming search.

  Why had her father not seen to the knives, she wondered. Why had he not called the repairman when he realized that only one of the burners on the stove was working? There was one answer that came immediately to mind, and it was an unpleasant one. Ed Gannon had been failing in the final year of his life, and Gincy had not known. Certainly he had never said anything to her during his last visits—assuming he had been aware of his diminished abilities—and her mother had given no indication that Ed might not be as capable as he once was. Had Ellen even noticed? Were her own abilities diminished?

  The family sat at the table, Ellen in the chair she had occupied at meals for as long as Gincy could remember. Tommy sat in his usual place, too, and Tamsin sat where Gincy had sat until she had left home at the age of seventeen. Gincy found herself in her father’s usual place. She felt a bit like a usurper. Then again, she thought, I am now the one in charge, aren’t I?

  “This is great, Gince,” Tommy said, chewing vigorously.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Gincy wondered if her brother’s cupboards were bare, too. She wondered if Ellen was giving him some sort of allowance. She would have to find out. Tommy couldn’t be allowed to bleed their mother dry, intentionally or not.

  Unlike her son, who ate like a starving man, Ellen picked at the chicken breast and baked potato and string beans. The conversation, what there was of it, was uninteresting and largely uninformative. Tamsin asked her grandmother if she was ready for Christmas. From the utter lack of holiday decorations in the house, it was clear that Ellen wasn’t, but Gincy was grateful to her daughter for trying to engage her grandmother. “It’s Christmas already,” Ellen stated flatly. “Time flies by.”

  Tamsin asked her uncle if he had seen the latest big action movie, the one featuring a group of superhero robots from Pluto. He hadn’t. “Maybe we could go while I’m here,” Tamsin suggested. Tommy nodded and shoveled a large bite of baked potato into his mouth. At least having a missing tooth wasn’t interfering with his ability to eat.

  Gincy gave her daughter a smile. Tamsin was a good kid. There was little if any doubt in Gincy’s mind that her daughter—and her stepson—would be there for their parents in the future, whatever being “there” turned out to mean. And as she glanced around the table, she wondered what a person really owed to her family. Back when she was young, before she met Rick and her life had changed in so many ways for the better, she used to regard family as a cumbersome thing foisted upon you at birth. Whether you liked it or not, there it was, unavoidable at least until you were old enough to get away and not have to rely on them for food, clothing, and shelter. But even when you were out from under the weight of their daily presence, family was still there. Emotionally unavoidable. Ever present.

  And now, Gincy thought, she was being called upon to come back and provide—literally or proverbially—the food, clothing, and shelter for what was left of her birth family. Responsibility worked both ways, if you chose to accept your part in the family dynamic. You didn’t have to, there was no law that could be enforced, and lots of people did turn their back on the messiness and complications of their parents and grandparents for good as well as for bad reasons.

  But I can’t do that, Gincy thought now, watching her mother listlessly push bits of chicken around her plate, seeing her brother gulping from the bottle of soda he had bought even though soda had not been an item on Gincy’s shopping list, and then wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. I can’t turn away. I wish I could, but I can’t.

  When dinner was over and Tamsin and Ellen were settled on the living room couch with the television tuned to some antic game show her mother had been addicted to for years, Gincy walked Tommy out to his truck.

  While Tommy was still skinny he had developed the middle-aged beer drinker’s gut. And his hair, always thin, was now sparse and almost entirely gray. Had it been gray back at their father’s funeral in June? Gincy couldn’t remember. We’re getting old, she thought. Tommy and me. And then there came a wave of sadness that shook her almost physically.

  “Where’s your coat?” she asked, pulling her own coat closer around her. The temperature had dropped significantly when the sun had gone down at four-thirty.

  “At home,” he said. “I got some oil on it when I was working on my truck and . . .” He shrugged.

  “Is Mom able to drive?”

  “She can,” Tommy said. “I mean, her eyesight is okay, but she mostly doesn’t. Except for church, she doesn’t really go anywhere, not since Dad died. Well, she says she goes to church most Sundays, but I guess I don’t really know if she does. She doesn’t ask me to go with her.”

  That’s why her cupboards were bare, Gincy thought. Her mother wasn’t leaving the house.

  “She seems overly tired,” Gincy said. “Do you know if she’s sleeping at night?”

  Tommy shrugged again. “She hasn’t said anything to me.”

  Gincy rubbed her forehead. Why hadn’t her brother talked to someone at the church, asked if there was a parishioner who could look in on their mother? Why wasn’t he being proactive for once in his life and asking his mother the important questions about her health? Are you eating, Mom? Are you sleeping?

  Then again, she thought, why hadn’t she, the responsible child, the one with a career, marriage, and family, why hadn’t she been home in six months to visit her newly widowed mother?

  “What did you and Mom really do for Thanksgiving?” Gincy asked, dreading the answer she knew was coming. “When I called that morning, she told me she was making the usual turkey dinner for the both of you. She didn’t, did she?”

