Page 8 of Good Days Bad Days

Charlie

Present Day

“Welcome home,” my dad says as I get out of the car in front of the oversized detached two-car garage. The driveway is unshoveled other than two long tire paths where my father just parked his car.

“I’ll get this side for you, hon. Give me a minute.” He reaches for a large gardening shovel and starts digging out a spot for me on the other side of the driveway.

“No. Let me do it.” I take the shovel out of his hands as he tries to protest but acquiesces quickly.

My dad doesn’t have much fight in him, never really has.

It’s something I appreciated as a child when I needed a soft side to curl into or someone to play games in the lake with me, but it also failed me a lot.

The older I got, the more I wished he knew how to be both my friend and a protective father.

“Well, thank you, hon. I’ll head in, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” I say, tugging my hood around my ears as my dad stomps through shin-deep snow to the front door.

I finish one side of the drive quickly, pull my car in, and then move to the front path.

It’s not easy with the gardening shovel, but there’s a nostalgia to it that brings back positive memories.

Clearing the driveway was always my chore when I lived here, and there are still odd cracks in the cement I swear I recognize even after thirty years.

Something about the cold air in my lungs and the echoey solitude of the repetitive chore is satisfying.

I only wish I’d worn snow boots rather than my heeled Coach boots because by the time I get to the front door, my socks are soaked and I don’t think the suede will ever be the same.

I carefully place the shovel on a pile of snow next to the house and make a note to find a real one before it snows again. The steps are pure ice. I can’t believe my eighty-one-year-old father made it up them without slipping. Salt. We will also need salt.

The storm door is opened a crack and the screen on the front has several holes from wear and tear.

There should be glass there, but my parents stopped switching it out years before I left the house.

Behind it is the door to my childhood home, green peeling paint with what looks like oak peeking out from underneath.

In my line of work, people would pay good money for an artistically done version of this kind of decorative weathering, but this finish isn’t intentional.

I touch the paint. It flakes off, showing more wood underneath.

Definitely oak. I crossed this threshold a million times in my childhood.

When I’d leave to meet my friends at the beach, walk into town to see Dad, catch the bus, jump in my boyfriend’s car, or when I left forever.

I reach for the doorknob instinctively but pull back like the metal gave me a shock.

What am I doing? This isn’t my house anymore.

I knock.

I can hear my dad moving around inside. The door finally opens, and he stands in the two-foot gap, his coat off and his blue-and-gray flannel shirt neatly tucked over his slight belly bulge.

“Hey, you don’t have to knock. Come in. Come in.” He backs up so I can enter. When I go to push the door open further, it doesn’t move, so I turn my body sideways and slip into the house. My father reaches over my head to close the door behind me.

It’s nearly pitch dark inside, and I hold back a gasp.

We stand on a small piece of parquet flooring that used to act as the home’s entryway. To my right and left are literal walls of boxes, papers, and bags. There’s a strong, musty mildew smell that makes it difficult to breathe, and a wave of claustrophobia overwhelms me.

I reach for my phone and turn on the flashlight function.

My dad looks at the floor. “Things may have gotten a bit hard to manage the past few years.”

There’s shame in his voice. I hear it. It’s the same shame I heard when he visited me in foster care and told me I couldn’t come home yet because the house “wasn’t ready.

” I was placed at a small ranch house in Honey Lake.

I’d been told my parents had been given six weeks and lots of support to help them clean the house.

I could go home after some safety issues were addressed and resolved.

When my dad finally pulled up to visitation in the family car, I had my garbage bag of belongings neatly packed.

I was lucky, I know. My first placement was fine enough, but I was ready to leave the small, unfamiliar house and town and go home.

My father’s head hung low that day. As a parent, I know it couldn’t have been easy to look me in the eye and say, “It’s going to be a bit longer.”

But “a bit longer” turned into “a lot longer.” Soon, a spot opened at a teen group home in Allouez near Green Bay.

It was lonely and had a lot of rules, but I was a rule follower.

I finished high school there, and tuition waivers and scholarships helped pay for my college education.

