My mother doesn’t like Tom. It frustrates me because any other mother would love him. He’s reliable and devoted and good-hearted. Handsome, too: tall and broad shouldered and muscular with a head of thick dark hair. Right now he’s wearing jeans and an old blue T-shirt that matches his eyes. He came ready to help out. She should be flinging her arms around him in gratitude, but instead she just gives him that cold wave.
I understand why it bothered her when we first started going out because I was so much younger than he was—so young in general. But it’s been ten years, and we’ve been living together happily for the past four, and I’m twenty-five now, no longer a kid. The age difference—a little over five years—has stopped being meaningful. If I had just met him, no one would think twice about it. So she can’t possibly think he wants to take advantage of me, not anymore.
Maybe disliking him has just become a habit for her.
She says to me, “There’s so much work to do here, you can’t believe it. I feel like we’ll never get through it.” She’s always overwhelmed by any amount of cleaning or organizing work. Her MO is to check out what needs to be done, feel hopeless about it, and abandon the project, which is why every closet and drawer in our house is bulging with stuff that should have been cleaned up and thrown out years ago.
“Is Dad coming back to help?” I survey the stacks of books and papers and boxes covering the room’s furniture and floor.
Mom snorts. “It took me a decade to get him out of this house. I’m in no rush to invite him back in. I asked him to clean up before he left—apparently this is his idea of clean.” She jerks her chin toward the small, slight man standing near her. “But at least he sent me Jacob, who’s given me more help in the last half hour than your father has during our entire marriage, which, by the way, we’re officially dissolving. I’ve seen a lawyer and started the divorce process.”
I stare at her. “This is how you tell me?”
“The engraved announcement is in the mail,” she says drily. She fidgets for a moment, her fingers tapping on the edge of Dad’s enormous oak desk. Even though it’s cleanup day, she’s wearing some kind of multicolored, floaty bohemian skirt topped by an old pink shirt that has big round buttons down the front.
Mom always wears skirts because they flatter her figure. She’s thin from the side, a board really—no breasts, no butt, nothing sticking out. But if you look at her straight on, her hips are surprisingly wide. The skirts hide that unexpected ultrafeminine width. She looks ungainly in pants, but in a skirt she’s close to gorgeous with her long dark hair—threaded with gray now but not as much as you’d expect for a fifty-five-year-old woman—and her large hazel eyes, long, straight nose, and wide mouth. I got her nose, but that’s it. Otherwise, I don’t look much like her or much like Dad, either. “You don’t even look like the mailman,” my big sister Hopkins used to tease. “Poor little red-haired freak.”
“Let’s go downstairs,” Mom says to me abruptly. “I need a cup of tea.”
So much for getting down to work. But I’m not all that eager to start cleaning, either, so I’m happy to flee with her.
As we head down the steps, Tom starts to follow us. Mom halts. “Help Jacob pack up in here, will you, Tom?”
“Sure thing,” says Tom and retreats back up the stairs.
* * *
I watch my mother as she whirls around the kitchen, plucking tea bags out of a canister on the counter, grabbing a couple of mugs out of the cabinet, filling them with water, and sticking them both in the microwave, which she closes with such a violent push that a stack of papers on top falls over and scatters on the floor.
“This kitchen!” she says, bending over and angrily snatching them all up. “It’s a mess. I can’t stand it.”
I look around. She’s right: it is a mess. Not only is every surface covered with old mail and dust, but the room itself hasn’t been updated or repainted for decades. I’m sitting on the breakfast booth bench, which is covered with a teal and pink vinyl that was probably considered stylishly modern in 1980 but which is just plain ugly now. The faded off-white cabinets that line the wall are fussy and ornate and not like anything my mother would have picked out herself, so they must have predated my parents’ purchase of the house. The floor is brown linoleum, the counters beige laminate.
