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Ariana peeked. “She’s watching TV.”
“Alright. Come with me.”
We walked into the hallway, passing the table where we’d left my mother’s birthday cake still in the white bakery box. She’d refuse it politely as she always did, and promise to eat a slice of it later. Either way, the whole cake would end up in the garbage by the time she went to bed.
“Wanna look at the roof now?” Ariana asked. “While we’re here?”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because she threw out all my father’s tools,” I muttered. “The ladder included.”
I wanted to tell her it was all for nothing, that no matter how many things we fixed, the repairs on the house would never end. My mother would never appreciate them, either. She’d been walking around a dirty, leaky kitchen without complaint, probably because her mind never registered there was anything wrong.
I wanted to tell Ari that my mother would never garden again. That no matter how beautiful we made the yard look come spring, she’d barely go outside. We could clean and repaint her planting shed, and show up with seeds and soil. She’d only smile and tell us how ‘nice’ everything was, then walk straight back inside without another word.
“Look at you,” Ariana snickered, pointing to one of the photos that lined the walls. “You were the chubbiest little baby in the world.”
I glanced up at the family photo. In it, my parents looked bright and happy — like entirely different people. My four siblings were all ten to eighteen years older than me. My sister held me in her arms, looking like some proud, teenage mother holding a toddler.
I was the accident. The “whoopsie.” My parents thought they were done having children, but suddenly there I was, kicking and screaming, destroying whatever chances they had of an early parental release. By the time I was in the fourth grade my siblings had moved out, and it was like growing up alone. My father had passed a few years earlier. Even now, the memories I had of him were fading, though I fought hard to keep them. One by one I could feel them slipping away, making him more of a stranger with each passing year.
Damn.
Looking at him in photos like this hurt my heart. But the guilt from not looking was even worse.
Ariana stepped past, grabbed my hand, and led me into my childhood bedroom. My old comforter was still stretched over the bed. The walls were lined with hockey sticks and pads, the shelves pregnant with all the medals and trophies I hadn’t taken with me.
“You mom loves the shit out of you, you know that right?” said Ari. “You’re her favorite.”
“And how do you figure that?”
“Because she hasn’t thrown any of this out yet,” she explained, gesturing to the organized mess. “This is one place in the whole house that’s still cluttered.”
She was right, of course. I’d inherited my oldest brother Andrew’s room when he took off for Ohio State, but the rooms my other siblings had grown up in were now empty.
“You also got a whole room to yourself,” Ariana pointed out. “Your brothers and sisters had to share bedrooms. But you were the favorite.”
“I was last. That’s the difference.”
She flopped onto the bed with a sigh, staring up at the ceiling as she folded her hands across her belly. There were still tape-marks there from a Wayne Gretzky poster I’d put up a hundred years ago.
“Remember all the fun we used to have in here?” Ariana lamented.
For the first time all day I actually smiled. “Not as much as we could’ve had.”
She rolled onto her side and returned my grin. “True enough. But damn, this place was our high-school hangout. I remember all the times the four of us sat here talking after school, after games, all night long. And your mom used to love feeding us. She’d cook her ass off all night, complaining about it the whole time. But she loved that we were here.”
“She did,” I agreed solemnly. “Even during those times Axel would eat us out of house and home.”
“Which was most of the time,” Ariana pointed out.
We laughed together, and somehow the laughter made everything better. I tried not to look at the peeling paint, or the broken door, or the cracks near the ceiling where the house had settled so much it actually left a half-inch gap.
Ari sat up and pulled me down onto the bed beside her. Sliding a slender arm up my back, she began playing with the hair at the nape of my neck.
“Are you okay?” she asked softly.
