“Oh, not SpongeBob again, Jack.”
“You think he’s funny.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Do so. I saw you chuckle at Patrick.”
I looked over at my Jack, with his white-blond flop of hair and gap-toothed grin, and the laughter broke loose. “OK. Busted. But don’t tell the grown-ups at school I like SpongeBob. I’ll never admit it in public.”
“Don’t worry, Mom. I can keep secrets,” said Jack, balancing his paper plate on his knees, holding his pizza one-handed, as we ate our dinner on our island of a couch.
My cell phone rang again, and I sighed with resignation as the caller ID flashed my ex-husband’s name.
Chapter 4
The sky was teasingly bright, but cold. My Corolla wound through the streets of Grand Ledge, and I kept missing the address Trish gave me, distracted as I was by the façades in the tiny downtown. A flat, slow stretch of the Grand River threaded through the heart of the town, and the well-preserved old buildings put me in mind of ladies with bustles and parasols. Quaint would be a word for it, like that little Christmas town our mother used to put up around the base of the tree. She got so excited about all the little buildings that the town soon fell victim to suburban sprawl and became bigger around than the base of the tree itself, exploding around the living room. It got so we would have to step over the tiny post office to go upstairs to the bathroom.
I chuckled, remembering the time Trish and I pretended our Barbie and Ken dolls were nuclear-mutated giants and had them “walking” about, kicking over the little Christmas town houses. When Mom saw, she was livid and I cowered before her anger. Trish tossed her hair and laughed it off. Right up into our adulthood I remained in awe of her ability to stand firm in the face of Mom’s fury. Why did she get all the strength? If I could have only borrowed some from her like I used to wear her favorite sweaters, maybe I would have dared get another job, rather than cling to the safety of that bookstore like a kid holds on to a frayed blankie.
I parked the car near a riverside walkway to study the map I’d printed out to find my way here. I imagined my mother crying at how separate we sisters had become—yes, I’d even say estranged was the better word. But she wasn’t here to hold us together anymore, and her death had in fact driven us further apart.
There had been no final showdown, no phones banged down in the heat of argument. It would be easier to patch things up, in a way, if there had been one clean break. Instead, our relationship wore out like an unraveling sweater.
Trish was mad at me, I know, for not making it to family dinners. She huffed and sighed, broadcasting her irritation and disbelief when I said I had to work every time the family planned a painful charade of togetherness for Thanksgiving, or Christmas, at Dad and Ellen’s condo. But I enjoyed the overtime pay, and the younger employees who had families were as grateful as panting puppies every time I took over a shift.
The last time I was at Trish’s, I’d brought my favorite picture book as a gift for tiny baby Jack, just born. I’d walked up her porch steps determined to say something comforting about the absence of our mother, how she was smiling down on little Jack, though I didn’t really believe that kind of thing. I was going to reach across the divide and be kind to her, as a way of making amends for skipping those awful holiday dinners.
Once I stepped inside, she barely acknowledged me. She was barking orders at Ron to fetch her this and that, she was burping the baby, she was rubbing cream on his reddened cheeks, she was talking to little Andrew about school. She smiled at the book for a mere heartbeat before tossing it aside—a literal toss, it became briefly airborne before settling on top of a grocery bag out of which spilled diaper cream and baby wipes—and then she was reaching into her bra to whip out her breast right in front of me as the baby began wailing.
When a passel of girls she’d known in high school came in with balloons and flowers and a casserole, I told her good-bye and let myself out. All the way home I wondered why I hadn’t thought to bring a casserole.
We were Facebook friends, though. That’s how I found out about her split with Ronald. When she changed her relationship status and there was a little icon of a broken heart, I thought, too bad, and poor Trish and, really, Facebook? A broken heart?
I did not call her. She did not call me.
I looked up through the windshield and decided just to walk the rest of the way. It couldn’t be far, as the center of town was little more than two intersections.
On foot, I finally spotted it. I hadn’t thought to ask what kind of company it was—I once had known, but had forgotten, and she might have changed jobs and hadn’t told me. As such I hadn’t known what to expect.
The façade said KENDRICK AND ADAMS in spare Helvetica lettering on a small brass plate, which is why I’d driven past it several times. Suite two.
I stepped into a narrow hallway and followed it back past the street-facing shop, which was some kind of crafty store with cute little knickknacks jamming the display window.
I found the Kendrick and Adams door. When I pushed it open, the door made a hush sound brushing across thick carpet. The lobby was a tiny nook, in the center of which was a reception desk.
Trish sat behind the high desk, a phone headset over her frizzy hair, which was grayer than I’d remembered. She glanced up at me and gave me an “I’ll be right with you” look, which made me wonder if she recognized me.
“Let me see what I can schedule with Angela,” she said into the phone, her voice smooth and efficient, like a television news anchor. Her fingers clacked away at a keyboard I couldn’t see.
A window next to the entry door faced uselessly into the dark hallway. I snuck a peek into it to see if I looked so different from eight years ago. Straight, flat hair cut shoulder length and with a sharp line of even bangs across my too-high forehead. A long, narrow nose that I never liked in profile. No reason she shouldn’t know me. A few extra crow’s-feet certainly wouldn’t throw her.
