The Spotless House We Left Behind

What Faye said

I’ve thought a lot about what Faye said next. I think she’d been working on it the whole flight home, the way Natalie had worked on her letter for three weeks. It came out slow, but it came out whole.

“When Brittany was little, she needed me every minute,” Faye said. “She was sick, and she was scared, and she was so unhappy in high school I used to sit outside her door at night. And you never needed anything. You were the one who was fine. You were always the one who was fine.”

“I know, Mom.”

“I told myself that’s who you were. That you could carry more because you always had. And when Britt and Wade started having trouble, I thought, well, Natalie’s fine. Natalie and Eli are saving. They’re happy. Natalie can help.”

Natalie wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist.

“I never once asked if you were tired,” Faye said. “Not once in two years. I watched you at that counter every morning, and I never asked.”

“No,” Natalie said. “You didn’t.”

It was the only hard thing she said the whole call. She said it quiet. She didn’t add anything to it.

Faye was crying then, the way older women cry on the phone, trying to hide it and not managing. “Your dad says I did this. He’s right. He says he did it too, by keeping his mouth shut. He’s right about that too.”

Then Faye said the thing I’ll remember the rest of my life.

“Can your dad and I come out for supper?” she asked. “At your place. Not this week if you’re not ready. Whenever you say. And you don’t have to cook a thing. I’ll bring it all. I’ll do the dishes.”

Natalie looked over at me. Her face was wet and she was smiling, the first smile I’d seen out of her about her mother in a long time.

“Bring a rhubarb pie,” she said.

“I’ll bring two,” Faye said.

Supper at the farmhouse

They came out on Wednesday. Faye carried in a roaster of beef and potatoes and a bag of rolls and two rhubarb pies, and she would not let Natalie touch any of it.

Gordon came in behind her with a gallon of ice cream in a cooler. He shook my hand at the door, harder and longer than he usually did, and didn’t say anything.

We ate at the two kitchen chairs and two overturned five-gallon buckets. Gordon took a bucket without being asked. Faye looked around the kitchen, at the curtains and the old sink and the window looking out on the fields, and said it was the prettiest kitchen she’d ever eaten in. I think she meant it.

After supper, Faye got up and ran the dishwater.

Natalie started to get up too, out of habit. Faye put a hand on her shoulder and pressed her back down into her chair.

“Sit,” she said. “I’ll wash. Your dad will dry.”

And Gordon got up, and took the towel off the oven handle, and dried. He wasn’t good at it. He held each plate like it was a carburetor he wasn’t sure how to put back together. But he dried every one.

Natalie sat at the table and watched her parents do her dishes. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.