The Spotless House We Left Behind

The mornings

I want to tell you about the mornings, because those are what I remember most.

Every weekday morning, I came up the basement stairs at six fifteen in my gray work T-shirt, and the kitchen would already be full of light coming through the window by the sink.

Brittany would be at the island with her coffee mug, scrolling her phone. Her long blonde hair would be down over a white sweater, because Faye kept the air conditioning cold. The kids would have eaten and gone to the living room for cartoons.

Natalie would be at the counter by the sink in her yellow rubber gloves, her dark hair up in a messy bun, scrubbing a stack of plates and cereal bowls and the skillet from Gordon’s eggs.

I’d grab a towel off the oven handle and stand next to her and dry. I had about fifteen minutes before I had to leave. I spent most of them there.

Brittany never got up. I don’t think it crossed her mind. She’d read something off her phone and laugh, or tell us about a fight Wade had started over the phone bill, or ask Natalie if she could keep the kids on Saturday.

Natalie always said yes.

One morning, I remember, Brittany held up her phone to show us a picture of a cottage with roses climbing up a stone wall. “Someday,” she said. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I just dried the skillet and hung the towel back on the oven.

Why we didn’t just say no

People have asked me since why we put up with it. Why we didn’t just tell Faye no, or tell Brittany to rinse her own bowl, or tell the whole family off at the supper table.

The plain answer is that it was their house and their rules. We were guests who paid rent. We could follow the rules, or we could leave. Those were the only two choices we really had.

And it wasn’t my place to fight my wife’s mother at her own table. I’d only been in the family three years. Natalie had been in it her whole life. It was her call when to go, and I wasn’t going to make it for her.

She did try once. The first Christmas, she asked her mom if Brittany could maybe take the dishes on Sundays. Just Sundays.

Faye didn’t even look up from her grocery list. “Your sister has three kids and a husband who’s never home,” she said. “You have it easy, Natalie. Don’t be petty.”

Natalie never asked again. She just did the dishes.

Gordon was in the next room when Faye said it. He heard it. I saw him lower his newspaper a couple of inches and then raise it again. That was the most I ever saw him do, those two years.

I didn’t hold it against him then. I hold it against him a little less now. Gordon spent forty years at the county highway shop running a road grader, and he is the kind of man who would rather fix a culvert in a blizzard than have a hard conversation in a warm kitchen.