I might even have worn this shirt eight years ago, or something very much like it.
As Trish finished up her task, I took my time observing her. Her hair was still frizzed out and curly, having inherited that from our mother. It had been brown once upon a time, but now was shot through with gray. She was wearing a blazer that looked strange on her; I was used to seeing her in embroidered tunics and flowy skirts. It was like she’d gotten cold and borrowed someone else’s coat.
She hung up at last, clicked a few last keys, then turned to me.
For a half second I held my breath.
“Mary,” she said, and then swung around the desk to greet me. She was wearing, I could see now, a flowy skirt indeed, and brown high-heeled boots. She swept over to me and squeezed me in a hug.
My hands got caught in her hair when I hugged her. There was so much hair! Her tub drain must get constantly clogged.
She sat me back at arm’s length. “You look great,” she said.
“No, I don’t,” I responded, then looked down at my feet. “Thanks. Hi.”
Trish was about to say something else when a voice cut through the air like a trumpet blast. “Patricia! What’s going on out there?”
“Sorry, Mrs. Adams, my sister stopped in.”
The woman who must be Mrs. Adams emerged from the recesses of the office. She was weirdly petite for such a frightening voice, and she propped her tiny doll-hands on her slim hips and stood akimbo. She looked like someone who’d spent much time trying to seem bigger than she was. Like a puffer fish, or one of those lizards with a big frill.
I bit the inside of my lip to keep from bursting out laughing about this because my sister looked abashed and a little pale.
“It’s almost closing time, so she just came in to wait.”
“Yes. Almost closing. If you can’t finish your workday with her here, then ask her to wait outside.”
Mrs
. Adams stomped back to her office, or she would have stomped, had she the mass necessary to make a sound against the thick carpet. She never once looked at me.
Trish was already moving back behind her desk.
I took the hint and sat quietly in a chair near the entry door, leafing through a Newsweek from the tiny table. I looked at my watch: 4:55 P.M.
For the next five minutes, the phone didn’t ring. No one came in. Trish didn’t look at me. Instead she busied herself behind her desk, but with what I couldn’t see. She seemed to be moving things around. At one point I saw her take out a squirt bottle and a lemony fragrance wafted over to me as she wiped something down.
The minute hand ticked up to the twelve and Trish sighed. She shed her blazer and hung it over the chair and reached down somewhere to pick up a battered leather jacket and her purse, a denim thing with leather fringes swinging off it.
She shot me a look and called, “G’night, Mrs. Adams!” over her shoulder before escaping into the hall. She didn’t look at me as we darted through the passage. I half expected to turn and see the woman chasing us on her tiny feet for another scolding.
We burst into the sunshine and I could finally breathe.
We faced each other on the street for a beat too long. “Hungry?” she said at last. “Cuz I am.”
Without waiting for a response, she headed off in the direction of a Mexican restaurant in a vast brick building. I’m not keen on Mexican food, but I didn’t want to start an argument. As we walked, her skirt rippling behind her like a flag, I asked a little breathlessly, “What was that all about?”
“Mrs. Adams is overcompensating. If she were a guy, we’d say she has a tiny dick.”
I choked out a laugh and glanced around to see if anyone had heard.
Trish charged into the restaurant and took over the mechanics of getting seated.
“Did you have a nice drive?” she asked, once we’d settled into a booth.
It had taken not quite two hours from Ypsilanti. “Yes.”
“So what is it you do, exactly?” I ventured, stirring my ice in my plastic water glass with a Pepsi logo. Trish ordered a margarita.
“I’m a receptionist,” she answered.
“Well, obviously, but what does your boss do?”
“Whatever she wants. Like that gorilla joke. What does an eight-hundred-pound gorilla do? Anyway, whatever, you’re asking about the business.” She cleared her throat and said, in the same smooth voice she’d used at work, “Kendrick and Adams designs process streamlining solutions for the modern information technology sector.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Yeah, I know. It means that other businesses pay them to find wasteful habits. It also means she doesn’t tolerate inefficiency in her own office. You know, inefficient things like going to the bathroom, talking, excess breathing.”
“Wow.” I thought of George and the time we’d spend chatting when the store was slow.
“You still at the bookstore?”
“I was. It just closed.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah.”
We ordered. I selected a salad, which seemed a likely candidate for me to pick off stuff I didn’t like. Trish ordered a burrito.
We stared across an eight-year chasm.
“So,” I asked, uncomfortable under her direct gaze, “how are the kids?”
She laughed, then shook her head. As she did this, I noticed her earrings were long and silver. “I didn’t mean to laugh, but really, Mary? My older son, who you saw, fancies himself quite the punk rocker, or maybe he’s a Goth kid, or whatever. I don’t know, but he hates my guts and spends all his time with his precious girlfriend at her family’s perfect house. And my younger son broke his collarbone at my house, and now we fear a knock on the door at any moment for the Gestapo arriving, so yeah, they’re perfectly swell.”
