“Housemom” by Hannah Gregory

At thirty-eight, I learn the alphabet of dying. Advanced directives. Biopsy. Cancer. My mom spends a month in the hospital just before Christmas. The rest of us—my dad, brother, and I—sit by her side in the oncology unit. I hold her hand that’s bruised and taped up with a needle thingamajig. When I was a kid, she was strung with those same thin tubes at a Delaware hospital, after she almost drowned at Rehoboth Beach. That word, again—drowning. Online, caretakers describe my mom’s disease as a yearlong drowning. 

My brother, Robbie, and I pass our phones back and forth, laughing at dumb memes in the cafeteria, as we become part of the hospital’s rhythm. Our dad becomes an aphorism generator. He says to take things one day at a time. Meanwhile, nurses and doctors talk with the elegance of a freight train. I cry by myself, next to windows in quiet corners, with a half-eaten sandwich getting soggy in my lap. Mom is lucid at times. She asks when Katy is coming around, my first serious girlfriend who broke up with me when I transitioned years ago. My childhood toys are still in the basement, she says, and to please make sure my kids—that I don’t have—get some enjoyment out of them. I say, yes, of course, but Robbie’s kid—that he does have—might have fun with them too. She says, tearfully, she’s just glad that my life is full of love and purpose. It’s not. I date questionable people. I work for a nonprofit that believes its workers can pay the bills by believing in the mission. So, I smile and say, thanks, Mom. Someday, my life is going to make sense and I’m afraid she’s not going to be around to see me happy.

After visiting hours, Dad, Robbie, and I walk through the near-empty parking lot, speechless, under streetlamps decorated with wet, red-bowed wreaths. When I return to my apartment every night, I don’t cry. I crumple.

---

We bring Mom home, a milestone, with a walker and a year left to live if we’re lucky. Before the semester starts, Robbie decides to bring his family to stay for a week at our parents’ house. Robbie is a directionless, non-tenure-track lecturer of Marxist history at a small liberal arts college two hours away. His wife, Samantha, is a “consultant” who specializes in “asset oversight” for “troubled municipalities” at a “Big Four.” Other than a respect for each other’s bitterness, what they love about each other baffles me. They have a four-year-old son named Kevin, whom Samantha calls Little Mouthful. The nickname hasn’t caught on with anyone else. She reposts content from a Freudian mommy influencer and I assume the name refers to the oral stage of psychosexual development. 

The day Robbie is supposed to arrive, I am at the house before him. My eyes itch and my mouth feels coated with dust. The fridge is full of slimy, wilted greens, collapsed fruit, and leftovers furred with mold. A slab of drywall has slid off the studs and shattered across the kitchen floor into powder and wallpapered chunks. The house should be livable before Robbie arrives and, eventually, I convince Mom to boss me around. She has to relearn how to navigate the house with her walker, pushing and lifting the wheels over the carpets and rugs, the wooden wedges between the door frames. I drag the garbage can from under the sink and clear the rotten food from the fridge. I vacuum the rug under the dining table. More things to fix keep appearing as I move through the house. Torn tissues on the floor. A picture frame that’s fallen off the wall and left behind a jagged hole. She tells me I missed a spot with the vacuum and the picture frame that I hung was crooked. A year ago, I would have been annoyed by the moving target of her expectations, but now, I am just happy that she’s here, alive to tell me that the ceiling lamp has a dead lightbulb that’s been driving her crazy and if I could please change it out. After an hour, my mom is tired and she settles down for a nap. I haven’t been able to find my dad. I hear his sounds in the walls—groaning, tapping, dull footsteps—and I assume he’s in some secret corner, repairing or making things worse.

I help Robbie unload his car and we settle in the living room. Kevin a.k.a. Little Mouthful is playing a brightly-colored game on Robbie’s phone where different types of beans (pinto, black, garbanzo, jelly) have been scrambled in a grid. Whenever he lines up several beans in a row, the beans vanish and the phone makes a farting noise. In between moves, Kevin rams his finger up his nose and slides boogers on the screen. Samantha sits on Robbie’s lap, twirling his shaggy beard. She asks for updates about my life, but I have difficulty looking at her directly. 

“Your job,” she says to me, “you’re still at that dysfunctional non-profit?”

“Unfortunately,” I say. 

“It says a lot about a person when they won’t leave an abusive relationship.”

She asks me about the lack of raises and promotions, if I’ve ever considered moving away from home and if I’m seeing anyone, which I hesitate to answer, but in my hesitation, she becomes persistent that I answer with anything but no. Her barrage of questions is not because she’s interested in me, but because she takes pleasure in other people’s injuries. Her gossip is usually full of colleagues lacking self-preservation at company parties: partners having affairs with new hires and interns vomiting where vomit shouldn’t be. She assumes every trans person’s life is tragic. I tell Samantha I have a girlfriend, but don’t tell her I am the affair.      

