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“Jeez,” Isaac muttered to himself as he got out of the vehicle.
How had Aunt Meg let it get like this? This place had obviously been run into the ground over a period of years, long before Uncle Jeffrey died.
Isaac walked up to the house with a sense of trepidation. This was the home that he’d grown up in. He’d been born on the kitchen floor — a story that his mother had always loved to tell whenever they had guests around.
“Did you know,” she used to say, “that my sweet little Isey was born on the very spot you’re now eating your dinner?”
Isaac shivered at the memory. Such happy times. So much had changed since those days.
Eying the front door with distaste, he knocked. Attached to the front door was a gaudy plaque that read: “Welcome — ish. Depends on who you are and how long you stay.” Under that, there was a handwritten note that said: “No junk, no bills, no dicks.”
Well. This was going to be fun…
Isaac waited a while, then knocked again. “Aunt Meg!” he called. “It’s Isaac.”
Eventually, he heard shuffling behind the door and his aunt opened it a crack, still leaving it on the latch.
She peered at Isaac suspiciously. “Can’t you read the sign, son?”
Isaac looked again at the words on the sign and signed. “Very funny, Aunt Meg. But I’m no dick. I’m your nephew. And I’m here for honorable reasons.”
“Honorable, eh?” said Aunt Meg, chuckling. “I’ll be the judge of that.”
She opened up the front door and Isaac tried to swallow away his judgment. She was wearing baggy gray sweatpants with holes at the knees and a stained t-shirt that said “Meh” on it.
Behind her, the hallway was full of piles of unopened mail. The wallpaper was dark and peeling — still the same paper his parents had put up thirty years ago. Now, there were damp patches and bubbles of mold on it. And as much as the whole place stank of damp and microwave French fries, there was still something about the smell that told him he was home.
“Well, don’t just stand there gawping,” said Aunt Meg, leading him through to the kitchen at the back of the house. “Sit down and say whatever it is you want to say.”
Isaac couldn’t help looking down at the spot where he’d been born, positioned directly beside the dining table. He pictured his mother gripping the edge of that table, and his father crouching beneath her, catching his slippery newborn body like he was birthing a calf.
That spot of the floor, now, was splashed with coffee stains and full of crumbs of… goodness knows what.
Isaac decided to sit on the other side of the table. Felt too strange to sit right there.
“Squirt?” said Aunt Meg, opening the fridge.
Isaac frowned. “What?”
“Soda?” said his aunt, holding up a yellow can.
“Oh, right,” said Isaac. “Uh, thanks.”
Over the past couple of decades, Isaac had sampled a martini with a one-carat diamond in it at a hotel in Tokyo, he’d drunk two-hundred-year-old Champagne rescued from a shipwreck, and he’d downed a shot of a rare single malt whisky kept in a gold and emerald Fabergé Celtic Egg. What he had never, ever had before was a can of Squirt with the aunt who had stolen his family home from him. But there was a first for everything.
“Refrigerator broke,” she told him as the warm, flat, grapefruit-flavored soda touched his lips.
Isaac tried his very best to looknot-disgusted.
Don’t fuck this up, Isaac. You only get one chance at this.
“Well,” said Isaac, turning his body away from the window at the back of the kitchen. Were he to look through that window, he might catch a glimpse of his parents’ graves, and he couldn’t allow that to happen. Too emotional. He didn’t want Aunt Meg to see him cry.
“Well,” said Aunt Meg, sitting over the spot that Isaac was born, glaring into his eyes like they were about to duel.
“I’m so sorry to hear about Uncle Jeffrey,” said Isaac. “I hope that you’re coping alright.”
Clearly, Aunt Meg wasn’t coping. The dirty dishes strewn about the kitchen. The stains and spillages all over the floor. The dark circles around her eyes.
