*
After we distributed the boxes to their proper rooms, Mom, Jimmy, and I sat cross-legged on the living room floor eating frozen pizza. The cable wasn’t hooked up yet; the TV eyed us blankly. Mom was drinking from a tall plastic cup. The new fridge didn’t have an ice maker, let alone a crusher, so she’d rinsed a Ziplock used to transport makeup, turned it inside out, filled it with cubes from the tray, and then bashed the ice into pieces with a ketchup bottle. She asked Jimmy again about his scholarship, if he’d gotten a clear answer from the MSU people about whether it could be applied to enrollment next year. She’d asked him that at least three times since I put the pizza in the oven. When Mom drank more than a couple glasses of wine, her brain caught on the same idea, replaying it over and over.
“Because that’s a lot of money to just throw away,” she said, and then launched into her regular speech, the one about his mistakes, and where did we think money came from?
“I want more pizza,” Jimmy said, and stood, leaving the room, probably to go blow blunt-smoke out of the fan propped reverse-ways in his bedroom window. It was the only thing he’d unpacked. He’d been smoking a lot since the divorce, and since his breakup with his chirpy-voiced girlfriend who was now well into the first term of her freshman year at MSU, where he should be, too. In my opinion, she was the real reason he’d deferred, turning down his scholarship just weeks before he was due to start, but who knew, when it came to Jimmy? He said it was because we needed him. College could wait. He joked that our band name should be the Pause-Outs—he’d paused-out of college, and I, for the moment at least, had paused-out of high school.
“If it turns out he had to fill out some paper or something, he’s going to be really pissed,” Mom told me, uncrossing her legs and tipping over her wine in the process. Ice slivered onto the floor and I scooped it back into the cup, the skinnier pieces wiggling out from between my fingers. “First stain,” she shouted, ceremoniously spreading her napkin over the spill. It darkened instantly, melting into the carpet.
Mom and I gathered up the plates and deposited them in the kitchen sink. “We can do them tomorrow,” Mom said, holding her cup under the Franzia box’s spigot until it filled back up. She kissed me loudly on the head and left. I turned the tap to burning and washed every single dish, even Jimmy’s.
The new house was a low-ceilinged, chubby rectangle propped up on a bunch of cement blocks. No basement. If you tapped any wall with your fist, a hollow echo bounced back. Our rooms all fed off a hallway to the right of the kitchen—bathroom first, then my room, then Jimmy’s, and across from his, Mom’s. I rattled the bathroom doorknob. “Quit pooping,” I said.
“Why? Don’t you want it to be nice and warm in here?” he said, from inside.
“You are disgusting.”
Jimmy opened the door, my tall, shaggy-haired brother, a dribble of toothpaste on his chin. When he was my age, he’d published an op-ed in the local newspaper about being a teenage atheist. He was blond and blue-eyed like Mom, and could run a mile in six minutes. Back when we were still the kind of family who went on camping trips, Jimmy and I used to share a bed in the rented motor home. Mom made us sleep head to toe, so we wouldn’t fight. Jimmy always got to put his head in the normal place; I was the one who had to be upside down. And so I loathed him, in an effortful way, for all that, but mostly because of how he dismissed Dad, and how that made Dad more eager for Jimmy’s attention than he ever was for mine.
For a long time, too long, I couldn’t stand that it was Jimmy, not me, who saw Marlena last. After Dad left, our sibling sonar, the one that travels via blood and cells and the bond of battling the same two parents, began to break down. A few years from that night in the bathroom we’d be like acquaintances. If we were closer, now, I’d tell him that I forgive him, for whatever he did or didn’t do, for letting her open the passenger-side door and walk off into the flat gray dusk, her bag swinging against her hip, for those long, last minutes that are his, alone. It’s hard to admit that the worst part of me still feels like this is another way he got a little more of what we were supposed to share. Once a baby sister, I guess, always one.
I kicked a box labeled HALLWAY so that it blocked him from leaving the bathroom. “What’s this? What do we need for the hallway?”
“You know, hallway stuff. Pictures of you blowing out candles and so forth.”
“Are there towels in there?”
“In the closet. Is Mom out?” He touched the toothpaste on his chin.
“Think so. She didn’t say good night, but the light’s off in her room.”
“Did she get her sheets on and everything?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
He looked at me like, I’m trying, why can’t you? In the days before the move he’d amped up his über-adult attitude, as if he’d not only taken Dad’s place, but become Mom’s caretaker too. Had he really postponed his future to make sure Mom put her sheets on? The act seemed to me like a load of bullshit, and I couldn’t bear bullshit, which I sniffed everywhere I turned. At fifteen, I believed that I would grow up to be the exception to every rule.
Jimmy stepped over the box and squeezed my shoulder, his hand dampening my shirt. “It’s going to be okay, Cath. Try to have a little perspective.” He moved away down the hall and leaned against Mom’s door until it fell open a lightless inch. “Momma,” he stage-whispered, and stepped in, checking.
I peeled off the tape holding closed the HALLWAY box. The flaps popped open. No pictures of Jimmy with a foil crown on his head, me with baby teeth, Dad in the distance, waving a lit sparkler. All we needed for the HALLWAY were tangled extension cords.