“Actually.” Mom pauses, smushes her lips together, and starts again. “Actually, we were planning to sell the house and move down there.”
They bought a new home. Shit.
The pit in my stomach threatens to swallow me whole. “We’re…moving?”
“Well. Your father and I are moving.” Mom doesn’t trail off so much as end her sentence right in the middle, holding her breath while I draw my own conclusions.
They’re moving, and I’ll just need to figure it out.
“Once you’re off at U of I, we won’t really have a whole lot keeping us here anymore,” Mom explains. “All my friends moved away years ago, and Dad and I are both just about ready to retire, and with you gone, we just won’t need this kind of space anymore. We’re always planning these trips down to Florida and spending all this money, and, well, we just thought…it’s time.”
As she works through her clearly rehearsed explanation, Dad nods along in agreement. I wonder if he helped her practice this little speech, if they first ran through it on the plane or when they were touring the place. Has this always been the plan? Have they looked at condos before? And where—if anywhere—do I fit it in?
“This is all great,” I lie. “But…what if I don’t get into U of I?” I try to steady my voice, hoping I come off more nonchalant than I feel.
Mom and Dad share a quick look, thinking I won’t notice. “Then we’d help you find an apartment here,” Dad says.
If there’s a deep breath to be found in this house, in this town, my lungs can’t find it. From the root of my tongue to the base of my stomach, nothing will move. Not a word, not a breath, not a scream.
“You could get something closer to school or closer to Sip,” Mom offers, tucking her phone away. “Your own place with your own stuff. And so long as you’re still in school, we can still help out here and there.” She rattles off something about an apartment complex she’s shown to a few younger clients of hers, selling me on the faux luxury of having my own shitty apartment in the suburbs. None of it sticks.
“So how soon are we selling the house?” I ask.
“Well, it’ll take a week or two to stage it,” Mom says. “Make it look all neat and spiffy for the listing photos.”
I stretch my arms wide, an unintended imitation of Dad in the shower of their new condo. Their newhome. “This”—I look left to right, regretting my excellent cleanup job—“this isn’t neat and spiffy enough?”
Mom’s mouth puckers at the sides, panicked eyes turning toward Dad, silently begging him to intervene.
“Your room, Murph,” Dad explains. “We’ll just need to stage your room.”
If I didn’t know better, I’d think God swatted the earth and rocked its orbit backward. Of course. My room. The only room that shows any signs of someone living here. I want to push back, to remind them that I have a final coming up. I need more time. I’m not ready. But all I can croak out is “Oh.”
“Oh honey.” Mom squeezes me into an uncomfortable side hug. I’m no longer a soldier coming home. I’m a twenty-one-year-old mooch being kicked out of her parents’ house. “We know it’s not a fun conversation to have, Murph. We were planning to take you out to dinner and tell you, show you all the apartments we’ve already picked out for you. We thought you’d be excited not to be stuck in yourparents’ houseanymore.”
Her delivery onparents’ houseis that of someone sayingspoiled milkorathlete’s foot. She’s doing the realtor thing, the thing I’ve seen her do with her clients dozens of times when they lose out on listings and she suddenly wants to make a perfectly good house seems like the completely wrong fit.You didn’t want a place with only two bedrooms, did you? It’s a shame you got outbid,but did you really want to live with an unfinished basement?She normally pairs it with a slow shake of her head, subconsciously getting her buyers to agree.You’re so right, that’s not what we wanted at all.Predictably, the next words out of Mom’s mouth are accented by her head shaking side to side. “You didn’t want to live with us for the rest of college, right?”
My cheeks overheat, and I wouldn’t be shocked to see steam come out of my ears. Of course I didn’t want to live with them for the rest of college. I didn’t even want to be here this semester. But I’m not going to let Mom use her goddamn real estate tactics on me. I’m not her client. I’m her daughter. “Why were you already picking out apartments around here?” I ask. “Because you didn’t think I’d get into U of I, right?”
Mom winces, and her mouth opens, but no words come out. Fuckin’ figures. Dad steps in with a “Well, Murph, you gotta understand—”
“Well, you’re right,” I interrupt, then press my tongue to the roof of my mouth. The tears come anyway. My parents have the exact right amount of confidence in me, which is to say, none at all.
“Honey…” Dad starts, taking a cautious step forward. I cut him off with a flat palm held up like a traffic guard. It’s the sort of thing Mom would usually chew me out for, reminding me to be respectful of my father. Right now, she doesn’t say a word.
“No, I mean it,” I choke out. “I missed the transfer deadline because I was so busy with the Sip renovations. So congratulations, you called it. Your daughter is exactly the deadbeat you always knew she was.”
“Oh sweetie, I’m so sorry.” Mom’s voice is thick with heartbreak, but not an ounce of surprise.
“Yeah. I think I’m just gonna head to…” I arrive at the end of the sentence before I can decide how it’s going to end. Where am I supposed to go? Work? School? Kat drove back to U of I this morning, so it’s not like I can go to her house. “I’m gonna head up to my room, is that okay?”
I feel simultaneously too young and too old for this moment, asking for permission in a house that is entirely mine and entirely not mine, all at once. This is the only home I’ve ever lived in, the only place the maps app has ever put the little house icon. My house, except not my house at all. At some point, the house you grew up in is supposed to turn a corner from “my house” to “my parents’ house,” but that never happens if you never leave it. Until now, I guess.
“We love you,” Dad says, and I snatch my phone off the counter and head for the staircase, leaving behind fragments of a conversation that will remain unfinished.
Upstairs, I slide into the home base of my bed, breathing in the mix of coffee and detergent that everything I own takes on. It’s a comforting smell. A home smell.Thishome. I remember how my pillowcase always smelled just a little different after a sleepover at Kat’s. It’s the only frame of reference I have to tell me that, even with the same job and the same fabric softener, this smell will eventually tune itself to wherever I live next. I’ll probably forget this smell altogether.
I know I’m being dramatic. People move all the time. I just always thought that, when I left this house, it’d be onward andupward and of my own accord, and it would always be mine to come back to.