  “No,” Tommy admitted. “I guess she wasn’t up to it. She sent me to the store for a couple of frozen dinners. They’re not bad. I eat them a lot.”

  Gincy and Rick and Tamsin had served up a feast at their loft, surrounded by good friends and an assortment of pampered children and dogs. It had been a wonderful day, with lots of stimulating conversation and genuine laughter. After the obligatory call to Appleville that morning, Gincy hadn’t thought of her mother or her brother once.

  Now, the thought of them eating frozen meals at the kitchen table with the sticky tablecloth stabbed at Gincy’s conscience, as did the fact that her mother, a brutally honest person, had chosen to lie to her; she had chosen to keep from her daughter the truth of her emotional condition, the fact of the overdue electric bill, the fact of the empty cupboards and the dirty house. Ellen Gannon was proud, and that was all right, but pride unchecked could get you into trouble.

  “Are you working?” she asked her brother.

  Tommy looked embarrassed. Gincy wasn’t sure she had ever seen him look embarrassed, not even the time he had been caught peeing against the wall of the high school by the head of the PTA. Well, Gincy hadn’t been there at the time, but she was pretty sure Tommy hadn’t been embarrassed, not with the way he had laughed ab
out it afterward.

  “Not much,” he said. “The guy down at the convenience store needs help stocking shelves sometimes. He gives me cash.”

  Gincy refrained from a sigh. “Do you need money?” she asked. When, she wondered, was the last time her brother had seen a dentist? Too long a time, obviously. But with no health or dental insurance, and with no steady income, how was he supposed to pay for treatment, let alone go to the latest blockbuster action movie or buy a new coat if the old one really was beyond saving?

  Tommy shrugged again. “I’m okay,” he said.

  He’s changed since Dad died, Gincy thought. He’s . . . subdued. Just how much had Tommy relied on their father for a sense of stability? She had never given it a thought before now, Tommy’s needing their father’s strong and reassuring presence. As a child and then as a young man, he had routinely ignored or rejected his father’s guidance and good advice. She thought back to the funeral at Ellen’s church, how Tommy had sat hunched next to their mother in the front pew, his old, ill-fitting suit jacket hanging off his thin shoulders, his face a mask of pain. Damn it, she thought. If she could have managed a kick to her own backside, she would have done it.

  “Look, Tommy,” she said, “before I go back to Boston, you and I will make some arrangement about Mom. You’ll have to shop for her and see that she eats properly. And you might have to hire a local woman to help her clean the house if she can’t do it on her own. I’ll give you the money for that. Can I trust you with that job, to keep an eye on Mom? Because I can’t stay here forever.”

  Tommy answered stoutly and, Gincy thought, a bit defensively, “Yeah, you can trust me,” he said. “I would never do anything to hurt Mom.”

  Gincy nodded. “Did this heap of steel pass inspection?” she asked.

  Tommy laid a hand on the door of his truck. “Don’t worry about me, Gince.” He shivered. “Just take care of Mom.”

  Easier said than done, Gincy thought. “You’re freezing. You should get home.”

  “Yeah.” Tommy turned and climbed into his truck.

  “Drive safe,” Gincy said. She didn’t wait to see her brother pull away but went back inside Number Nineteen to the sound of the truck’s engine painfully spluttering to life.

  There was no sign of her mother. She had probably gone upstairs to her room again. The room she had once shared with her husband. Tamsin was in the living room, reading a book she had been assigned to report on during the Christmas break. It was a biography of Angelina Jolie. What ever happened to assigning kids biographies of the greats, like Abigail and John Adams, Einstein, Mozart, even Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers? When Gincy had asked this of Tamsin, Tamsin had said, “Mom, just because they’re all dead doesn’t make them better than someone who’s still alive.” Well, Gincy hadn’t been able to argue with that.

  Now she went into her mother’s kitchen to make a cup of tea. A box of decent tea was one of the items she had asked Tommy and Tamsin to bring back from the grocery store. Her mother had always used an obscure, ridiculously cheap brand of tea bag that routinely leaked crushed leaves into the cup. Was it really worth choking on the sharp, little bits of dried leaves in order to save a few cents? Mrs. Gannon might think so, but her daughter did not.

  When the tea was ready, Gincy sat at the table. She had vigorously cleaned the cloth both before and after dinner, but it still felt sticky. It should be thrown out and replaced. Gincy added this chore to the growing list she was compiling in her spiral notebook, a list that included finding out the details of Tommy’s financial dealings with her mother.

  The thing was, she truly believed that Tommy wouldn’t intentionally hurt their mother, not at this point in his life, though God knew he had caused her enough heartache in the past. But he might be seduced by one of his buddies, assuming they were still around and hadn’t come to unhappy ends, into spending the money she sent him for a cleaning person on alcohol or lottery tickets or cigarettes. Maybe, Gincy thought, remembering her brother’s hunched shoulders, the look of embarrassment on his face, maybe it would be better to send a check directly to her mother. But even if her mother accepted the money, and with her pride there was no guarantee that she would, acceptance wouldn’t guarantee that she would spend it on groceries or domestic help and not give it away to her son. And there was always the chance that she might forget to cash the check, like she had forgotten to pay the electric bill. A gift card to Harriman’s might be the way to go, if her mother could be persuaded to leave the house. And as for a cleaning person, Gincy might have to pay her directly, but who would check to be sure she was doing a proper job?

