Dirty Little Secrets

“She’ll be fine. Probably sleep until tomorrow, anyway,” he said. “I could have told you not to bother.” He grabbed a couple of plates that were in the drainer and started slowly rubbing them in circles with the towel. We didn’t speak for several long moments. I could feel hot tears beginning to form behind my eyelids as I ran the argument over in my head. She always said it was our fault—that Phil and I couldn’t pick up after ourselves, and that’s why this place was such a mess. If I ever left so much as one shoe in the hallway, she’d scream and yell like I was the one who stacked up piles of crap in the middle of the living room that were so high you couldn’t see around them.

“You know, it wasn’t always like this,” Phil finally said. He was talking quietly, and I almost didn’t hear him over the running water.

I sniffed. “What wasn’t like this?”

Phil looked around the kitchen. “This place. The whole house. Mom didn’t used to save stuff like she does now,” he said. “When Dad was here, everything was clean—almost too clean. Sara and I had to pick up everything, and if we left toys out, Mom would go crazy.”

“So Dad was a neat freak?” I was almost afraid to say anything in case he stopped talking.

“No. That’s the weird thing. Dad wasn’t a slob or anything. He was just regular. Mom was the neat freak.”

I let out a laugh so forceful it sounded like a bark. “Right,” I said. “Look around, Phil. Mom is the opposite of a neat freak. She’s more like some kind of garbage freak.”

Phil shook his head. “Seriously,” he said. “The whole house was spotless all the time. Mom vacuumed and dusted like every day. She used to say that everything in this house had its place, and it was our job to make sure it got back there.” He laughed. “She had this thing about vacuuming—all the lines had to be going in the same direction when you were done, and if you made footprints in the freshly vacuumed carpet, she made you do it again.”

I looked around at the piles of stuff that hadn’t been touched in years. “I don’t remember any of that,” I said.

He shrugged. “I guess you were too little.” He stopped and looked around too. “It didn’t start to get bad until after Dad left.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, we only have to deal with it until we move out. Then she can bury herself in it for all I care.”

I turned back to the dishes. “Easy for you to say,” I said. “You’ve only got another year.” The thought of being alone with Mom in this house made me nauseous. It seemed like Sara had always had her own apartment and was more like a distant, bossy relative than a real sister—but I wasn’t sure I could do it without Phil, even though most of the time he was no help at all. It was just having someone around who understood, even a little bit, what it was like. We weren’t one of those families that went around talking about their feelings all the time, but I was sure Phil knew what I was thinking.

“It’s not that long,” he said. “And besides, I’ll probably go someplace close by so I can come and visit all the time. And you can come and stay with me sometimes.” He bumped me with his hip. It was probably the closest thing to a hug I’d ever gotten from him. “It’s going to be fine. You’ll see.”

Just then the phone rang, and he ran to get it. I could tell it was a girl by the way his voice got softer and he stretched the cord as far into the dining room as it would go.

I picked the last dish up out of the sink. It was the pink “World’s Greatest Mom” mug that she always used for her morning coffee. I stabbed at it with the sponge and tossed it into the drainer without even rinsing it. Maybe I’d get lucky and she’d be right about the germs.

Now, so many years later, I stared at the pink mug in my hand like it was an artifact from a previous civilization. As I threw the mug into the garbage bag with as much force as I could, it was satisfying to hear it break into little pieces.

chapter 9

4:00 p.m.

The smell in the kitchen was giving me a headache, so I decided to take a break from the worst of the mess and go back to the living room. I’d been digging for a while when the shovel hit something at the bottom of one pile that felt solid, not like the papers and clothes that were everywhere else. I leaned against the handle of the shovel and tried to figure out why I couldn’t pick up whatever was on the bottom of this pile. It just looked like newspapers and maybe a couple of bags of something else. A McDonald’s bag was lying near it, and when I picked it up, the top half tore off of the soggy bottom. The bag must have had food in it when it was set down here however long ago, because whatever it was had liquefied and seeped into the layers of newspaper down below, providing a home and nourishment to a colony of rice-sized maggots. I scrunched up my nose and tossed the remains of the bag into the big green can.