My father came to my high school graduation, making excuses for my mother, who stayed behind either from shame or anger that I’d “caused this whole mess,” but I didn’t invite him to my college graduation.

By then, I’d been on my own for nearly seven years.

It hurt a lot less to stop reaching out than to have my offers for connection rejected.

“Dad, you can’t live here. This is dangerous.”

“Oh, no. No. We store things up here. I’m fine. I have all I need,” he explains, but I don’t believe him.

“Where do you sleep?” I ask, dumbfounded.

“In the den. After a while, your mother wasn’t good with the stairs, so we moved down there.”

“Show me, please.”

“Yes, yes. This way.” He takes me through a narrow footpath, and I have to navigate carefully, as though I’m walking a high wire.

At one time I knew this house like the back of my hand, but this landscape is new and confusing.

The house was a disaster when I was a kid, but we still had living spaces, even if they were surrounded by invading clutter.

In this new world—I’m lost. I follow my father like he’s a tour guide who knows the language and landmarks.

We pass the kitchen and I have to look away.

No path even leads in there—it’s so full of garbage and packaging materials.

Even with my mother’s acquiring, stacking, and storing when I lived here, the one room of the house she left clear was the kitchen.

She made dinner every night, which used to be my reasoning for why things weren’t as bad as they could be.

But as I spent more time in foster homes, group houses, and then my own home, the uncluttered kitchen of my youth became a sticking point for my bitterness.

If she could keep that one room clean and organized, that meant she knew how, it meant all the rest of the mess was her choice.

But now even that bastion of normalcy is sealed off in her cocoon.

Every few steps, I hear the thump of an object crashing to the ground.

I flinch and fight the urge to cover my head.

I should be wearing a hard hat like we do on set when working on potentially dangerous construction sites.

But this isn’t a gutted house halfway through a total renovation—it’s where my parents have lived for decades.

When we reach the den, I hold in my horror. All four walls are blocked by stacks of boxes and collections of folders and papers that are at least a foot thick. Two layers of bookshelves filled with books, photo albums, and some kitchen supplies keep the potential avalanche dammed.

There is a walking path around three out of four sides of the bed.

Half of the ornate antique wooden headboard is mostly covered with my father’s shirts and slacks, the other half empty where my mother’s belongings must’ve recently hung.

The bed is neatly made. A TV stands on one of the shelves facing the foot of the bed.

There’s a small wood-and-wicker ceiling fan that has accumulated an inch of thick gray dust on its edges.

This room was clearly the core of their life before Mom was placed in the memory center.

They lived in this suffocating small space carved out of a whole house, four bedrooms, a full basement, a two-car garage, a half acre out back sloping down to the lake, and a long dock that would leave any vacationer or real estate investor drooling.

Alone. Without their daughter or grandchildren or friends of any kind.

I place my hand over my aching heart. My dad shuffles around to his side of the bed and tugs at the comforter like he’s trying to tidy the room for me. It’s sweet but sad to see him trying to make a dent in a home that’s taken thirty years to nearly destroy.

“Dad, this isn’t safe,” I say, assessing the bookshelves’ stability and contents. As far as I can tell, this is the only semilivable room in the whole house. I’m already itchy from all the dust from the decades’ worth of belongings. “And how do you eat or bathe or anything?”

“Oh, hon, it’s not all that bad. I’ve been making some headway with tidying up . . .” He gestures to a bare shelf and a few less-dense spots in the room.

“Dad, this is way beyond tidying up. We need to hire a crew.”

“Do you really think?”

“I don’t think you see this clearly. This room alone would take at least a month to clean out on our own. You have a whole house—and the yard. And that’s just to get things cleared out. I’m sure there’s plenty of structural, plumbing, and mold issues we have to deal with.”

“Well, hon, I don’t know about all that.

It seems like a bit much. I don’t know if your mother would like that.

” The mention of my mother makes hot words burn on the tip of my tongue.

The memory of the sweet old lady from the nursing home evaporates.

Mother. How can he still worry about what she might say?