I started folding my napkin in half, and half again, smoothing the crease each time. “I don’t know what to say.”
She sighed, fluffing her hair out behind her shoulders. “I know.”
“I can help you clean up, you know.”
At this my sister took a long drink of her margarita, staring into the golden pool in her glass as she did so.
“I don’t let anyone in my house, and you . . .”
“I . . . what?”
“It’s not like we’re close. And you have a habit of judging.”
“I do not!”
By way of riposte she just plunked down on her elbows, one eyebrow pulled up, her hazel eyes locked onto mine.
“I won’t say a word,” I said, raising my hand like the Girl Scout I used to be. “I swear.”
She snorted. “We’ll see.”
Our food arrived. My salad was massive, and I regretted ordering it. I already wasn’t feeling well, but I tucked in anyway, so I wouldn’t have to say anything else wrong.
I followed Trish’s taillights as we left the quaintness of downtown Grand Ledge and headed into the rural wilds. The sun was sinking, and whatever fake warmth there had been in the air was gone entirely now; winter was reasserting itself. My car’s heater blasted away to keep the windshield clear.
She’d explained how she’d sent the kids out for the evening but they’d be back soon. She’d said that I could agree to help only after seeing what we were up against. I could tell she assumed I’d run screaming, and her problem would be solved. It made me nervous, which forced me to pretend I wasn’t nervous. I was failing at this; I’m a lousy actress.
We were on our way to the house that her husband, Ronald, had built; literally, he’d built it himself with his crew, being a contractor and all. She’d explained this to me back when we still kept up the pretense of connection.
I wondered where Ronald lived now.
We turned onto a long gravel driveway leading into a stand of naked trees. The house revealed itself as being a perfectly normal house. Trish got out of her car wordlessly and only glanced back long enough to see I was there. A motion-sensitive floodlight clicked on and put us in spotlight. As we approached, I noticed funny bulges in the curtains, which were drawn closed and in places pressed to the inside of the window.
Trish closed her eyes and sucked in a breath as she shoved the door open and hit a light switch.
My hands flew to my face, to cover my shock and also my mouth and nose from the intense musty, mildew odor. It was a smell with substance. Three-dimensional. It was like walking into a wall.
Towers of junk teetered around us, hemming us in. Two paths wound around the perimeter of the living room to meet at a couch, which was clear but for piles sprouting on the arms and along the back.
Trish nudged me inside so she could close out the cold evening, and as she did so, a shivery feeling crept up my spine. My ill-advised taco salad burbled in my gut, and my heart worked harder. I swallowed, reminded myself to breathe. I reached for something to support me but could find only precarious towers.
I was driven to find more space, and with the door shut behind me I wandered to the couch, and then took another path until it led to the kitchen.
No relief here, either. Every counter space was jammed with shopping bags and piles of paper. The sink was overrun with dishes, themselves crusted over. All around my legs were more bags. I stumbled away from that mess and down the hall to the bedrooms . . . the hall was made narrower by stuff along its edges. Each bedroom I looked into was crowded with piles; they looked like Indian burial mounds.
I felt hot, my skin prickled, and my breathing shallowed despite my efforts to settle myself.
I battled back through the hall. Trish, having followed, wheeled herself in reverse ahead of me. I couldn’t see her face; my eyes were darting for more room, space, air. . . . I turned back through the kitchen, a dining area, all this stuff, and came across a back door. I yanked it open
only to be blocked in by a wall of things, the entire enclosed back porch was jammed full. I whirled around again and stumbled back through the front of the house, past the narrow entry and over the front porch where I folded down to my hands and knees in front of a garden. My body shook and I breathed slowly, swallowing hard, rocking slightly, to keep myself from retching onto the soil. At this close view, I could see the green shoots of early flowers, daffodils or crocus, nudging out of the earth.
When my breathing had slowed and my stomach settled, I sat back on my heels, daring to raise my face to Trish.
She was on her porch, sitting much the way her son had. Her head was resting on her arms, and she stared into the enclosed space created by her drawn-up knees.
When she looked up at me, I could see in the yellow floodlight her face was wet.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “You have hives.”
I touched my face and became aware of an itchiness that had been in the background of my fear of vomiting in Trish’s garden. Trish took a compact out of her purse and handed it to me, as if I doubted her.
I looked. Sure enough, bright pink, raised splotches spread across my face, neck, and collarbone above my shirt.
I handed back her compact, staring, openmouthed. She took it from me, snapped it shut, and tossed it roughly back into her bag. “You’re allergic to my house,” she said, putting her hands to her temples now. “It makes you sick.”
I wondered where I could get some Benadryl. I rubbed my face and tried not to scratch it.
Trish looked down again at her skirt, and I tried to reconstruct what I’d seen just moments ago. What was all that? In my memory it was just indeterminate shapes, mostly in bags.
The image of Trish’s house conflated with my last memories of Mother’s house.
As the initial shock of seeing her home receded like a wave, a new thought crashed in. She’d gotten as bad as Mom. And little Jack was living here.
Trish was getting up to go back inside. She closed the door, leaving me in her front yard.
Keepsake Page 4
