Holding the Net

by Melanie P. Merriman

  I made lists—a list of the furniture, kitchenware, linens, and decorative items that were going to North Carolina, and a list of those that were staying behind; a list of phone numbers for the United Van Lines contact in Florida, the contact in North Carolina, and the company that was handling the closing on the condo sale; a list of Mom’s medications; and a list of the most important and hard-to-replace legal and insurance papers. I made copies of the lists for Barbara.

  I packed the critical papers in a zippered tote bag that Barbara would carry on the plane. I refilled Mom’s prescriptions, to be sure she wouldn’t run out before they could be transferred to a pharmacy in New Bern.

  I took pictures of the living room in Florida, and sent them to Barbara to help her recreate the look in the new apartment at McCarthy Court. One item was crucial: Mom’s glass-shelved étagère. She loved it, and often took me on a “tour” of the contents—family heirlooms like the eighteen-inch bisque shepherd and shepherdess figurines that had belonged to her grandmother; a few decorative plates, including one that featured a huge dead duck; and a hodgepodge collection of bird figurines. I thought that having it set up just right would go a long way toward making her new apartment feel like home.

  Mom’s étagère. I took this photo of the étagère before Mom moved out of the New Port Richey condo, and used it to recreate the tableau each time she moved.

  The first act of my play went pretty well. I drove over from Miami knowing I would need the SUV to take things back to my house, and picked up Barbara at the Tampa airport. We arrived at the condo just after noon on the Saturday before the move. Mom pulled out some sliced turkey and ham. We made sandwiches, and took them to the table in the sunroom.

  “Barb, did Mel tell you about the party the condo office had for me?” asked Mom. She continued without waiting for Barbara’s reply. “We had pizza. The whole maintenance crew and some of the security guards came, plus everyone from the front office,” she said. “And they’re going to plant a tree in my honor—right next to Clubhouse 2.”

  Barbara said, “I think they’re going to miss you.”

  “I’ll definitely miss them,” said Mom. She grabbed a tissue and blew her nose. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I can’t help it.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. I got up and gave her a hug.

  “I’m so glad you girls are here.” Mom reached out and grabbed Barbara’s hand.

  Barbara offered to make coffee, but Mom said she would do it. She took another tissue, wiped her nose, and headed for the kitchen. Barbara picked up the plates and followed her. I stared out at the canal, and wondered if it was too soon to have a glass of wine.

  As we sipped our coffee, Mom asked what the plans were. I downplayed the need to do anything. I said Barbara and I might pack a few things, and that I hoped we could all go out to dinner.

  While Mom and Barbara took the coffee mugs to the dishwasher, I looked into the storage closet off the sunroom. The two-drawer metal filing cabinet and the fireproof lockbox sat on the floor on the left side. Mom and I had been through them both, and pulled out the critical papers. Daddy’s old steamer trunk was on the right side. He had used it when he was a teenager to ship his things from home in Philadelphia to boarding school in Vermont. When we were kids, it had been tucked into a basement storeroom, packed with clothes that were out of season or waiting to be handed down from Barbara to me. Now it held decorations that Mom pulled out for various holidays—fragile pastel-painted eggs, each carefully wrapped in tissue; two small, colorful Easter baskets; papier mâché pumpkins and some dried, multicolored corn cobs; an artificial Christmas wreath decorated with dried flowers; and the wooden figurine of the Nutcracker Prince Mom had bought at intermission when we went to see the Christmas ballet.

  I decided to inventory the four-drawer oak bureau at the back of the closet, since it would not be going to New Bern, and its contents would have to be packed. The top two drawers held several expanding files. Some were filled with greeting cards and letters to Mom and Daddy from Barbara and me. The others held clippings and notes for her columns for The Comet. The bottom drawers were filled with packing materials, like bubble wrap and tape, along with multicolored wrapping paper and rolls of ribbon. I pulled everything out so I could see it all, wrap anything fragile, and repack it to be shipped safely.

