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Twenty

I’ve never used the wordruckusbefore, but there’s a ruckus in the house when I get home from school on Tuesday. I catch a whiff of my mother’s chocolate-scented candle she burns when she’s convincing herself she’s being productive or trying to hide a stench, usually while scrubbing her sneakers with a bleach-soaked toothbrush.

“Mom?”

Bagel starts barking from somewhere near the ruckus.

“Mom?”

“In Grandma’s room!” More ruckus.

It sounds like something heavy being shifted on the hardwood, items being dropped, the littleplink plink plinkof Bagel’s paws as he trails along. I kiss my hand, press it to the living room mural, and then head to my grandma’s room. I can’t enter because my mom has a tower of haphazardly stacked boxes blocking the way.

“Hello?”

“Hey,” my mom says, her face appearing in the crack between boxes and door frame. Her dark hair is pinned back, several strands trying to escape. Our hair is naturally the same color, but before the school year started, I dyed mine a charcoal color. It just felt like a better fit for my mood. “How was school?”

“What are you doing?” My eye catches on the words “DONATE” and “STORAGE” written messily on the boxes in faded black Sharpie. “Donate? What are you donating?”

“Just some of Grandma’s things. Art supplies, clothes—”

“You can’t get rid of her things.” I pull the top box marked “DONATE” from the pile, holding it to my chest. It was one thing to accept we’d one day move out of the house, but we’re not also getting rid of her belongings.

“Saine,” my mom sighs, pushing the tower of boxes aside carefully. It’s taller than her. “She’s not coming back for any of it.”

“MaybeIwanted some of her clothes, or her supplies. She was my grandmother. You can’t just claim full responsibility for her things as if she had no other family.”

She cocks her head to the side. “The boxes full of donations aren’t anything sentimental.”

“Maybe toyou.” I set the box on the floor and open it. The first things I see are several unopened boxes of soap, and memories start hitting me at the same speed that the scent does. Painting on Sundays with a record picked at random blasting through the house. Milkshake Mondays on which my grandma would randomly pull me out of school for a “family emergency” and then we’d get several milkshakes between the two of us and sit at a park to enjoy them. Building tents in the livingroom and staying up all night watching the worst things we could find on Netflix. Trips to the art supplies store in our pajamas. Cooking three-course meals at one in the morning. All the things I’ve been carefully and gently pushing to the back burner of my metaphorical stove of unhappiness.

“Saine. It’s soap and paint.”

“I can use both. I’ll use all of it. Why would we donate this stuff when you’re clipping coupons in your sleep trying to afford it?” I close the box without investigating further. “And what are you putting in storage? Maybe I don’t want it in storage. Maybe I have space for it in my room.”

I start getting this itchy feeling under my skin seeing her in this room, with boxes and packaging tape. “Don’t pack anything else. I want to go through it first.”

Most likely I’ll just take everything from her room and put it into mine, but at least then it’s safe. How would my mom feel knowing that once she died, I just started giving her stuff away or moving it out of my sight so I didn’t have to think about her, so I didn’t have to beinconveniencedwith grief?

No. No, this is not acceptable.

Her mouth shrinks into a thin line. “You have until next Monday.”

“And then what happens?”

She slides out the gap she made by the door. “Then I pack it all up myself and start painting.”

“Painting?” I follow her to the kitchen, where she gathers bread, mayo, mustard, and ham for her sad dinner. “What do you mean by painting?”

My mother was never the artistic type. She likes logical things like books and maps and math. Things that are formulaic and complete and informational. She doesn’t art. It’s why my grandma and I meshed so well. We are like-minded people. We see past what’s there. We feel things harder. We create.

“The walls.” She spreads the condiments on the bread. “I’m painting them all white so they’re fresh for the photos. Or maybe gray.”

“Photos?” I feel like she’s speaking a different language than me, like I’m but a mere human being and she’s from some distant planet outside my galaxy.

“For the Realtor.” She places several layers of ham on the bread before dropping the second piece on top and taking a bite. “For the internet.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, stepping forward with Corrine’s signature Intense Eyes™. “Are you telling me our house is already on the market? We don’t have a place to move if the house sells.”