Page 17 of The Housekeeper

Chapter Eight

Looking back, I’mhard-pressed to pinpoint the exact moment everything changed.

Maybe there wasn’t one.

Maybe it was just a gradual progression of events, a shift in nuance here, a change in tone there. The sort of thing you don’t pay much attention to when it’s happening, the sort of thing that, if you notice it at all, you accept as natural, rationalize out of importance. Until suddenly, everything is different.

Until nothing is as it was.

Those first months Elyse came to work for my parents were pure bliss. She was everything I’d hoped for, and more: a wonderful cook, an excellent housekeeper, a great companion. She was patient and kind and caring. No chore was too big. Nothing was too much to ask. When she wasn’t doing the housework or preparing meals, she’d sit with my mother for hours, combing her hair, doing her nails, reading to her, making sure she was eating properly, giving my father a much-needed break.

“Tell me the truth,” I whispered to him at dinner about four weeks into Elyse’s employ. “She’s a gift from God. You don’t know what you’d do without her.”

“It’s working out better than I expected,” he admitted, unwilling to concede more.

The invitation to dinner had been a surprise, and I suspected it had come at Elyse’s instigation. It was the first time my father had hosted the family for dinner since my mother became too sick to participate. And now here we were—me, my father, Tracy, Harrison, and the children, grouped around the long, skinny, dark oak dining room table; my mother, dressed in a long, quilted pink housecoat, her hair freshly washed and arranged flatteringly around her thin face, hunched over in her wheelchair at the head of the table, next to my father—feasting on fresh pickerel, a kale and berry salad, wild rice, and the best homemade apple pie I’d ever tasted.

It felt as close to a miracle as anything I could imagine.

Not that it was easy. My mother had to be fed, she had noticeable trouble swallowing her food, and her conversation was limited to a series of barely audible words and phrases that trailed into nothingness before her thought was complete. Looking at her blank eyes and frozen expression, I found myself wondering if she even knew who we were. I’d read that dementia was a common marker of late-stage Parkinson’s.

“So, Harrison starts teaching next week,” I said in an effort to banish such unpleasant thoughts, looking for the slightest flash of animation on my mother’s once-beautiful face, receiving nothing but the familiar dull stare.

“Why on earth are you still wasting your time with that?” my father asked Harrison, sliding a tiny morsel of apple pie between my mother’s barely parted lips. “How much are they paying you anyway?”

“I don’t consider it a waste of time,” Harrison said, answering the first question and ignoring the second.

“Have any of your students ever gone on to publish anything?”

“Not yet,” Harrison admitted. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t. It’s not easy to get published these days.”

“Well, you would know,” said my father, the casual cruelty of his remark wrapped in a smile. “How’s that book of yours coming along anyway?”

I watched Harrison offer up a smile of his own, and marveled at his self-control.

“It’s coming,” Harrison said.

“So’s Christmas,” came my father’s instant retort.

“Did Jodi tell you that I tried to get into your course?” Tracy asked. “They told me it was all filled up.”

Thank you, God,I thought, bowing my head.

“So I signed up for one of the other courses instead,” she continued.

“Really,” Harrison said. “Which one is that?”

“How to Write a Bestseller. Which is probably a better course for me to take anyway. I mean, that’s the ultimate goal, isn’t it? Why write something that nobody wants to read?”

“I think the goal is to produce something of value,” Harrison argued, still smiling, although I could tell from his tone that he was reaching the limits of his patience, “and if it happens to sell well, then that’s the icing on the cake.”

“Bullshit,” Tracy said, laughing.

“You tell him, kiddo,” our father said. “Did you hear that, Audrey?” he asked my mother. “Tracy’s going to write a bestseller.”

My mother opened her mouth to say something, but her words were quickly absorbed into a series of violently escalating coughs, the coughs becoming gasps, the gasps triggering her gag reflex, causing her to start choking.

“What’s the matter with Grandma?” Daphne cried, jumping off her chair to bury her head in my lap.