  Just then, Barbara and Mom walked back into the sunroom.

  “Hey Barb,” I said, “How about we pack everything from this bureau into the trunk?”

  Barbara stepped into the closet, and Mom headed for her chair.

  After a few minutes, Mom said, “I hate this. I really hate this.”

  I looked up from the bubble wrap, ashamed that I’d forgotten my well-laid plans.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. We don’t need to do this now.” I turned off the light and slid the pocket door to the closet closed.

  Barbara said, “Let’s watch a movie.”

  Mom asked if we had seen You’ve Got Mail, and we had, but agreed to see it again. Nothing like watching beautiful people struggle toward a happy ending to take you out of your own troubles. Mom napped in her chair.

  The next day was Sunday. The three of us sat at the rattan table reading the paper, drinking coffee, and picking at some fruit and toast. Barbara offered to help Mom choose clothes for the trip, and once they headed for the bedroom, I snuck into the storage closet to finish the packing I had started the day before.

  Act II of Mom’s Move was proving to be a downer. Why had we come so early? There was nothing to do except worry. We worked on the Sunday crossword puzzle together. After lunch, Mom napped, and Barbara and I very quietly packed up some of the more fragile knick-knacks from the étagère, hoping Mom wouldn’t notice.

  Finally, it was time for cocktails. We toasted to Mom’s last night in the condo. She didn’t smile.

  “Try to remember how nice New Bern is,” I said.

  “I just can’t believe it,” Mom said. “I can’t believe I’m leaving my home.”

  Then, she cried.

  At bedtime, I urged her to take an extra half a Xanax. I took the other half.

  On Monday, moving day, we all woke up early. At 5 a.m., I lay in bed and listened as Mom went into the kitchen. Time for Act III, I thought.

  “Are you awake?” Barbara asked.

  “Yeah.” I rolled over to face her in the other bed.

  “Are you ready?” she said.

  “No.”

  I went into the kitchen, hugged Mom from behind, and snuggled my head between her shoulder and neck. I thought about all the times she had gotten me through when I was scared—new schools, overnight Girl Scout camping, my first date with a boy.

  “You doing okay?” I asked.

  “Okay,” she said.

  We had coffee, took showers, and got dressed. I cleaned up the kitchen, and carefully set aside one mug for me to use after the movers were gone. Barbara helped Mom pack her toothbrush and face cream in the ancient plastic blue-flowered zipper case she took on every trip. All the luggage was lined up at the front door by 8 a.m., and we sat down for a second cup of coffee before the car service arrived at 8:30.

  The mood was somber but peaceful. I was so pleased that we hadn’t torn Mom’s home apart with her in it.

  And then I saw the moving van. They were forty-five minutes early. I ran out the front door and accosted the driver as he got out of the truck.

  “You cannot come in,” I said. “I specifically scheduled the move for 9 a.m. so that my mother would be gone. She’s still here.”

  “We’re a little ahead of schedule,” he said, “We won’t take anything out. We’ll just start packing.”

  “Do you have to?” I asked, “Please, please wait ten minutes, just until the car comes to take her to the airport.”

  He explained that it would take them a few minutes to get the boxes and packing paper out of the truck, but then they wanted to get started. I told him to start in the bedroom, figuring Mom wouldn’t need
to go back in there.

  I was shaking as I walked back to the condo.

  “What happened?” Barbara asked.

  “They’re early,” I answered. “Best-laid plans and all that. I tried to stall them.”

  Barbara said she’d keep Mom in the sunroom.

  The car service arrived a little past 8:30, while the movers were still staging outside.

  Mom, Barbara, and I followed as the driver took the luggage to the car. I wrapped Mom in a hug.

  “I love you,” I said. “I’ll see you soon.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Barbara helped Mom into the back seat of the car, then got in on the other side. I watched until they were out of sight.