Her name’s Clara and she’s an assistant editor at a small publisher. The way Clara talks about her work makes me think she hates reading. There are hardly any books in her apartment, which is decorated with plants, inoffensively-designed West Elm furniture, and flourishes that make me nauseous. A banner hangs over her bed, spelling FLAWLESS in bubbly, gold-glittered letters, and I have taken to calling her Flawless as a joke that she interprets as a compliment. Clara is getting married in mid-July and she has said that this, whatever this is between me and her, will end then. I am Clara’s promiscuous life that she can abandon whenever it becomes too dangerous or personal for her. 

“Is this person marriage material?” Samantha asks.

“It’s on the horizon,” I say, with regret, but also as a joke for myself.

“You have to bring Clara around before we leave,” Samantha says. “I bet your mom would love her.”

A loud, juicy fart spills out from the phone in Kevin’s hands. Blood drips down his upper lip and onto his shirt too. Samantha crouches down and plugs two tissues up his nose.

“Don’t take them out, Little Mouthful, until your nosebleed is over,” she says.

“He’s gotten blood all over the carpet, Sammy,” Robbie says.

“Did you get your bodily fluids all over the floor, Lil Mouthie?”

Kevin shakes his head and tries to remove the tissues rammed in his nose, which saturate with blood. Samantha removes Kevin’s shirt and tosses it to Robbie.

“What do you want me to do with this shirt?” Robbie says.

“I want you to clean it,” she says.

“Then tell me to clean it. Don’t just throw it at me.”

“I’ll clean Little Mouthful and the floor. You: the shirt. Unless your bourgeois ass needs your servant wife to clean up everything.”

Robbie lets out a loud punch of a laugh. “I could live in poverty, you know. Rice and beans are a complete protein. We could feed this family for ten dollars a week.”

Kevin’s stomach juts out as if he’s pregnant, but his chest is flat, almost concave. His nipples are pink dimes that barely exist. I feel bad for him. Every time I hear Samantha say Little Mouthful, I want to crawl into a cave and be mauled by a bear. I hope he doesn’t turn into a selfish twerp like his parents and stays the feral freak he is. Robbie gets up and tussles Kevin’s hair. Samantha pulls the back of Robbie’s shirt as he tries to walk towards the laundry room and she wraps her arms around his neck. 

“Robert loves it when I tease him,” she says to the room and kisses him. 

He responds in a tiny, froggy voice: Iloveit-iloveit-iloveit. Kevin sits on the floor, pulls out the bloody tissues, and casts them onto the carpet. Blood drips back down his nose as Samantha and Robbie peck at each other’s lips like hungry, oblivious birds.

For the rest of the afternoon, Robbie watches football and Dad appears, gliding through the house, one hand clutched around his pants waistline. Faint whiffs of wet paint follow him. He has hardly spoken since the diagnosis. Every other week, he awls another hole in his belts to keep his pants from falling down his two-by-four waist. I wish I could articulate the right words that would open him up. I want to hear him say that he’s angry or upset, that my mom’s life is worth fighting for, and how we need to support each other through this illness. 

I text Clara how I’ve only been home for a few hours and I already need a break from my family. Clara responds that we’re overdue for a tryst and we make dinner plans for next week.

Wear something cute, she texts. Don’t try to beta-test your mourning clothes on me.

I’m at the movies rn and people behind me are maaaaaaad I’m texting. 

It’s not my fault Victorian England was dimly lit!!!

I tell her this sounds great and react to all of her texts with a !! or HA HA. 

Our relationship has a bumper car rhythm. Clara has no facades and loves no one except herself. When we make out, there is too much saliva and the way she presses my lips against my teeth feels like Play Doh flattened between two palms. Our sex is slow, often clumsy. She is forceful, as if there were no greater injustice than having control taken away from her. But I like the bruises she gives me. Feeling small often feels better than processing my grief. The first time we fucked, she said not to friend her on social media. She doesn’t want any evidence we exist. I found her wedding website anyway and looked through the couple’s smiling photos: hiking in Bavaria; eating poutine in Montreal; half-naked, covered in mud at Burning Man. Maybe they’re not happy. He could be a starter husband, a placeholder until she discovers something better.

Night arrives abruptly and, for dinner, I make chili. The fridge has stopped working and I quickly pull out the first things I see: spinach, chicken sausage, pizza sauce. Kevin drinks his out of a cup. Steam pours from his mouth as sauce and chopped onions trickle down his chin and neck. He mimes a chef’s kiss and says, “Ahhh! Buonissimo!” When I try to eat, it burns my tongue. Everyone else blows on their spoons before carefully tipping the chili into their mouths.

“We were thinking about going to Delaware for the summer,” Robbie says. “Rehoboth Beach. Like when we were kids. We could rent a house and everyone could come.”