The funny thing is that the house itself—a 1920s Tudor—is incredibly valuable, especially because Newton is such a desirable suburb, much more coveted than Waltham, where Tom and I live. The school system is good and the Mass Turnpike is close enough to be convenient but far enough away that you can’t hear or see it.
And just as I’m thinking, Wonder what this house is worth now? my mother says, “I’m putting the whole thing on the market.”
“Ha,” I say, pleased to be ahead of her for once. “I saw that coming.”
“Really?” She seems surprised. Then she shrugs. “Good. I’m glad. I was worried you’d get upset.”
“It’s too big for you and Milton, anyway. Now that Dad’s moved out.”
The microwave dings. Mom instantly wheels around, pulls the door open, and grabs at the mugs. Tea slops over the edge as she strides over to the booth and plops them down. She cooked the water with the tea bags already inside so both cups are a dark brown color now.
“Milk? Sugar?” she asks.
“Whatever you’re having.” I’m not a tea drinker normally. Coffee’s my drug. I keep hoping it will make me feel alert, aware, brilliant, on top of my game…but it just makes me irritable and always needing to pee.
Mom is at the fridge in seconds. A whirl of skirts, and the milk is glugging into the mugs. Another whirl and sugar is pouring from a teaspoon. A whirl, a knock, a shove, a beat, and she’s sitting across from me, her spoon clicking rhythmically against the sides of her mug, open milk carton and spilled sugar still out on the counter behind her.
No one moves faster than my mother. My main memory from childhood is of trying to keep up, pumping my little legs like crazy while I raced after her in a supermarket or department store, desperate to grab hold of a corner of the elusive skirt that was always billowing just out of my reach.
You’d think with all that energy, she would be efficient, but there’s a frenzy to her restlessness. She moves a lot, just not in any particular direction. Even at the supermarket, we’d be cutting back through the store multiple times to get things she’d forgotten or missed on the first pass.
I take a sip. The tea is tepid and harsh, barely drinkable. She may have figured out how to make it quickly, but she hasn’t figured out how to make it taste good. I put my mug down. “Do you know where you’ll move to?”
“Definitely an apartment. Probably downtown, but maybe Cambridge or Somerville.”
“What about Milton?” My brother hasn’t left the house in two years, not since he graduated from high school. “Does he know you’re moving?”
Mom carefully places her own mug down on the table. There’s a dark red shield on the side facing me that says Ve-ri-tas. Truth. “I haven’t figured out what to do about him yet.”
When I picture my brother, he’s hunched over his computer—because he usually is—his face pale, his eyes large and expressive when they’re staring at the screen, elusive and blank when they meet another person’s gaze, which they rarely and reluctantly do. Even when he was little, he was a homebody, the kind of kid who never went on playdates and who would insist he was sick and had to stay home from school as often as he could get away with it—which was often, since he managed to get straight A’s no matter how much school he missed. When he was sixteen, he told my mother seriously that he had thought about dropping out since he could do it legally now, but that he’d decided it made more sense to finish up.
Given that conversation, Mom should have been worried he might not make it to college, but I guess any fears she had were allayed when Milton applied to and got accepted by six Ivy League schools. We all waited to see which one he’d pick.
None,
it turned out.
“I’ve decided I just want to live at home,” he said in April of his senior year of high school. “I can go to college online.”
“Why did you bother applying to real schools then?” I asked him crossly, annoyed that he had gotten into two schools—Harvard and Princeton—that had rejected me, and then wasn’t even interested in going to either one.
“The guidance counselors would have bugged me if I hadn’t,” he said. “It was easier just to do it. Oh, and tell Mom I’m not going to give the valedictorian speech, will you? They wanted me to but I said no, and if I tell her, she’ll get that tone in her voice.”
My brother, folks.
He’s basically been hanging out in his bedroom since then with occasional forays down to the kitchen—he doesn’t even take the trash out as far as I know. When I ask my mother why she isn’t doing more to get him out of the house, she throws her hands up in the air and says she’s done everything she can think of, by which I guess she means that every once in a while she tells him he really should get out of the house and he ignores her.