  Gincy yawned a yawn that seemed to go on forever. In spite of the dose of caffeine she had just ingested, she suddenly felt exhausted and, as she had told her husband earlier, more than a little overwhelmed. It was time to call an end to this interminable and disturbing day.

  CHAPTER 8

  Tamsin had already made herself comfortable on the blow-up mattress they had brought with them from Boston. Tamsin was one of those people who could curl up in the most uncomfortable, hard plastic chair or the most saggy, unforgiving couch and be asleep within minutes.

  “Hi, Mom,” she said.

  “Hey.” Gincy dropped down onto the narrow bed on which she had slept for most of the first seventeen years of her life. And yes, the bed—along with the dresser with a few missing knobs and the small desk with matching chair—was still here. It always had been, in spite of what she had told her good friends Clare and Danielle all those years ago—that her mother had cleared out the room the moment her daughter had left for college, dumped all of her possessions in the basement where they were left to deteriorate, and installed her sewing machine and other personal belongings in their place.

  Why had she lied? Who knew? She had enjoyed being perverse. She had needed to exaggerate the unpleasantness of her home life for some odd, childish reason she no longer wanted to identify. Gincy sighed and tossed her socks into the corner where she had spent her childhood tossing dirty clothes. Well, the sewing machine was now here in the room; that much was true. Though if the thick layer of dust covering it was any indication, it hadn’t been used in some time.

  “Mom?” Tamsin said from under her favorite fleece blanket. It was bright pink. She had brought one of her favorite teddy bears with her, too. This one was the color of caramel and named, appropriately enough, Theodore.

  “Yes, Tamsin.”

  “Did you really see the Rolling Stones?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “What made you ask that?”

  “I found a ticket stub in the drawer of the desk.”

  “I must have left it there on one of my quick visits home during college. What else did you find while you were snooping?”

  “Not much. Nothing interesting, anyway.”

  Gincy laughed. “Thanks.”

  “Uncle Tommy didn’t have a coat,” Tamsin said. “Who doesn’t wear a coat in December? Unless you live in Florida or something.”

  Gincy lay back on the mattress. It was hard and flat. It must never have been replaced after she had moved out. The sheets she had found balled up in the hall closet were familiar, too. The fitted sheet had a tear. “He said it was dirty.”

  “Oh. But isn’t it better to wear a dirty coat than no coat at all?”

  “One would think.”

  “Mom, why is Uncle Tommy the way he is? Was he always so . . .”

  “So much of a loser?” Gincy said.

  “I don’t like using that word about family,” Tamsin replied stoutly. “I was going to say, was he always so lost. I mean, at Grandpa’s funeral he looked pretty awful, seriously upset, but now it’s like, I don’t know, now it’s like he’s a ghost. Do you know what I mean? It’s like part of him isn’t here anymore.”

  “I do know what you mean,” Gincy said. “And I’m sorry I used the word loser. What I should have said was that, yes, Tommy was always unsuccessful. He was a poor student. Frankly, I think he might have a learning d
isability, but as far as I know it was never identified and certainly not addressed. And he never took to sports. He never had much of an interest in anything, really. He never had a hobby, and he never joined a club at school. After a while he was too busy drinking and smoking dope to get involved.”

  Tamsin sighed. “That’s so sad.”

  Yes, Gincy thought. It was sad. She felt an unfamiliar stab of pity for her brother. The fact was she used to think that Tommy was fairly bright and just lazy and self-concerned, and she had despised him for it. But over time she had come to realize—if slowly and with resistance—that Tommy wasn’t bright at all and that laziness and self-interest had nothing to do with his inability to live a productive adult life. Not much, anyway. At least the mean streak he had exhibited early on seemed to have run itself out. And as far as Gincy knew, he hadn’t been arrested since his early twenties. That didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t committing crimes punishable by law; it might only mean that he was smarter now about not getting caught. Whatever the case, neither she nor her mother was being asked for bail money, and that was something for which to be grateful.

  “I know I’ve got a nasty, suspicious mind,” she said then, “but I can’t help but wonder if Grandma’s depressed mood is really just a bid for attention. She does have a flair for the dramatic, and she can be passive-aggressive, believe me.”

  Tamsin shook her head. “No way. You know how she loves to eat. Do you really think she’d starve herself just to get our attention? And you know how fanatical she’s always been about cleaning. Do you really think she’d stop dusting and vacuuming just so we’d notice? Mom, this is not about you or me or anyone else. It’s about Grandma being really, genuinely sad. It’s about her missing Grandpa.”