The Maid Out Back Was My Mother

I leaned back and took her face in my hands. There were new lines in it. Her lips were chapped.

“Why would I call Jessica first to come to your house?”

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she looked down at the bucket.

“It’s not my house, Rachel,” she said gently, as if she were breaking bad news to me. “You know that. It’s all right. I’m not angry with you. I never was angry.”

I felt the cold thing settle in deeper.

“Tell me what you think I know,” I said.

She wiped her hands on her pants. She glanced at the big glass doors, where I could see the shape of a woman moving around a kitchen island inside.

“That you signed it over,” my mother said. “To Jessica and Trent. Two years ago, when you decided you were staying over there for good.”

“I decided what?”

“Jessica showed me the paper. I didn’t have my glasses, but she read it to me. She said you didn’t want the taxes and the upkeep hanging over you anymore, with you making a life over there. She said you felt bad about it and didn’t want to talk about it, and that I shouldn’t bring it up on the phone and make you feel worse.” She swallowed. “So I didn’t.”

I thought about two years of phone calls.

Every one of them had been on Jessica’s phone, on speaker, with Jessica somewhere in the room saying, “Mom, tell her about the church picnic.” My mother’s own phone, Jessica had told me, was a flip phone that would not take international calls, and Mom could not manage the apps.

Every call, my mother had sounded bright and brief. Fine, honey. Everything’s fine. Don’t you worry about me.

I had thought she was being brave about missing me.

“Mom,” I said, “I never signed anything. I never signed this house over to anyone. I have paid the taxes and the insurance on it every single year. And I have sent eighteen hundred dollars a month, every month for three years, to the account Jessica set up for your groceries and your medicine and whatever you needed.”

My mother’s mouth opened a little.

“Eighteen hundred,” she said.

“Every month.”

She looked down at her red hands, and I watched her do the arithmetic that I had already done. Thirty six months. Sixty four thousand, eight hundred dollars.

“She gives me forty dollars on Fridays,” my mother said quietly. “For my personal things. She says that’s what’s left after my share of the household.”

I did not say anything, because I did not trust what would come out.

“Where do you sleep?” I asked.

She did not want to tell me. I could see that. My mother spent her whole life keeping hard things away from her girls, and she was still trying to do it on her knees on a patio.

“Mom. Where do you sleep?”

“They needed the upstairs,” she said. “Trent has his office in the one room, and the exercise bicycle in the other, and the guest room has to stay nice for when his parents come. It’s fine, Rachel. It’s warm. The dryer keeps it warm.”

“The laundry room.”

“There’s a cot. It’s a good cot.”