“I’ve never been,” Samantha says, with the conspiratorial air of a pre-planned conversation. “I hear it’s lovely that time of year.”

“The summer?” I say. “It’s a beach. Of course it’s lovely in the summer.”

There had been an unspoken moratorium on Rehoboth Beach since my mom almost drowned there. For years, we would go out of our way to avoid mentioning Delaware, even though most of my dad’s family still lived there. Dad would say, Aunt Liz’s house, or, the state where I grew up. My brother was too young to remember how traumatic that time was, seeing my mom carried off into the ocean, and then brought back unconscious by a lifeguard with a blurry Sublime tattoo on his pillowy, deeply bronzed pec, an image that I always see whenever I think of this moment. The lifeguard had stiff-armed my mom’s chest until she coughed up seawater and vomited in the sand. Even then, I had wanted to believe that Mom would always be around and that motherhood was the same as immortality. When she woke up, she laughed, scaring me, as the paramedics wrapped her in a thin, silvery blanket and brought her to the hospital. Now, her face reminds me of how broken she had looked in the ambulance. She’s bent forward, shaky, but she is smiling, as she follows along with the conversation.

“Yes. The summer,” Samantha says. “You could bring your girlfriend or themfriend, or whoever you’re playing around with these days.”

“Her name’s Clara,” I say.

“Well, don’t forget to invite us to your wedding.”

“What’s that?” I say, changing the subject to get a rise out of her. “Is that a library that needs privatizing?”

She says, in one quick breath, rising out of her chair: “Privatizing libraries is a perfectly efficient method to resolve budget crises in distressed municipalities.”

I turn to Robbie and say, “I thought you were a Marxist.”

“Stop pretending like we’re not a normal family with a normal happy life,” Samantha says.

“I’m happy, too,” I say, and hate how desperate it sounds. No one says anything except Kevin, who is meowing and slurping his glass of milk with his tongue. 

“I wouldn’t plan around me,” my mom says. Her spoon rests on the edge of her bowl and she has stopped eating. “I may not be around this summer.”

My eyes meet Robbie’s and he has a sad, helpless look on his face. My dad too. Kevin holds out his empty cup to Samantha and pssts at her, as if trying to draw attention from a cat.

“Positive vibes,” Samantha says, scooping more chili into Kevin’s cup. 

“If you want to go, just rent a house and we can decide later,” I say.

“Okay,” Samantha says, with unbroken eye contact towards me. “But we won’t know what size house to rent. And if we wait until May, there might not be anything left. Now’s the best time to find a place to rent, unless you’d rather vacation in some dump like Atlantic City.”

“Let’s talk about this later,” Robbie says.

“Okay, comrade,” she says.

“Don’t be like that,” he says.

Samantha says mmhmm, and smiles at her own joke. We eat the rest of dinner in silence. At one point, Kevin lets out a loud burp and Robbie gives him a light punch on his shoulder. Kevin growls with sauce-grouted teeth. After cleaning up, I pull Robbie aside into the hallway.

“Do you really think bringing Mom back to Rehoboth is a good idea?” I ask.

“She told me she wanted to go back,” he says.

“When?”

“Earlier.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“What’s gotten into you today?”

“Nothing. Just. Nothing,” I say. “Never mind.”

“Listen,” he says. “She said she needed to go back. It seemed important to her. And don’t you think it would be nice to have a family vacation one more time while she’s still around?”

Around for what? I want to say. No longer dying?

“Is that the best thing for her right now?” I ask.

“Yeah, I mean, I dunno, dude,” he says. “Sorry. I mean. I dunno.”

I shrug and make a face, like, it’s all good. “Dude can be gender neutral,” I say.

“I try to be better than that, though,” he says, embarrassed.

Before I leave, I help Mom into bed. The quilt she made is patched with green vines and bright, colorful pops of flowers. It’s heavy and seals her in. She looks as if she’s going to lay down by a river in a lush forest.

“When were you going to tell me that you had a fiancée?” she asks.

“We’re not engaged,” I say. 

“St. Joseph’s is a nice place to get married. Remember Father Tom, who baptized your brother? He said he’d never seen a baby’s penis so crooked.”

“Mom,” I say and laugh. “I am dating someone. There’s no wedding. Her name’s Clara. She likes books. She’s flawless, really.”

“Bring her around next Saturday before Robbie leaves. Everyone wants to meet her.”

My mom will be charmed by anyone I bring around. Clara would be the first girlfriend my mom has met since Katy, who visited regularly and engaged in our family traditions, like pizza on Christmas Day and fireworks brought from New Hampshire on the Fourth of July. I wasn’t happy then. We all knew it. I drank too much. I argued with Samantha about her asinine, meritocratic outlook on life. I want to show my mom that I’m capable of finding oases of love and fulfilment in my own life. But Clara can be a wildcard and I have an urge to protect her from Samantha. Do I love Clara? I don’t think I do, even though I want something like love from her. This relationship is the closest thing I’ve felt to being desired since I transitioned, a feeling that’s impossible to explain to my mom. I have the urge to protect her too.

