Forty

Jael slowed to a stop in front of my mother’s house. If she noticed the mess, she was polite about it. A hoarder’s yard is always a mess; once the hoard fills the house, junk spills outside. My mother’s yard was no different. Cardboard boxes of paper rested against the side of the house. Paper had escaped the boxes and gotten caught in the long lawn. A row of full recycling bins sat in front of her garage, their contents soggy from repeated rainstorm drenchings. Though recycling bins are uniquely suited to dispose of the papers they hold, these bins hadn’t made it to the curb. And they never would.

I climbed out of Jael’s car. “Thanks for the lift.”

“I’ll be back in two hours,” said Jael. She drove off to access her armory and load up for tonight’s rendezvous with Dave Patterson.

My sneakers crunched on the stone walkway as I approached the door and rang the bell.

My mother called out, “Just a minute.” Stacks of paper thumped on the other side of the door.

The door opened halfway and my mother smiled out at me.

This was new.

I stepped through the door and she gave me her cheek. I kissed it.

“I’m glad you called,” she said. “You’re lucky. I had gravy cooking on the stove when you called. It’s good not to eat it alone.”

That explained the smile. A good Italian marinara sauce simmers for two hours. After all that time, it tastes better when shared.

Still, I couldn’t imagine my mother cooking in this space. I looked around at the stacks of paper and asked, “Is cooking safe?”

The smile disappeared. “Of course it’s safe! Do you think I’m an idiot?”

We wound our way through the goat path in the living room. The path forked in what was once the dining area. We took the kitchen branch instead of the bedroom branch.

The kitchen was a small rectangle. The kitchen window peered out from over the sink and gave a view of the back yard. The kitchen’s back half-wall stopped three feet from the ceiling. In normal Campanelli ranches, this allowed light to fill the house. My mother had clogged her half-wall to the ceiling with books. Light never reached here.

The sink, range, and oven, however, remained clear of clutter. A covered quart pan of marinara sauce (gravy to my mother) bubbled on the stove over low heat. Next to it, water boiled in a larger pan.

My mother dumped a box of ziti into the boiling water and stirred. The ziti frothed for a moment and settled down. “I waited for you to get here before I started the ziti.”

I thought about how steam permeates paper to create mold and looked around at the piles of books in the kitchen. My mother had gotten them from yard sales, library fundraisers, and trash cans. In addition to the books on the half-wall, piles of books sat on the floor and on the kitchen table. Some of the books were shredded where mice had gnawed homes for themselves. These were mostly near the floor.

My mother said, “What’s the matter? Aren’t you hungry?”

I said, “Sure I’m hungry. Can we use my room?”

She smiled and said, “Yes. Yes, of course. Let’s eat in your room. You open it up and I’ll bring in the food.”

I wound my way down the goat path to the door of my room and worked the combination lock. The room was just as I had left it. I turned on the light and found two small folding tables to put in front of our chairs.

My mother liked to eat in front of CNN, so I brought it up on the HDTV. The economy was in the shitter. The Middle East was devolving into a missile fest. A celebrity had adopted an Asian baby and tried to return it. Somebody had been arrested for mistreating a horse. I couldn’t believe my mother ate in front of this garbage. No wonder she was crazy.

My mother bustled in carrying two steaming bowls of pasta on a tray. She put a bowl on each table, smiled at me, and went back out again. When she came back she had a bottle of wine, one from Trader Joe’s with a rooster on the label, two wine glasses, and a wine opener. She handed the wine and the opener to me and I did the honors.

My mother sat next to me but popped up again and went into the kitchen. She came back carrying a small wedge of cheese and a cheese grater. She held the cheese in one hand and the grater in the other and grated me the perfect amount of cheese. She always got it right. Then she grated some for herself, settled into her chair, and said, “Isn’t this nice!”

“It is. Thank you for dinner,” I said. I forked ziti into my mouth, tasting the gravy.

My mother’s gravy was perfect as always. I had tried to re-create it and failed. When I was married, Carol tried to re-create it. She failed. Determined to succeed, she asked my mother for the recipe but was stymied by directions such as “chop some garlic,” “add enough oregano to make it taste good,” and “add two bay leaves, unless they’re small, then three or four.” She watched my mother make it and tried to copy the steps and ingredients, but it never tasted the same. My mother’s gravy, like the gravy of all Italian mothers, was her unique gift to me. I was thankful for it.

Our meal together transported me back to the family dinner table. We had occupied three sides of the rectangle. My dad sat at the head. My mother sat kitty-corner on a long side of the rectangle. I sat across from her on the other long side.

A crusty Italian bread on a scarred breadboard waited in front of my dad. He would cut the bread, give the end to me, and the next slice to my mother. A big bowl of pasta sat on the stove. My mother would fill our plates with spaghetti and meatballs, grate cheese onto them, and serve them. We’d eat pasta and talk about nothing and everything: Ronald Reagan, Uncle Walt, my Auntie Rosa’s latest drama—all were grist for the mill at our dinner table. At the end of the meal, we’d sop up the last gravy with our Italian bread.

I pointed at the ziti with my fork and said, “This is delicious.”

