What My Mother Hid in the Recipe Box
I was thirty-seven. I had a one-bedroom over on Canal Street and a job I liked, counting and filling behind the counter at Marlow Pharmacy, and a life that was not large but was mine. I gave up the apartment the week she came home from rehab. I told myself it was until she got her feet under her.
She never did get them under her, not all the way. The left side stayed weak. She could walk with the cane on a good day and with me on a bad one. Then her heart began to tire, and there were more bad days than good, and for the last two years she did not go up the stairs at all. We put the bed in the dining room where she could see the bird feeder.
I learned things. I learned how to lift a grown woman out of a bathtub without hurting either one of us. I learned to sleep with my bedroom door open and one ear awake. I learned her pills better than I knew my own birthday, which was easy, since pills are my trade. I learned that an aide costs twenty-five dollars an hour, and that two mornings a week of one, so I could keep my job, ate most of what was left of her Social Security after the supplement and the prescriptions.
Which left the house.
I want to be fair about this, so I will say it plainly. Nobody asked me to pay for the house. My mother fought me on it for the first year. But the oil man does not care who is fighting whom. So I paid the oil. I paid the electric and the insurance and the water. I paid the town and county tax in January and the school tax in September. I paid Walt for the plowing. When the kitchen ceiling stained brown in our second winter, I bought a roof rake with a twenty-foot handle, and after every big snow I stood in the drifts in my father’s old barn coat and pulled it down off the eaves, a strip at a time, so the ice would not back up under the shingles.
My father would have done it. Dad was a lineman for the power company for thirty-one years and he could fix anything that had ever been built. But he has been gone since 2011. There was no man in that house to speak up or to climb a ladder. There was my mother and there was me.
And there was Michelle, two thousand miles off in Scottsdale, Arizona.
My sister is four years older than I am. She married Greg Brandt, who sells commercial air conditioning, which in Arizona is like selling water to people on fire. They have two boys, grown now. She came home twice a year, every year: four days at Christmas and a week in July. She sent pretty cards in between. She called on Sundays.
When she came she stayed at the motel out by the highway. She would bring Mother a new robe and tell me I looked tired. Then she would cry in the driveway and fly home.
I did not hate her for it. I want that understood. Mostly I was too busy to think about her at all.
She stayed through the week of the lawyer. On Friday she asked me to meet her at the house.
I had already packed. It did not take long. When you move into your mother’s house at thirty-seven, you move into a house that is already full, and you find out how little you own. I had my clothes, my books, a lamp, and my coffee maker.