  The rest of that day went by quickly. The movers packed everything from the kitchen, the bathrooms, Mom’s room, and the storage closets. I monitored them closely, even though we had placed labels—stay or go—on every piece of furniture, and almost every shelf. Barbara called at around 3:00 to let me know they had landed in New Bern. Their connecting flight had been delayed.

  “Mom was a real trouper.” I knew she was making it sound better than it was. I had traveled with Mom.

  The movers finished up around four in the afternoon. I went through the checklist of everything they had in the truck, and signed the papers.

  Standing in the middle of the now-empty living room, I could see the well-traveled pathways on the rug. For the first time, I noticed how much furniture was left to deal with. I walked through every room, taking a quick inventory. The guest room beds and dresser, which I would use for the next few days, were going to one of the condo maintenance workers. I decided to give them the sheets and blankets, too, and made a note to leave time to launder them before I left. Mom’s “good” china and silverware were on the truck to New Bern, and would end up at Barbara’s house. Other than that, the dining room had been left intact. I planned to pack up my grand-mother’s china and some of Mom’s glassware to take to my house. That left the books, a few bottles of wine, lots of small serving and decorative pieces, and the beautiful Scandinavian teak furniture—a six-foot oval table plus two leaves, six chairs, and a large sideboard with a glass-front hutch.

  I wandered into the kitchen and realized that most of the food was still there to be sorted through and tossed, donated, or taken to my house. I checked the liquor cabinet, and was delighted to find that the movers had not packed any of it. I pulled a serving of the homemade beef stew I had made for Mom out of the freezer, then remembered there was no microwave—nor were there pans to heat it up in. Searching for anything that might work, I found the broiler pan in a drawer under the oven. Mom had used it to make gravy, so I knew it could sit on top of the stove. I put the partially thawed stew in the pan on low heat, fixed myself a Manhattan in the one remaining mug, and headed for the sunroom.

  The rattan furniture remained where it had been since Mom and Daddy had moved in thirty-three years earlier. Now I sat in Mom’s chair, formerly Daddy’s chair. The teak TV tables were gone, and so was the TV. I stared at the blank, silent wall and cried.

  I ate dinner at the sunroom table, looking out at the canal and reading leftover sections of the Sunday newspaper. I called Klein, and told him I was too tired to talk. I took a long, hot shower and got into bed with All Things Wise and Wonderful, one of the James Herriot books from Mom’s shelf. I opened it to the middle, read maybe two pages, and fell asleep.

  Despite all the preliminary sorting and cleaning we had done, it took me two full days to pack the boxes bound for my house, tote things to Goodwill, sell the car, and find homes for the left-behind furniture. Over the years, Mom had done a great job pruning and organizing, or I would have been there for a week or more. The fact that she had been diligent about getting rid of broken and unwanted items meant that Mom really cared about everything that was left. I struggled with every decision. Well, maybe not every one. It was easy to throw away old cleaning supplies, some threadbare washcloths, and the ancient forty-pound ironing board that Mom had owned since she was married.

  The truth is, I made it harder than it needed to be. The new owners had said I could leave anything I didn’t want, and I could have called one of those estate sale companies and sold them everything for one price—but I was afraid I might miss something I should keep. By the end of day one, I felt too paralyzed to make any more decisions. When I realized I’d been staring at the books in the dining room for fifteen minutes trying to figure out what to do, I called Lenore, and asked her to come and help me.

  Early the next morning, Lenore identified a few books that she thought might be valuable, and said I should have them appraised. She told me to choose five that I really wanted; I settled for ten. She chose five that she wanted. Then she helped me pack what was left, and she took them to donate to the library. We did the same thing with the porcelain and glass collectibles in the dining room sideboard. We each chose items we really wanted, then packed the rest for Lenore’s church bazaar.

  That left the car and the furniture to deal with. A good friend from Suncoast Hospice, where I still did some work now and then, came to my rescue. Her daughter-in-law bought the car, and her work colleague took the dining room furniture. I had the car cleaned and detailed, and drove it to my friend’s house that evening. We went out for dinner, and then she drove me back to the condo.