This relationship is the closest thing I’ve felt to being desired since I transitioned, a feeling that’s impossible to explain to my mom.

“We don’t have to go to the beach if you don’t want to,” I say.

“What beach?”

“Rehoboth. Robbie and Samantha brought it up.”

“Oh. Yes,” she says. “Robbie wants to go.”

“We never really talked about what happened, but, it might be an emotional experience going back. Or overwhelming. I’m here to talk about it if you want.”

“It’s fine.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m a strong swimmer,” she says.

“I know that Mom,” I say. 

She closes her eyes and says: “I was sad once, but it was different then. The expectations we put on ourselves. Now, let me get some rest.”

Her breaths are labored, rattling, and coughs snag her awake. I stay with her until she falls asleep. I want to believe she needs us, and that she knows the world is more alive with her in it, and that it’s okay if she was a little weak in that moment, we’ve had many good times since.

---

I wake up at odd hours, usually at two a.m., and fall back asleep around five or six. Every morning, I have to convince myself that my mom is dying. I don’t want her to die, but grief is a kind of love and all love will drown your heart in an acid bath at some point or another. I’m stuck thinking about our biannual road trips to Rehoboth Beach. Every other year, we were trapped in summer New Jersey turnpike traffic and passing through the cloying, rotten smells of factories and farms, as my brother and I pleaded for rest stop McDonald’s or Sbarro’s or a Nathan’s hot dog. We cried, we whined, we laughed and laughed as we crossed the Delaware River and said that’s a long river, George Washington probably peed in the river when crossing it—he peed in the Delaware River, you see, the Delaware River is full of his pee. My mom smiled back at us, not understanding why the joke was so funny and my dad was tired of driving, wishing for a beer and children knocked out with the drunkenness of a road-trip. We arrived at sunset, at low tide, sandbars exposed like bare gums, but the ocean still so vast and endless as we dipped our feet in the warm, leftover pools of seawater and asked Mom why the sun wasn’t setting over the ocean like the movies and my mom calmly said to us like we were adults that this is the Atlantic, sweetie. I asked if we could go to the Pacific next year and she cried instead of making a promise. There were many days like that even before vacation. Tears. Keeping our house intact. Removing a black mold that would never go away. Many years later, when I came out to her, she had said there will be deep, deep pits of weariness in my life, full of doubt and questioning that doubt, where nothing feels fixable and you watch the ridges lengthen and deepen in your skin and wonder where all the good years have gone. That’s okay. That’s how we live. I’ll get beyond it. But there we were on the last day of vacation, the sun as terrible as that stupid Sublime logo, and Mom being swept away into the horizon, fighting against the ocean but also letting the water drag her under. We stopped going to Rehoboth after that trip. 

When morning plasters the curtains, I text my brother that I think I need a lobotomy if I’m ever going to be happy again. He says he knows a guy. The doc is imprecise, but he’s quick. I say sure, but does he take catastrophic insurance? Robbie’s not sure, but says maybe check the doc’s Yelp page and ignore the one-star reviews. 

I ask him what he remembers about Rehoboth Beach. Being knocked around by the waves, he texts. The car ride back, all of us sitting in silence and seeing the Twin Towers when they were still standing. The game we played on long car rides where we owned everything outside our windows and I whispered, Robbie look, you own New York City. Did I remember? How he owned New York City and I was stuck with a bunch of billboards and Giants Stadium? Or maybe that was another trip. 

I’m worried about Dad, Robbie texts. I don’t know what he’ll do without Mom.

The house is falling apart too. I’m tired of take-out and room-temperature leftovers.

I tell him I’ll look into refrigerator repair. It’s an old house with low ceilings and oddly-shaped rooms, and needs constant work. My mom’s father designed and built it after the war. When I was three, he died from a blood cancer and our parents moved in shortly after. Robbie was born a couple of years later. 

For my whole life, I’ve associated this house with Mom. The home of her childhood, where Dad placed a corsage on her wrist for prom, where they converted an office into Robbie’s bedroom when he was born. My grandfather taught my mom how to caulk and grout and Mom taught Dad how to retile the bathroom floor. They tag-teamed repairs and garden projects. They would sump out floods in the basement during storms and emerge in the morning, baggy-eyed, spotted with dirty water, and microwave a cup of coffee that had gone cold from the day before. I never had the sense Dad knew how to repair anything without her guidance. He hammered his fingers instead of nails. He always forgot the difference between a Phillips-head and a flat-head. This was love, I thought, taking her lead without question. Simple, unselfish love.