My mother said, “Good. I’m glad you like it.”

“It reminds me of dinner with Dad.”

At the mention of my father, my mother’s face tightened and a line formed between her brows. She asked, “Is it true?”

“About the house in Pittsfield?”

“Yes.”

“It’s true. I’ve been there myself. Dad’s pictures are all over it with Cathy Byrd and JT.”

“Who is JT?”

“John Tucker Jr. Dad’s son with Cathy Byrd.”

My mother ate a forkful of pasta and said, “I always thought she was too friendly with your father. I never imagined that he would stoop so low as to sleep with the little whore.”

“I never would have believed it without the pictures.”

We stabbed at our ziti. The TV droned on about some indefinite threat that could only be solved by immediate, but undefined, action. My mother drained her glass of wine and refilled it. I joined her and we finished the bottle.

Emboldened by wine, I said, “We have to do something about that search warrant.”

My mother said, “I don’t see why. There is no reason for them to search this house.”

“I know, but Lee’s going to get a warrant anyway. He thinks there are clues in those notebooks.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Even so, he says he’ll be here tomorrow. If we don’t want him to search, we need to give him the notebooks. He needs something to explain how Dad bought a house in Pittsfield for cash.”

Our plates were empty. My mother stacked them and carried them into the kitchen. I took the empty wine bottle and the glasses and wound my way through the piles with them. I handed my mother the glasses and said, “They’ve got to be here somewhere.”

She took the glasses and said, “I don’t have anything for that detective.”

My relationship with my mother had been punctuated by a long string of failures and mistakes. There were events that I should have remembered but forgot, wrongs that I should have forgotten but remembered, things that I should have done but didn’t, and things that I did do but shouldn’t have. There were fights and absences, disagreements and slights, hurt feelings and mangled emotions. Yet none of those mistakes would match the one that I made at that moment.

I suppose I was driven by the right reasons. I was trying to protect her. I was trying to keep strangers from coming into the house to do exactly what I chose to do when I left that kitchen: climbed off the goat path and waded into my mother’s piles.

My mother heard the crunching paper and came out of the kitchen. She asked, “What are you doing?”

“I’m looking, Ma. I’m looking for the notebooks in this pile of crap so I can give them to Lieutenant Lee and keep him from clearing out your house.”

I remembered that the piles had started in the corner of the living room nearest the front of the house, away from the front door. I worked my way back there, stepping around stacks of newspapers, junk mail, books, magazines, and the other detritus that most of us ejected from our lives on a daily basis.

My mother said, “Get out of there!”

“They’ve got to be back here,” I said. “In a file. In a box. Somewhere.”

“Get out!”

The light from my room spilled into the living room. Still I couldn’t see. A lamp was pressed against the front wall, buried by papers. It hadn’t been turned on in ages. I turned it on, thinking the light would make it easier to see. The cacophony of printed material got no clearer.

My mother started to pace on the goat path. She yelled at me, “Goddamn you! Get out! Get out of there! You’re ruining it! You’re ruining everything. I’ll never be able to find anything!”

“Find anything? Find what, Ma, what? What piece of crap is back here that you could find? The police are going to tear this place apart. Don’t you get it? All this—this—this crap, this shit, is going to get dumped into the front yard and then thrown into dumpsters. All of it, unless I can find something. Those notebooks, or a bank account slip, or a betting receipt, or a cancelled check—something that Lee can use to chase down Dad’s money trail.”

“There’s nothing there!” My mother sobbed. “Nothing there from him. I don’t keep it there.”

“For God’s sake, there must be something.”

“Get out! Get out! Get OUT!” my mother shrieked. She ran along the goat path and into the kitchen. I looked down into a pile, saw a manila folder, and pulled on it. It was stuck. I pulled harder and it moved. Something in it looked official. One more pull and the folder came free as its pile gave way and fell across the living room.

My mother screamed behind me as the paper hit the ground. I turned. She had left the goat path and stood right in front of me, holding a kitchen knife in a trembling hand.

“Get the FUCK out of my house! Get out of my house, you goddamn son of a bitch! You bastard! Get out!”

I raised my hands at the sight of the knife, holding the manila folder in my right hand. I said, “Okay. Okay, Ma!”

“Don’t call me that! Just get out!”

She backed up onto the goat path, holding the knife in front of her. I climbed out and stood in front of her with the manila folder. I took a step toward her.

“Get out! Get away from me!” She said, tears running down her cheeks, her voice skipping along the edge of hysteria.

I said, “I just want to lock my room.”

“NO! No! Get out! The room is mine. It’s my house. My house! I’m tired of giving you that space and not having enough room for everything I want, having to rent space, use the yard. It’s my house and my room. You get out!” She waved the knife at me, and I backed up. She took a step forward.

I said, “Put down the knife.”

“Get out!”

“C’mon. Please. Put down the knife before you hurt yourself.”

My mother’s voice was icy cold as she said, “You and your father have ruined me. Now, get out.”

I was at the front door. I pulled on the door and got it open to its limit. Then I squeezed out and pulled the door shut behind me. The lock clicked and my mother yelled, “Don’t you ever come back!”