I once suggested to her that maybe there was a real problem there, that maybe something was wrong with Milton, something that he needed professional help with. She just shook her head and said, “Milton is one of the smartest people I know. He’ll be fine.”
Like intelligence is all that matters.
I even e-mailed Hopkins to try to get her to back me up, but she wrote back, If Mom decides she wants to kick him out at any point, she will and he’ll be fine. He’s a little spectrumy, but perfectly competent. But so long as she’s happy having him at home, let them have each other. Without any support from the actual neurologist in the family, I gave up.
The first few months after high school, Milton did at least go to movies and restaurants with us, but he’s stopped doing even that. He pulled back gradually, pretending he was in the middle of doing something important and couldn’t leave the house at first, but now he just shakes his head dismissively if you invite him somewhere, like you’re the one who’s nuts for thinking it’s even a possibility.
He’s more withdrawn, more reclusive, every time I see him. It scares me and I want to do something about it, but other than berating my mother and fretting to Tom, I don’t know what. I’m not there that often—a couple of times a month at the most—and I’m not his mother, as Milton has reminded me often enough.
“You’ll have to take him with you to the new apartment,” I say now. It’s weird to think of Milton anywhere but here. Maybe a change will be good for him.
“I know. I will.” Mom puts down her mug a little too heavily and a few drops of tea fly out. “But I anticipate some awkwardness. Inviting a man back to my place when my adult son still lives there—”
“Whoa,” I say. “Whoa. Someone’s moving fast.” I mop up the tea drops with a napkin.
She regards me for a moment, then says, “Keats, I’m fifty-five years old. I have been married to a man twenty years my senior for the last thirty-three years. Please tell me you’re not going to be prudish about this. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to go on a date now and then, do you?”
I shake my head as I crumple up the napkin. “No. I’m sorry. It’s just an idea that takes some getting used to. But maybe it’s another argument for getting Milton to live on his own.”
“Maybe. So far it hasn’t been a problem.”
It takes a moment for that to register. “Wait,” I say. “So far? You mean—”
She plays with the tag on her tea bag, her face flushing. “I’ve gone on a few dates.”
“A few dates?” I repeat. “You mean a few dates with one guy or a few dates with a few different guys?”
“Both actually.”
“Are you seeing anyone special?”
“There are three men who interest me at the moment. One’s an old friend, another one I met online, and the third is in my creative writing class.”
“What creative writing class? You’re taking a creative writing class?” I slump down and say accusingly, “You don’t tell me anything.”
Mom tilts her head to study me. “Is this upsetting you?” she asks—not apologetically, just curiously.
“Not really. I’m glad you’re dating. It’s just weird.”
“Tell me about it,” she says.
2.
After our conversation, Mom heads up the stairs to the third floor, and I’m about to follow her when I change my mind and knock on Milton’s closed door instead.
“Mom?”
“No. It’s me. Keats.”
“Hold on. I’m not decent.” There’s the sound of rustling, and then he opens the door. “Hi,” he says and pats my shoulder, which is his customary way of greeting me. “I didn’t know you were here.”
I hug him. His body goes rigid under my touch because he doesn’t like to be hugged, and he crosses his arms protectively over his concave chest and round stomach. I’m not trying to make him uncomfortable, but when he was a baby, I carefully carried him around the house for hours, so I figure I’m entitled to a hug every now and then.
He’s wearing a loose pair of sweats and a faded T-shirt. He’s gained weight since I last saw him. He’s been doing that a lot lately. He was a skinny teenager, but these days he’s got a real belly on him.
I release him and step back, looking around. The room is a mess. There’s old clothing everywhere and some dirty dishes and lots of books. You can see through the connecting bathroom into my old room, which Milton annexed for himself after I left for college. No one asked me if that was okay. It wasn’t, but by the time I came home for Thanksgiving break, he had already moved a bookcase and an iPod dock in there. And a lot of empty protein bar wrappers. Fortunately, I already preferred sleeping over at Tom’s by that point.