Confronting this loss has turned Dad frail, though language was never his greatest gift. He has always attempted to be the most stoic among us, but vulnerability would bubble up unexpectedly. He would be the only family member to cry during movies. We would sit through the credits as a kind of reverence for what appeared to be a profound experience for him. When Mom was in the hospital after Rehoboth, he hardly spoke then too. I was nine and had to piece together keywords doctors used: IV fluids, shock, dehydration, support system, therapy, anti-depressants. Extracting his emotions is like unclipping the wings of an already flightless bird. We have to wait and hope he’ll reveal what he needs from us. 

I text Robbie how we need to look out for Dad and we need to keep the house livable for him. He responds with a thumbs-up emoji. When I ask him if he thought Mom tried to drown on purpose he texts back: Why do you always go for the darkest ducking possibility?

Fucking*

She told me she was avoiding a jellyfish and got caught in a riptide.

Don’t you think we should try to leave there with one last good memory?

I want to show Samantha what a happy family looks like.  

I wish he wasn’t making this trip about himself, but that last text makes me wonder how much of this desire for a family vacation is coming from Samantha, if she thinks she can replace our mom after she dies, with her Freudian mommy-isms and inability to patch drywall. I want to tell Robbie to not worry about Samantha, but I don’t, so I text back a noncommittal, Sure, instead.

---

Clara and I go on a date far outside of town, at an Italian restaurant known for its garlic-aggressive food. I ask Clara how her wedding planning is going. She eyes me suspiciously and says that July feels so far away. I know what she means. My dad says that every day is a blessing, but to me, anything beyond next week doesn’t exist. 

“I can’t decide if it’s better to be bloated for my fitting or closer to my ideal weight,” she says. 

“What’s your ideal weight?”

“As close to a waif as possible.”

She shows me pictures of wedding dresses on her phone. The models look emaciated and far too young as they pose at European-looking estates, in front of macaron towers and painted portraits of depressed, European-looking women. Waif-like, petite, and European-looking are not words I’d use to describe Clara. She is six feet tall, lacks nuance, and moves like a battering ram.

“I like the dresses that look like bowls of cream,” I say as our dinners arrive. “They seem expensive. Flawless. What’s your budget?”

“They are,” she says. She unfurls the silverware from the napkin and spreads the cloth across her lap. Her engagement ring sits loose on her finger and she spins it easily.

“Have you and your fiancé ever talked about having kids?”

“God, listen to you. You sound like my grandmother,” she says. “No, I want my youth. I want bottles of wine on the Seine. I want pizza with Stanley Tucci. I want people to feel like they have nothing because, when they see me, they’ll know I have everything. Doesn’t that sound perfect?”

While she talks, she forks and twirls her bucatini with the vigor of a concrete mixer. Dots of sauce and roughly-chopped garlic splatter on the edge of the plate. She avoids my gaze and speaks to her pasta, as if eye contact would have ruined her nice soliloquy about youth and defiance of expectations or whatever. I murmur something like an affirmation. 

“Life’s too short to live for other people,” she continues. “Besides vanity, from what I remember, is not a deadly sin. What do you want in life?”

“I want to make rent next month. I want my mom to stop dying.”

“Don’t be so morose. I’ll end things right here if you don’t stop being so moody. Tell me what you want and don’t make it sound like you’re getting last rites while standing in oncoming traffic.”

I think of my mom and say, “I want someone who will love me despite my bad decisions and still give me perfect gifts every year.”

“That’s right. I am your bad decision,” she says with a mouthful of pasta and sauce wedged in the corner of her lips. Her foot slides under the hem of my skirt.

After dinner, we pass a “fog flavored” vape under the restaurant awning. A fine mist diffuses the streetlights. Warm winters still feel like an anomaly. It should be snowing.

“Have you ever seen someone die before?” I ask.

“No, never. I try to avoid death at all costs. Have you?”

“Once. My mom almost drowned when I was young, on a family vacation to Rehoboth Beach. Caught in a riptide, I guess.”

“Rer-hobe-both?” she says, stumbling over the pronunciation.

“Rehoboth,” I say. “It’s in Delaware.”

“I’ve never been.”

“We used to go every other year. If I went back now, I’d think it was some crowded tourist trap. There’s a boardwalk, arcades, taffy shops. It felt like something special then. I remember once my mom was teaching my brother how to swim in the ocean. He had those little floaties on his arms. He was two years old, I think. A wave knocked him over and whisked off his swim trunks. My mom laughed hysterically as she carried my naked brother across the beach, shouting: Don’t mind my naked child! The waves ate his swimsuit!”

“If I ever meet your mom,” she says, “I’ll collapse into a puddle of tears.”

“She’s very kind,” I say. I want to ask Clara if she can come over for dinner next week, but I’m too fragile to be rejected right now. I’ll text her about it.

“The best people die young. How old is your mom?”