  I poured some wine into a paper cup I’d found in a drawer, picked up one of my ten books, and headed for the sunroom. I sipped my wine and looked at the room where Mom and Daddy had spent most of their time—the room where Daddy had died. I couldn’t imagine that furniture anywhere else. I decided to leave it—my version of a shrine, perhaps.

  The next morning, I made myself some instant coffee. I carried it to the sunroom and sat at the rattan table looking out at the canal. A single pelican sat on the edge of the sea wall. The tide flowed slowly toward the gulf. Every few minutes, a mullet burst through the surface, twisting slightly and then flopping back into the water. Daddy once asked me why mullet jump. I pretended to know all about it, telling him it was an evolutionary holdover from a time when they leapt from pool to pool looking for food. At first, he seemed to believe the story; then we both laughed. I missed him, and at the same time, I was grateful for the sudden death that had spared him the anguish of further aging.

  I wandered outside and dumped the last of my coffee in the canal. Then I got into my overstuffed SUV and drove away from the condo for the last time.

  Everything about that move was sad and full of fear. There had been no sense of adventure or new horizons, no excitement about setting up a new household or meeting new people. It represented the end of Mom’s complete independence, and it was the end of Barbara’s independence from Mom, as well.

  During the five days she stayed at Barbara and Phil’s house, waiting for her furniture to arrive in New Bern, Mom was miserable, and Barbara had to deal with that misery in close quarters. It was the worst possible time for them to be thrown together without me as a buffer.

  Chapter 11

  I CALLED BARBARA’S HOUSE EVERY DAY. Mom cried. She begged us to undo everything and let her go back to New Port Richey. I told her to hang in there until the furniture arrived, and she could actually be in her own place.

  “Give it a chance,” I said. “Give it a month or two, at least.”

  Barbara said Mom seemed terminally homesick.

  “Well, it’s only been a few days,” I said.

  I reminded Barbara about her first week of college. Mom, Daddy, and I had come home from church on Sunday to find Barbara sitting on the living room couch when she was supposed to be on campus.

  “Your point?” she asked.

  “Mom and Daddy made you go back that very day, saying you had to try it for another few weeks before throwing in the towel. After that, we had to beg you to come home.”

  “I know, but I was a kid,” Barbara whined.

  “Well, she probably feels like a kid,” I said. “Look, I know it’s
hard on both of you. But it just has to get better.”

  When the truck arrived, Barbara and Phil placed the furniture, unpacked the kitchen, made up the bed, and finally brought Mom to McCarthy Court. I was working at the offices of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization in Alexandria, Virginia when I got a frantic call from Barbara. Mom wanted her bedsheets—where were they? Mom had used the same sheets for almost a decade. How they had lasted through frequent washings for that long, I cannot imagine. The sheets featured black Japanese-ink-style drawings of a cat on a light brown background, but what Mom really loved was how soft they were.

  “I left those sheets for Colleen—you know, the maintenance worker who is taking the bed. They’re ancient, and they won’t fit her new smaller bed,” I told Barbara. Now I was frantic and crying. I’d been trying so hard, and still I was failing Mom.

  “Is there any way to get them?”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  I called Susan in the condo office and asked her to help. I told her where the sheets were in the house, and asked if she would mail them to Barbara.

  “Of course,” Susan said. Then she asked how Mom was doing.

  “She’s having a hard time, but I keep hoping that once she gets settled, it’ll be better. Please call me and let me know if you find the sheets,” I said. “I know it sounds crazy, but she really wants them.”

  Susan called an hour later, and said the sheets were in the mail. I called Barbara.

  “Mel, I’m losing it,” she said. “My anxiety is out of control. I don’t think I can do this. It feels like when I had that breakdown. She’s so needy, and I don’t know what to do.”

  “I know. Remember all the times I called you when I was losing it?”