and one of the bathrooms had been sealed off with some kind of plastic sheeting—my mother said she was trying to cut back on air-conditioning. She’d realized how bad it was for the environment, she said. It was the same reason she’d let the lawn go, she said—all that wasted water and energy and gasoline for the mower. I asked her, half-joking, if that was also why she had stopped using the vacuum cleaner, and the mop. And the dishwasher. Throughout my childhood, my mother had been an energetic housekeeper. She’d baked bread. She’d kept a little flagpole by the front door, with a different colorful flag for every holiday and season. But when I first came home that May, the Christmas flag, with its faded smiling snowman, was still flying over the doorway. Inside, small tumbleweeds of dog hair drifted under the ceiling fan of the living room.
She’d gotten a job selling accessories at DeBeck’s; it was just for the summer, she said. In the fall she would start subbing again, and figure out what she really wanted to do. She brought home fast food for dinner—mostly turkey sandwiches from a sub shop in the mall, and she ate hers right off the foil wrapper they came in, sliding mine to me across the table. She insisted we eat dinner together whenever possible, but she was difficult to talk to. She jumped around a lot in conversation. She asked me the same questions twice.
I, on the other hand, did my best to ask her no questions at all. I did wonder if she had been in love with the Roofer, and if she was heartbroken for him, and not my father. But I could not bring myself to ask her this. She was different now, too open, more than ready to tell me too much. She seemed desperate in a way that my father did not. I was anxious to get back to school, to Tim, to my friends, to all my plans, and to my own unruined life. My mother and I looked alike. We had the same dark, curly hair, the same brown eyes and long noses. But we were not the same person. That whole summer, I could feel myself pushing away from her, like a swimmer trying to escape someone reaching out, about to drown.
A week after I moved back into the dorm to begin my junior year, she sold the house. The buyer, who apparently had the rare ability to look past an overgrown lawn and plastic-wrapped rooms, wanted to close in thirty days. My mother acted as if she’d won the lottery. She was excited about moving into a new apartment, she said. It would be so nice to have all the maintenance taken care of, and so much less space to clean.
I understand now that I was refusing to see what I didn’t want to. I could have asked her more questions. I could have asked her how she really was doing. In my defense, I will submit that I was young. And she said, repeatedly, that she was fine, absolutely fine.
Just a few months later, winter descending again, she started to seem askew. I came to stay with her over Thanksgiving, and most of her things were still in boxes at her new apartment—she said she didn’t have time to unpack. She kept newspapers spread out over much of the carpet in case Bowzer had an accident while she was at work. And then one night, she drove to Lawrence to take me out to dinner, and on the way back from the restaurant, we almost ran out of gas—by the time she realized it, the needle was on empty, and we’d coasted into a station on fumes. These were little things, but together, they were worrisome. They seemed part of a larger unraveling, her good judgment falling away.
Finally, against the probable advice of anyone she might have asked, she started to complain to me about my father. Almost a year had passed since the day of the Sleeping Roofer. But the divorce—or more precisely, the settlement—was far from over. She believed he was hiding money from her. Their lawyers were still battling it out.
“Elise didn’t have to work when she was in school. And she went out of state. It’s ridiculous. He could afford to help you more if he—”
“Mom.” I turned to her quickly. “Stop. Don’t bring me into it.”
She leaned against her window, her fingers pressed over her