My mom laughed hysterically as she carried my naked brother across the beach, shouting: Don’t mind my naked child! The waves ate his swimsuit!

“Sixty-five,” I say.

“I bet she would live another twenty years if she were more selfish.”

I’m tired of thinking about my mom. I hope she’s sleeping well or doing something nice for herself right now. “What did you think of the food?” I ask.

“All Italian restaurants are a scam. They make you pay thirty dollars for an entrée I could have made at home.”

I’m caught off guard by my own laugh. She is, too. At my apartment, she bludgeons my body into something ecstatic and pitiful. I want to tell her that I love her, but I know how embarrassing that sounds.

---

I’m surprised that Clara doesn’t decline my invitation for dinner at my parents’ house next Saturday. When I tell her all the ways my sister-in-law has been a bitch this week and has coerced me into inviting her, Clara responds that bitches like herself will out-bitch lesser bitches and ends her response with a foot emoji stepping on the smiling shit emoji. Besides, parents love her, she texts, she knows how to work them. I had been prepared to plead with her, but she said it was fine, just not to expect anything more serious between us.

When I arrive, the house has deteriorated further and I follow a trail of destruction: saw dust, bent nails, overturned furniture. Samantha is in the kitchen, unhelpfully letting water run in the sink as it cascades over a pile of unwashed dishes. She seems put off by my presence and I avoid her. I don’t know why I’m such a failure in her eyes. Is it my transness? I’ll never know because I never want to be vulnerable with her. A family is comprised of many thorns and she is most of them. 

She tries to attract my attention, but I have drowned her out, my brain occupied by a sound that becomes more audible when I turn off the sink. A tapping, grinding. I attempt to triangulate the noise from different rooms. The living room. Outside my parents’ bedroom, where Mom is sleeping. The garage. My old bedroom connects to the attic with a crawl-space door. It’s cracked open. Inside, my dad is pushing a hand plane over the old framing studs. Wood chips gather around him as he makes each plank thinner and thinner. New studs are piled next to him. The cotton candy insulation has been ripped out and spread loose too. Somehow, he is wet.

I say hello to Dad, sit next to him, and I see a deep sadness in his face. Not one of a child who has been caught red-handed, on the verge of tears to avoid punishment. No, my dad looks more like a spelunker who has been trapped in a cave for months, uncertain what to make of his rescue.

My dad picks up a crowbar from the floor and says, “When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

“Are you okay?” I ask. 

“You can’t unscramble an egg,” he says.

“I know, Dad. I wish we could.”

It’s hard to envision our lives without Mom. Is this his attempt to preserve the house, despite his incompetence with repairs? I don’t know what he’s trying to accomplish. But there are today’s problems, the solutions we’ll discover tomorrow, and the irresolvable questions that will outlive us all. I tell my dad it’s our responsibility to look out for each other and he nods solemnly.

“Thanks, D—,” he says. That’s not my name anymore, but I don’t correct him. I’ll let him stew in his sadness for now. I’m tired too.

---

I enlist Robbie to help me fix and tidy the house. We re-hang pictures and sweep up drywall. Kevin helps turn furniture back over and shouts to us when he discovers the fridge is not broken, but has just been unplugged. We cheer as the fridge’s cold light is restored.

At night, Clara is late. She said she would be here by four and it’s nearly six. We order pizza anyway and my dad drives to pick it up. 

“Your girlfriend’s not real, is she?” Samantha says.

“What time are you leaving tomorrow?” I ask.

“As soon as Robert gets his ass out of bed,” Samantha says, ignoring my jab. “You know he’s been crying himself to sleep? Probably over your mom. He doesn’t think I hear it, but I do.”

“I can talk to him.”

“There’s no need. Someone has to take responsibility for this family when your mom is gone. Besides, that’s what wives are for,” Samantha says. Before I can tell her that she’s being cruel and delusional, she sees my phone light up on the counter and says, “Speaking of, is that yours?”

I open a text from Clara that says Outside? In the driveway, her car’s headlights splash across the trees. When I greet Clara, we kiss and she apologizes for being late. Her friend’s dog ate a candle and had to go to the emergency vet. 

“An expensive candle too,” she says. “It cured her bad breath at least.”

“Maybe we should all be eating candles,” I say. She gives me a playful shove and I stagger away from her. 

“He almost died,” she says.

Before we step inside, I tell her how appreciative I am of her being here, even though what I mean is that I’m appreciative of her being this crass and unlovable person who snaps me out of my sadness and makes me feel human. She laughs and says that it’s frankly adorable how sentimental I can be. She kisses me and it feels tangible, certain, but also like sticking my head into a void that would strangle me if I attempted to hold onto this moment any longer. A small hum exits with my breath. 

Samantha pretends to appear surprised by our entrance. I panic when she raises Clara’s left hand and says, “Now, let me see that rock.” Clara removes her gloves and shows off her ringless hand. 

