Chapter Seven
The house was dim and quiet. And cold. A glance at the thermostat on his way through the foyer surprised Ash. It was sixty-four degrees in here. The fireplace was empty. Two space heaters faced his father’s recliner, but they weren’t running. A full, squat Christmas tree stood in its usual place by the front window, its branches burdened with handmade ornaments, ribbon, and lights—unplugged.
“Hello?” he called, crossing the living room. He dropped his bag and set his model down on the kitchen counter next to a battalion of orange medicine bottles. He lifted one to read the label. As if an unfamiliar drug name would reveal anything. Something simmered in a Crock-Pot, its savory scent mixing with a hint of the cinnamon candles his mom favored during the holidays.
A door whined open down the hall. Muted footfalls approached. “Took you long enough,” his mother said, voice soft with sleep, crossing to hug him.
“Where is everyone?”
She went straight to the refrigerator and began pulling out Tupperware containers. She was wearing an oversize sweater and a turtleneck underneath, jeans, and thick wool socks with slippers. “The little ones got stir crazy. Maggie and the twins took them to the park. June will be in late tonight. Says she’ll Uber from the airport.”
“What time? I’ll pick her up.”
“Eleven-thirty. Now, minestrone or meatloaf? I’ve got stew for dinner, but I’m sure you’re hungry.”
He wasn’t, but he wouldn’t pass up his mother’s cooking. “Meatloaf.” He meandered back through the living room, knelt to plug in the tree lights. The rainbow bulbs instantly illuminated the whole room. Now it felt more like home, but he couldn’t ignore the cold. “Is something wrong with the furnace?”
She shook her head. “It was doing that clicking thing again. Someone’s coming to fix it tomorrow.”
“What clicking thing?”
“Happens every couple of years, and they have to come out and replace a switch. It’s fine. It’s under warranty.”
“Mom, there’s snow on the ground out there. You haven’t been able to run the heat at all?”
“We’ve got the space heaters. Go turn one on if you’re cold.” She popped a plate of meatloaf into the microwave and ducked back into the fridge for orange juice.
“What about the fireplace?”
She raised one eyebrow at him, a warning.
“What?”
When she reached for a glass from the cabinet, he beat her to it. She had a stool that she slid around the kitchen because she was too short to reach the top shelves, but it was over by the pantry. Shaking her head at him, she took the glass and poured the juice. “I know what you’re doing, and I wish you wouldn’t.”
“What am I doing?” he said, defensive, though he didn’t know why.
“All your questions.”
“All I said was what about the fireplace? You’re dressed for the Arctic.”
For a moment, she stared at him, stubborn. Evading. He hadn’t yet attached meaning or judgments to his observations, but now, concern solidified.
“A friend of your father’s had an old tree that died. He gave us a few cuts of it for firewood. They need to be chopped into smaller pieces, but of course no one around here is up for splitting wood, so it’s been sitting out there.” Her tone was offhand, casual.
“You can buy firewood, Mom. Go to any gas station. There was a guy less than a mile from here selling it on the side of the road.”
She flicked her wrist as if shooing a fly—it was settled, no point debating it. When the microwave beeped—saved by the bell—she pulled the steaming plate of meatloaf out and set it in front of him, then nudged him back to pull a fork from the drawer he was blocking. “You know your father won’t pay for firewood when he already has it for free in the backyard.”
“That’s ridiculous. You can’t use it.”
She laughed, loud and hearty. He was preaching to the choir.
“Are you guys okay for m—” He didn’t finish the question. His mother, usually a broken record insisting everything was always fine, had let some truth slip in one of her late-night calls. They’d started his first year of college, but the last one had been as recent as September. On these calls, she would hit him with a barrage of questions, wanting him to keep talking about his classes, his friends, football games, girls, work, until finally, she’d go so quiet he thought she was falling asleep, only to surprise him by saying, “What if this relapse is the turning point?” Or she’d say, “Your sisters. If he can’t walk at their weddings…” Or, “If he won’t take care of himself, what am I supposed to do?”
But in all these moments of unmasked worry, the one subject she never brought up was the financial burden of his father’s condition. He could dig for details about a lot of things, but money wasn’t one of them.
He turned his full attention to cutting into his meatloaf, watching the steam ribbon out. Did she know about the money he’d sent his twin sisters last month? He’d made Laurel and Leanne swear, one at a time on the phone, not to tell.
“Like I said,” his mother went on, “the furnace will be fixed tomorrow. For now, the portable heaters work just fine. In fact, go turn them on. The kids will be back soon.”
