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I plucked the ancient cable remote from her hand.
“This is a smart TV, remember? Everything’s updated. You can use the new TV remote over there,” I pointed, “but we downloaded the remote app on your phone, so you can—“
“Did you know the kitchen smells?”
Ariana and I exchanged another look. It wasn’t a good one.
“What does it smell like?” she asked.
“Like… like… sour.”
“Did something go bad?”
My mother shook her head. “No. No, I throw everything out. Everything. All of the time.”
That part was true. Most of my mother’s idiosyncrasies were getting worse with old age, but none were as bad as her wastefulness. She’d been known to take the first spoon of peanut-butter from a fresh jar to make a sandwich, then throw away the rest of it. We’d tried buying single-serving packages, but she wouldn’t have them.
“No, it smells like sweat,” she went on. “Or like your hockey bag, when you always used to leave it open in the back of the car. Do you remember that smell?”
I walked into the kitchen just to placate her, but it turned out she was right. The dank, musty smell washed over me instantly like a punch to the face. I looked up… and my heart sank.
“Ariana?”
“Yes?”
“Could you come in here a minute?”
She patted my mother’s hand — the one gesture she actually seemed to appreciate — then ducked through the archway and into the kitchen. I pointed, and her mouth dropped
“Holy shit, Zane.”
I couldn’t believe it. There was a damp spot on the ceiling about four-feet wide, bowed out a few inches with water. It looked like the ceiling was pregnant. All around the ‘belly,’ a dark, sinister-looking mold was spreading outward.
“Ma!” I cried, loud enough to be heard from the other room. “How long’s the ceiling been like this?”
My mother took a few long seconds to answer. “The ceiling?”
“Yeah. Did you not see this?”
Again, no answer. At the sound of the television turning on, I put my hands on my hips and let out a long, hopeless sigh.
“Well at least she figured that one out,” Ariana said, trying to look on the bright side.
But there was no bright side. There was only the leaking roof, the sagging ceiling, and the peeling yellow wallpaper that my father had put up the weekend of my sister’s Holy Communion. Their once-cherished silver spoon collection hung crookedly in its wooden case, forever half-full. With each spoon representing a place my parents had visited together, the empty half represented all the adventures they hadn’t had. I only saw the places they’d been robbed of, with my father’s sudden passing.
Select parts of the house reminded me of happier times, mostly involving my older siblings on the few occasions they’d had the patience to include me in their fun. But in general, I only saw the sad, empty mess of the childhood home I’d grown up in. A home which was falling down around my mother’s shoulders, whether she noticed it or not.
“So, can we fix it?”
Ariana’s pretty chin was still turned toward the ruined ceiling. Her use of the word ‘we’ made me love her just a little bit more, if that were possible.
“Yeah. I’ll get Tyler over here one night next week. We need to cut this whole piece out and replace it, but first we need to find and fix the leak.”
Even that was the tip of a much bigger iceberg, I knew. In all likelihood the entire roof would need to be ripped down to the plywood, then patched and re-shingled. The gutters were filled with acorns, because the trees encroaching on the house hadn’t been trimmed in decades. The original windows were shot. The entire house was cold and drafty.
And these were just the things I could think of off the top of my head.
“What’s she doing now?” I nodded toward the living room.