“Haha,” I say. “That joke never gets old.”

I expect a sharp comeback from Clara, but instead, she rubs her tongue over her teeth, the way I imagine a chef hones their knife before making a cut.

“Well, we’re not getting any younger,” my dad says, as he enters with a stack of pizza.

My mom inches into the kitchen and I introduce her to Clara. 

“What a beauty,” my mom says and holds Clara’s hands in hers, looking up to her. “And tall too. A real Amazon.”

Clara laughs and says, “You have a lovely home.”

Everyone sits down at the dinner table and, above us, I notice a dark water stain around the base of the ceiling fan. Tiny drips have soaked into the center trivet. Robbie looks up to the ceiling, but ignores the water and reaches for a slice of Hawaiian pizza. I don’t say anything either. 

“I hear you’re a writer,” my mom says to Clara. 

“Oh, haha, no,” Clara says. “I’m an editor, which means I get to work with some interesting writers.” 

“Like Barbara Kingsolver?” my mom asks.

“I wish. We’re a small publisher. Translated work. Writers on the fringe. We have a book coming out next month by this Bulgarian author named Savina Makendzhiev. She has 1-in-1,250 odds of winning the Nobel this year.”

“Oh, interesting,” my mom says. “What’s it about?”

“It is interesting,” Clara says and leans closer to my mom. “It’s a satire about this Russian oligarch who, after experiencing nearly everything in the world, creates a space exploration company called The Monstrosity. He spends a week on the moon and, when he returns to Earth, he believes everyone in his life has been replaced by replicas. His wife—who, at the beginning of the book, is this docile, compliant woman—has suddenly turned into this boss, this Lady Macbeth-type who tries to manipulate him into assassinating all of his enemies.”

“And then what happens?”

“The man befriends a rat, a common street rat, who becomes his only friend.”

Samantha laughs and says, “Seriously?”

“Sounds like Ratatouille,” my mom says, ignoring Samantha.

“Exactly!” Clara says and looks to Samantha with a brief, taunting smile. “But get this: the rat is actually an accomplice of the wife. When the man refuses to name his wife as head of The Monstrosity, the rat bites him, sending him into this fever dream for the next four-hundred pages, where he confronts all of the damage he’s caused throughout his life.”

“What will they come up with next?” my mom says sweetly. 

My mom and Clara are warm with each other. Their voices resonate at the same homey pitch. Whenever my mom’s shallow, persistent coughs take over and she appears self-conscious about interrupting their conversation, Clara waves them off and says, it’s okay, everyone coughs. Seeing Clara like this makes me doubt how cynical she really is. While they talk, I nod along and smile. I wipe my hands on the coarse paper napkin dotted with foggy oil spills of cheese and sauce, propping my cheek on my loose fist, and add approving mms and hahas. This is the liveliest I’ve seen my mom in months, since her sudden illness and her return home, as she’s moved around rooms lethargic, pale, ready to slip off into countless sleeps. And maybe this is what this is. A bright, motherly peace that now trusts I’ll continue to search for happiness and meaning when she’s no longer here. 

But I can feel Samantha’s agitation at the table’s opposite end. Her laughs are loud. Samantha’s prickly invitations to conversation with Robbie, my father, and Kevin fail to magnetize the whole table towards her. She repeats and emphasizes Kevin’s nickname—Little Mouthful, Little Mouthful, Little Mouthful—as if he’s doing something unique. I pivot my head over to him and he is eating his pizza, uncharacteristically, like an adult, leaving strips of burnt crust gathered in a tidy pile. Mom is oblivious to offers to refill her plate. She won’t budge from Clara as pizza boxes are opened in front of her, shuffled like a deck of thick, greasy cards. 

At an abrupt pause in our conversation, Samantha says, “Any plans this summer? You two. Hello? The lovebirds.”

“It’s only January,” I say. 

“This is what we do. We plan. We dream of warmer months. We execute the plan.”

“Do you have plans?” Clara asks.

“Rehoboth Beach,” Samantha says. “It used to be a family tradition, I’ve learned.”

“Oh. Rehoboth?” Clara says and laughs, saying Rehoboth correctly this time. “What a tourist trap. And it’s so crowded.”

“Are there sharks in Rehoboth Beach?” Kevin says, dropping the Hs in Rehoboth so that it sounds like rowbutt. 

“Of course there are, Little Mouthful. There are sharks at every beach.”

Kevin ducks under the table and I feel him squirming between our legs. Our bodies jolt every time he knocks against us.

“We’ll have to see,” I say.

“Why?” Samantha says. “You don’t have anything else going on.”

“We can discuss this later,” Robbie says.

“It was your idea, Robert,” Samantha says. “Besides, wouldn’t it be nice to go on vacation while your mom is still alive? Mid-July seems like the perfect time.”