A Mac desktop with a huge monitor fills up the desk in front of us, but there are two more computers within reach: a PC on top of the dresser and a MacBook lying open on the bed.
“What are you working on?” I ask.
“This and that. I’ve been getting into game development.”
“Oh.” That means nothing to me. “How’s school?” He’s supposedly taking college courses online, working toward his degree, but I’m not sure anyone ever checks up on him. On the other hand, I’ve never known Milton to lie.
“It’s okay. Stupidly easy.”
“Maybe you should go to a real college. It would be more challenging.” He just shrugs, and I say abruptly, “You want to go get a sandwich or something?”
“No, thanks,” he says politely. “Hey, guess what? Dad’s book is required reading in my gov class.”
“Are you going to read it?”
“I already have,” he says. “Haven’t you?”
“I tried once. Not my kind of thing.”
“Really? It’s pretty good.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“The guy who grades us asked me if Lawrence Sedlak was my father.”
“What’d you say?”
“Nothing.” Milton’s skin is so pale it’s practically translucent except under the eyes where half-moon shapes turn the skin dark and coarse. “It was just in an e-mail, so I didn’t answer. Did Tom come with you?”
“He’s upstairs. So’s Jacob. What about a walk? Want to go for a walk with me? It’s really beautiful out.”
“Maybe later,” he says. “Jacob’s here to help pack up Dad’s stuff, right?”
I nod.
He tugs on a strand of hair. It’s too long, his hair—it falls in his eyes and curls along his neck like a girl’s. “It’s weird not hearing him moving around upstairs,” he says. “Especially in the middle of the night. It’s so quiet now with just me and Mom here.”
“Are you sleeping okay?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “Define okay.”
“Eight hours a night?”
“I don’t usually sleep in one big chunk.” There’s a ding from his computer. “I just have to ch
eck that,” he says and darts away.
From the way he settles on his seat and peers intently at the screen, I don’t get the feeling he’s going to come back to the conversation any time soon, so I wander out of his room, through the bathroom—ye gods, it’s filthy in there, hardened toothpaste in the sink, dirt crusted into the grout, rust stains all over the shower/bath combo—and into my old room.
There’s not much of mine left in there. I know some of my old clothes are still hanging in the closet and folded in the drawers because I just left behind whatever I didn’t take with me to college or Tom’s. But most of the visible signs that the room once belonged to me are gone. When he claimed the space for himself, Milton took down my posters and shoved my softball trophies to the back of the dresser top where they’re hidden by the flat-screen monitor he’s set up there. The bed once held a pink-and-purple quilt (the height of glamour to my ten-year-old self), but now the bare mattress has a sleeping bag and a pillow on it, like someone camps out there occasionally.
But my old digital alarm clock is still on the small white night table next to the bed. I pick up the clock and turn it around in my hands. I bought it with my allowance money when I was eleven, because I was tired of being late for school. I hated the stares I got when I walked in after class had already started, but Mom was a night owl and often overslept. So I’d slouch in after everyone else, embarrassed and frustrated.
It hit me one day that my mistake was letting Mom be in charge of our mornings. So I bought this clock with my own money. From then on, the alarm would ring in my room, I’d wake up my mother and Milton (Hopkins had gone off to college at the age of sixteen, so she was already out of the picture), and by yelling, scolding, begging, cajoling, I somehow managed to get the three of us all out the door in time.
I put the alarm clock back down on the night table and leave the room.
* * *
I cross the hallway and stand for a moment outside Hopkins’s room. She’s not there, of course, but then she never really was there much, not even when she lived at home: she was always running around, taking classes outside of school or heading off to work in various labs. Even when she was home, I had orders (from her and Mom) to leave her alone and be quiet so she could concentrate on the huge amount of homework and research she was always dealing with.