She made a movement as if to reach for it, then seemed to think better of it. Better to feign indifference than to show her physical limitations. She held my gaze, daring me to speak. I looked at the floor. At her feet was a rusted hammer, the grip of the rubber handle rubbed smooth and bare in places.
I started to bend down to pick it up, and she skittered backward, dangerously off balance. I straightened back up and let her get her distance. She managed to reach the wall to support herself and straightened defiantly. After a moment, she limped back to her chair and sat with painful slowness. I bent down and retrieved the hammer.
I turned the hammer over between my hands, feeling its roughness, and looked from it to the boards scattered across the floor and hanging from the doorframe, and back to the hammer again. For some reason, I hadn’t thought about how the door had come to be nailed shut. My eyes found Rose’s, still daring me to offer some rebuke.
How had she managed to nail the door shut with a gnarled hand? She could barely stand. Where had she gotten the planks? How long must she have worked last night? She must have stayed up until early in the morning. Why had she attempted to get the hammer now? Was she going to nail me into the bathroom, trap me in the house, crush my skull? No matter how she’d done it and what she was getting ready to attempt, one thing was certain: her determination and I-will-do-what-I-damn-well-please disposition was still firmly intact.
She continued to glower at me as I turned and walked back through the door, taking the hammer and tossing it into the car. That’s all I needed to worry about, my mom bashing my brains out while I scrubbed the bathroom linoleum. Of course, maybe she’d try to nail the house shut again and would overexert herself and cause a fatal stroke, or would succeed in securing the house and eventually starve. An odd mix of relief and guilt washed over me at the thought.
This was new; I didn’t remember fixating on her death when I was a kid, even at our worst moments together. At times, I would stay awake nearly all night, afraid to fall asleep until I would hear her come back home after meeting up with one of her new men. Once I would hear the door shut again and her loud cursing as she stumbled into a corner of a table, I would be able to drift off, content in knowing that Mom was still safe and alive. Even when she brought one of the men home and forgot she had a child who might be listening, I wasn’t disturbed by the thought of what the men were doing to my mother; I was just relieved that she was home and that she was safe. This new fantasy of her death made me feel dirty and evil. I wasgoing to have to work through this if I hoped to be able to see this through without becoming as hateful as her.
Upon reentering the house, it was evidently clear there would be no more speaking today. She closed her eyes and refused to look at me the rest of the time. I got the boards picked up and stacked them outside, away from the house. Other than holes from the nails and dents from me crashing through, the door seemed to be in fine working order. Miraculously, not even the doorknob was damaged.
I started cleaning in the kitchen. It took me over two hours just to clean the oven, but when I was done, it gleamed like a beacon surrounded by the grime and filth of its environment. I was able to get through half the cabinets before the sun fell. For some reason, being in the house after dark gave me the willies. It looked more dilapidated, and the shadows falling across Rose’s face made her more haggard and crone-like. Early in the afternoon, I’d set out a corned beef sandwich Maudra had sent over. Rose had refused to eat, on her own effort or when I attempted to feed her. The amount of snarling and hissing had almost been comical when I attempted to hold the sandwich close enough for her to bite. At the risk of losing my hand, I conceded and left it sitting on a tray beside her rocking chair. Before I left, I managed to have a pleasant tone in my voice when I told Rose good night and I would see her in the morning.
Thirteen
Itcontinued in that manner for the rest of the week. I would come a little bit before noon every day, and leave before it got too dark. Rose refused to speak to me again. I didn’t make much effort either after I saw her mind was made up. I would come in, say good morning, set the food Maudra sent over on the tray beside her chair, and start cleaning.
It took me the better part of three days to get the kitchen clean. It appeared that Rose hadn’t taken out the trash in months. There were trash bags huddled randomly around, and piles of trash that had never made it to a specified bag. I had to push a few of them out of the way of the door of the refrigerator. There hadn’t been much food in the refrigerator, but what there was hadn’t been put away properly and seemed to have been in there for years. In all actuality, it might have been. Most of it was food that was on paper plates covered with plastic wrap. The majority of the bottoms of the plates had disintegrated, and food had gradually leaked through the wire racks so that there was not an inch of the refrigerator that hadn’t been soiled.
The worst part was trying to clean under the sink. There were piles of trash and rotten food that had fallen out of the trash can or had never actually made it in to begin with. The pipes had leaked, and mildew and mold covered the bottom paneling, which was soft with decay.
I have always hated spiders. They don’t bother me when they are outside; I have often spent a vast amount of time admiring their webs and watching their graceful movements. As a kid, I would go catch small bugs to place inthe webs on our porch. Seeing a spider inside, however, was a very different story. They became macabre aliens that would crawl under your skin and slither their way to your head where they would exit from your nose and eye sockets. Even worse were cockroaches. Just the sight of them made me queasy. There had been a few of each in the cabinets and corners of the room. Several cockroaches in the sink. Surprisingly, none had made their way into the refrigerator. Under the sink was a different matter entirely.