Robbie says her name under his breath, sternly, but Samantha is impenetrable. This is beginning to feel too personal, an attack for me and Clara. Everyone shifts and navigates their legs around Kevin, who is swimming under and around the table with his hands behind his head in the shape of a shark fin. I want to change the subject, but my dad has started singing the Jaws theme. Kevin forces his way onto Samantha’s lap and tries to bite her.

“Oh, you got me. The shark got me,” Samantha says, jostling Kevin around. “Save me! I’m drowning!”

“Samantha! Stop it,” Robbie says. “You’re being such a bitch right now.”

I realize I’ve never heard him shout like this. Samantha looks stunned, but takes a breath. She recomposes herself, moving Kevin to the side, folding her napkin, shifting her dirty fork, her clean knife, back into position.

“Clara has—as I understand it—a wedding in July. We can work around it, but you and your fiancé George look very happy on your wedding website.”

“I’m confused,” my mom says. It’s difficult to describe a dying person’s eyes. Vacant? No. Detached, maybe, as if her whole being has been loosened from the world. I’m scared she’s going to die thinking I’m an unloved failure. 

“These arrangements are very common nowadays,” Samantha says. “Throuples, polycules, I think they’re called. Is that how it will work for you three?”

I wait for Robbie or my dad to say something, to tell Samantha she’s being out of line. I don’t want to bait her, so I say, sure, as cold as I can muster. 

“What do you think, Mom?” Samantha says to my mom.

I hate Samantha and this terrible illness, but I cannot excise Samantha from this family any more than the cancer from Mom’s lungs. My hand trembles, I feel a violent shaking inside me, and I want to say something, but I don’t and I won’t, because we are a family that avoids the difficult things, the conversations that need to be said. I feel a gentle graze on my wrist from Clara as she stands up and knocks against the ceiling fan. It sways as she rubs her head.  

“Why are you so goddamned horny about making everyone miserable?” Clara says to Samantha, snapped out of her performance. “Your husband looks sooo happy right now. Model family, my ass. And you’re taking a big sloppy dump on my choices? Be for real.” 

“I just wanted to clarify my understanding of the situation,” Samantha says, shifting into her business voice. “In case it affects our travel plans.”

“Real mature. No one buys that. Look at your mother-in-law and apologize.” When Samantha says nothing, Clara continues: “Don’t be pathetic. She’s dying. None of you are going to say anything?”

I’m ashamed that no one says anything, even me, as I fail to find the words to back up Clara. 

Drips rattle on the top of pizza boxes and build into a steady drumroll. Kevin places his palm under the ceiling fan and licks his hand before Robbie can pull him away. A few crumbs of wet drywall fall. Everyone pushes their bodies away from the table, instinctively, as the ceiling fan crashes on the pizza. My mom has hardly moved, but she does not seem shaken up like the rest of us. She looks at the broken fan and the needle-thin, candy-colored wires tentacled from the base, shaking her head and laughing.

When Samantha calms down, she says to Clara: “Look at what you did.”

“Stop,” Clara says, reprimanding Samantha. “You’ve lost.”

Clara, Robbie, and I help my dad move the ceiling fan from the table as my mom says that the fan was ancient and begging to be replaced. Samantha pats the top of Kevin’s head and, for the first time since I’ve met her, she looks wounded, defeated. Clara dusts the wet drywall from herself, gathers her coat and her purse.

“I’m going to go,” Clara says.

“Don’t be a stranger,” my mom says. “It’s not always like this.”

“I believe you.”

“Send me the rat book when it’s out. Signed, please.”

“Of course,” Clara says, smiling.

Before I walk with Clara to her car, my dad stops us and says, “Thanks. We’re a little lost right now.”

Clara puts her hand on his arm and I try not to cry.

Outside, I feel a resistance to touching her, kissing her on the cheek, saying goodbye, but I also want to do all of those things except say goodbye, because I have a feeling that it would probably be my last goodbye with her.

“Tell your mom I’m sorry for making a scene,” Clara says.

“Don’t apologize,” I say.

“Please. I can’t have a dying mother put a hex on me.”

She leans in and we kiss. Her mouth is wet and stings my chapped lips. As she backs out of the driveway, her car crunches over the gravel. I watch the headlights for as long as I can see them and listen to the faint decrescendo of her driving away as long as it echoes through the quiet neighborhood. It’s drizzling again and the mist clings to my eyelashes, or no, I’m crying. Through the kitchen windows and the dim, warm light, my dad is cleaning up, throwing away the wet, crushed pizza. My mom is still sitting there and she looks tired, immaculate. She deserves sainthood. 

Someday soon, I’ll tell her not to worry about me because I have been loved. A sharp syrup of phlegm catches in my throat as I try to say it aloud. I have been loved. A second-floor window slides out of its frame and lands on the ground, somehow, without shattering.