Page 21 of Good Days Bad Days

It’s been a week since I’ve seen her, a week since she was lucid and accusatory, since she remembered who I was and how deeply she hated me.

Nurse Mitchell called me a few days ago, saying Betty was asking for me.

Every day I wake up thinking I’ll stop by for a cup of coffee or at lunch or before dinnertime or .

. . but I haven’t. Every time I pull into the Shore Path Memory Care parking lot and reach for the box I keep in my back seat with the items I want to show my mother, I think about her telling Mitchell “I have no daughter” and how much it hurt when I knew she remembered me.

I want to go back. I will go back.

Tomorrow.

Maybe.

Or maybe not.

It takes four tries to get the first bag into the overfilled metal dumpster, but the last three fly in no problem.

I remove my mask and take a few deep breaths of clean, unfiltered air as I walk back to the sorting area, where the other team members, including Dino, are transporting another load out of the house.

No wonder Will thought my measly four bags were pitiful.

Will takes me through his pile. I end up approving the disposal of 90 percent of the papers, all the Reader’s Digest magazines with corners of pages turned down in each one.

Part of me would love to check what stories my mom found interesting, spend a few days or weeks reading them to understand who she was without the risk of another confrontation.

But we realize rodents have clearly been snacking on the pages, and that’s an automatic toss.

And when I smell the stench of animal urine, I remember I’m not wearing my mask and snap it back into place.

I take the photographs with me; two are of me as a little girl, and one is simply a view of the lake from our back porch at sunrise.

Nothing special, but I still want to keep them.

My kids have never seen a picture of me as a little girl, and I can’t help but notice how much I resemble Olivia when she was a toddler.

I snap a photo of all three pictures with my phone and send them to Olivia with a text: Guess who looks like her mom after all?

“Here, hon. A few more to look through.” Tina gestures to a pile of photographs with a headshot of my mother in black and white on top.

She looks young, late teens, early twenties, hair teased toward the sky in an impressive bouffant that looks to be held up by someone as grand as God himself.

She’s downright stunning, and if it wasn’t for a handwritten note on the back of the eight-by-ten photograph labeling it “Betty Laramie-headshot proof,” I would’ve thought it was a picture that came with a frame.

The other photos are less telling, more images of random landscapes, houses, a barn, a farmhouse, a kitchen, artfully taken but giving me no clues to why they were taken at all.

“Dad!” I call to my father as he walks out of the house, his hands empty. My curiosity is temporarily displaced by a hot flash of annoyance. How does he have nothing to throw away?

“Hey, honey. It got quiet inside. Thought everyone called it quits for the day.”

“Sun is setting so we’ll be out of here soon. Charlie was just looking through some things, if you’d like to help.” Tina focuses both me and my dad with her comment.

“Yeah, sorry. Found this headshot of Mom.” I hold up the photo with a question in my voice.

He takes it with a smile without giving any detail about its origin.

“And a bunch of these,” I continue, passing him the small landscape images, keeping the two grainy photos of myself in a white dress and bonnet, playing in the grass on a summer afternoon.

I wait for him to take a hint and explain the pictures, but instead, he tosses all of them into the garbage pile.

“Whoa, wait. Why are you throwing those away?”

“Eh. A silly old hobby.”

“Photography?”

He nods and I fish the pictures out of the garbage.

“Why did Mom have a headshot? Was she an actress or something?”

“Or something,” he says vaguely. “But she won’t want this. You can throw them out.”

“What about these?” Tina points to the sealed boxes. Up close, I can see the corner of one box has lifted, showing stacks of papers inside.

“Those can go, too,” he says. Tina nods and places them in the “throw away” side of her station, praising my dad for tossing two whole boxes without picking through them.

“What do you mean, ‘Or something’?” I ask. “And you didn’t even look in these. What are they?” I read the label. “Betty Laramie at WQRX” and an address in Janesville, Wisconsin. Janesville, again. That station, again.

“Nothing important, honey.”

“I showed Mom her ID from WQRX last week and she said you worked there, too. You never told me that.”

“It was a long time ago—before the shop—before you were born.” He tugs on my ponytail and walks away to another sorting area. I follow him.

“I didn’t know you were both in television. So, what did you do there? What about Mom?”

“I was a camera operator and your mom was kind of a Renaissance woman, you could say.” He releases another pile of belongings into the garbage pile and then moves back toward the house.

“Like, in what way? In front of the camera, crew, or more like production?” It’s a link to my parents I didn’t expect, like those identical twins separated at birth who each had become nurses, had three children, and married a man named Bob.

“You make it sound so official. It was a tiny local station,” he says, heading up the front steps, not answering the question.

I had already Googled WQRX and learned everything Wikipedia could tell me about it, which was one paragraph and a link to the parent network Epistle Broadcasting Network that ended up rebranding in the mid-seventies and moving to Texas, leaving WQRX to a small public access station.

The Wikipedia page had a few names and dates, and so I found as many people as I could, former producers mostly, and sent them emails, but they all bounced back.

I think I could ask my dad a million questions and they’d get me nowhere. He doesn’t want to tell me about his past, my mom’s past, the roots of my nearly rotted-out family tree. Why??

I let him leave without asking more questions, not willing to have an all-out confrontation with my dad in front of my professional colleagues, who I’m sure see me more as Charlie McFadden than Lottie Laramie, daughter of a hoarder. He’s off the hook for now but not forever, that’s for sure.

My phone buzzes. I step away from the sorting area and glance at the screen.

It’s a text from Cam. We’ve exchanged a few messages every day since we ran into each other at Thumbs.

He asks if he can buy me dinner at least once in each conversation, and every time I nearly say yes.

As I peel off my gloves to open my phone, Tina calls me back for one last query, pointing to the sealed boxes I’d been questioning my father about.

“So, these boxes. Toss ’em for sure?”

“Probably. Let me look.” Out of curiosity and a little stubbornness, I rip off the decaying tape in one tug and the flaps gape open.

Lifting one side with the tip of my ungloved finger, a familiar set of eyes meet mine.

They’re my mother’s eyes—my eyes. I spread the beleaguered flaps wide, and now four sets of eyes look back at me.

My mother’s headshots. Hundreds of them.

There’s only one reason someone would have this many headshots—the same reason I’ve had stacks of similar shots in front of me with a black Sharpie in my right hand.

She had fans, and those fans wanted her autograph.

“I’ll throw these out,” I say, balancing the stack of boxes in my arms. As I pass Dino, I tell him there’s a new exception to the auto-toss rule—anything with the name Betty Laramie or the call letters WQRX needs to come to me immediately. Not my dad, not the garbage, not a pile to be sorted—me.

“Yes ma’am,” he says, touching the tip of his baseball cap before digging another armful of clothing from the laundry trolly. I say my goodbyes and rush away from the chaos of my parents’ front yard.

However, I don’t stop at the industrial-sized garbage bin as I’d promised Tina.

Instead, after making sure no one is watching and seeing that the coast is clear, I use my knee to prop the boxes open and pop the trunk of my car by pressing a button.

I cringe at the beeping sound, but thankfully, no one is close enough to hear it.

I shove aside two other cardboard boxes containing my mother’s belongings and drop in the new boxes.

My mother’s stiff smile and sparkling eyes seem to peek back at me through the unfastened flaps of the box.

I know where I can get answers without reaching into my father’s throat and forcing them out. I can’t put it off anymore. I have to go see my mother.