At first I didn’t see anything. I was on my hands and knees; I reached in and picked up the trash can. After I set it on the floor, I reached in to pick up the trash that had fallen out; I noticed an entire gathering of cockroaches that had been underneath the trash can scampering away in search of cover. I let out a curse and felt shivers run down my back. It was then that I felt something on my arm. I looked down and saw a baby-sized amber cockroach making its way through my arm hair. I bellowed at the top of my lungs and lurched backward, knocking over the trash can. The interior contents of the trash can scattered all over the floor, releasing an entire new colony of cockroaches. A whimper was all that escaped my body. I shuddered and felt my stomach begin to convulse, and I scuttled backward like a crab, on my ass and hands, through the kitchen door.
Rose let out a low, scratchy laugh that sounded more like a dog wheezing. It was the only sound I’d heard from her all day. A vision of setting off bug bombs, nailing the door shut with her beloved wooden planks, and casually watching through the window while she asphyxiated in her disgusting recliner flittered through my mind. I didn’t even feel guilty.
I promptly left the house and went to the supermarket and got rubber gloves and bug spray. I also went back to Maudra’s and took a quick bath. When I relayed the experience to Jed on the phone that night, he laughed until he couldn’t breathe. I reminded him how he felt about snakes, but that still didn’t dampen his spirits. We spoke for over an hour. I began to notice how much I truly missed him. How much better everything would be if I could curl up beside him and lay my head on his chest as he ran his fingers over my back.
His voice was soft, and I could tell he was nearly asleep. “You sound different, Brooke. I can’t quite put my finger on it. I was afraid after the first couple of times I talked to you after you got back there that you were reverting back to the timid, self-conscious man you were when we first met. Don’t get me wrong, you were completely adorable, but you didn’t seem like you were very sure of yourself. You were sounding like that again. I was getting nervous.”
For some reason, I couldn’t help feeling irritated. “What did you expect, Jed? After all that happened in Denver and getting the call from Donnie telling me about Rose, and then moving back to Hell, and not even having you with me. Was I supposed to be cheerful? I didn’t know what was waiting for me back here. I still don’t. Mom hasn’t exactly been pleasant, but she hasn’t let loose the way I know she is able. Sure, Maudra, Donnie, and the rest of the Durkes have been wonderful, but I haven’t even seen the rest of the town yet. Who knows what all they’ve been saying ever since I left? It’s going to be a free-for-all.”
“Sweetie, just because my life revolves around you doesn’t mean everyone else’s does too.” I could hear the smile in his voice. It just pissed me off.
“You’re not from a small town. Don’t try to tell me what it’s like. I grew up here, remember? You wait till you get down here. You’ll be the talk of the town too. We’ll see how you like it.”
Jed was silent on the other end of the line. I felt a pang of guilt. This was not how I wanted to spend my time talking with Jed. I had actually been in the mood to get him to talk to me and pretend that we were both in bed together again, and hope I could keep my volume down so Maudra wouldn’t hear. That idea was definitely out the window now.
His voice was even softer now. “That’s what I mean, sweetie. Since I’ve known you, I have never heard that sound in your voice, not even when all the stuff went down here before you left. I’ve heard you angry. Lord knows you’ve been angry with me plenty.” He took a breath. “But I just don’t recognize what I hear in you now. It scares me.”
The guilt got sharper. I pushed it away. “Don’t start lecturing me, Jedediah. You don’t have the right to. You get to be home, where everything is comfortable and you can go about your life. You’re not here, dealing with all this shit, waiting for the axe to fall.”
His pitch changed now. “I’m not lecturing you, Brooke. And it’s not all that easy for me here either. I miss you like crazy. I’m lonely. I’m horny. I am trying to get the rest of our stuff packed, say good-bye to my students and the faculty, dodge questions about why you left your job, and try to figure out who the man is I talk to every day when I call my husband, because I don’t know him.” His voice was more intense, but he wasn’t loud. He sounded sad, defeated.
Neither of us spoke. My heart was pounding in my throat. It ached. It was all I could do to keep the tears from starting. This wasn’t going to work. Jed would not be able to handle being here. He wouldn’t be able to handle me being down here. We should just end it now. I wished I could deny what he was saying, but I couldn’t. Constantly stressed out. Always nervous. Getting angrier and angrier. Envisioning my mother’s death. Yeah, I was changing.
Tears were silently running down my face when he spoke again, startling me. “So, I was looking online today. There’s an opening both in kindergarten and a second grade class in the public school in El Dorado. There’s also a couple of openings at the Christian school there, but I doubt that would be a good decision. There is also a position in ethics at Cottey College in Nevada. It’s only about half an hour from El Dorado, right?”
I choked out a laugh.
“What?” He sounded a little brighter, maybe encouraged that I was able to laugh.
“It’s not Nevada.” He had said it like you would pronounce the name of the state of the same spelling. “It’s Nevada, a longA.”
“You hicks and your pronunciations of incorrectness.” He chuckled. “That’s another thing; I’ve noticed your accent start to come back already. Did you realize you’ve started to say ‘worsh’ and ‘El Dorada’?”