Ash rebuttoned his coat and strode to the sliding back door. “I can chop that firewood.”
She yanked him back by his sleeve. “Your food will get cold, and I won’t get a word in once everyone else comes back. We haven’t really talked in weeks.”
“If you already know what’s wrong with the furnace, I can probably fix it.” He flung a hand at the dormant space heaters and the tree that he knew had at least eight strands of lights threaded through its branches. “I’m surprised you haven’t tripped a breaker.”
She prodded him back to the island and his food. “If you tinker with it, it could affect the warranty. We will survive until tomorrow.”
“Fine, but after I eat, I’m gonna chop some wood,” Ash said, shoveling in a huge bite. It was still hot, and he had to suck in air to avoid burning his mouth.
“At least wait until your dad wakes up. And please, Ash, try not to rub it in.”
Ash chewed slowly.
“You know how he is.”
Yeah, Ash knew too well how his father was. Rather than tell anyone that he’d fallen off the ladder and hurt himself, the guy had army crawled across the front yard and into his truck, driven himself to the hospital, and waited until the broken hip was confirmed with X-rays to finally call and tell his wife where he was.
“He’s taking a nap?” Ash was fishing, and he knew she saw right through him.
“I told you, he’s fine. The pain meds make him drowsy.”
“I’m just—”
“You’re not telling me anything I really want to know. Like, if you’ve got someone special—”
He groaned and shoved more food in his mouth, burning his tongue all over again.
“Fine, then tell me how your internship’s going. They still planning to keep you on after you graduate?”
Ash shrugged, but not because he didn’t know. It was practically a done deal. “Yeah, probably.”
“The money will be better?”
“Yep.”
“Then you can quit the café? All your running around, you’re like a chicken with its head cut off.”
His back tensed. He didn’t want to talk about this. He knew the point of all this school and his internship was to start his actual career, but the café was the only thing lately that offset the isolation of living alone, working in a cubicle and freelancing remotely, delivering plans to city hall clerks who were usually too immersed in their jobs to make eye contact. He made enough money to cover his expenses without his café shifts, but he needed the security of that financial cushion. More than that, he needed to feel like a person.
He also felt possessive of his regulars. The old ladies who gossiped while they crocheted. Frank with his crosswords. Hazel in her chair. Ever since she’d come back into his life, he’d been alternately taking advantage of every small moment shared with her and trying not to get too attached.
Although…who was he kidding?
But, sure, he wouldn’t work there forever. He knew that. He’d take the next logical steps. After all, Ash was the stable one. Maggie’s husband traveled too much, sometimes to remote and dangerous places, leaving her to parent Cosette and Isabel on her own. June had bailed on college and lived with three other people in a two-bedroom east Los Angeles apartment, her audition-to-rejection rate nearly one hundred percent. The twins were typical roller coasters of teenage emotions. And his father…Well, Ash didn’t have the full picture of his father yet, but at the very least, the man was recovering from a hip replacement. Ash lived the way he did, saving what he could, following his plan, because he expected to be responsible for all of them at some point.
“You know,” his mother said, “if you had a nicer place to bring a girl back to…”
“Mom.”
She clutched nonexistent pearls. “Don’t look so scandalized. I was young once, too, you know.”
Ash groaned around another bite of meatloaf before rummaging through his duffel bag for the pound of fresh coffee he’d brought from the café. His father was content with Folgers, but his mother appreciated the good stuff. When she reached for it, he held it up over her head and, with his other hand, pulled out the filter basket on the coffeemaker.
“I finished Maggie’s house,” he said, nodding over his shoulder at the model on the counter. A shameless diversion from the previous line of questioning, it had the added benefit of keeping her from waiting on him.
“Oh,” she gasped. “It’s beautiful. The kids are going to love it.”
Then, as if she’d summoned them, young, joyful laughter rang out from the front walk. Boots thudded up the porch steps. His mother lifted the flaps on the box, but they wouldn’t cover the top of the model, so she hoisted it off the counter, arms barely reaching all the way around, and motioned for him to intercept his sisters and nieces at the door. “I’m not done talking to you,” she said before she ducked backward into the laundry room.
Ash tried. He really tried, for his mother’s sake, to leave things alone.
But after several rounds of flinging his nieces up in the air until his shoulders ached, and after Maggie and his mother took them for a bath because they were cold and muddy, and after his twin sisters left to meet up with friends, Ash found himself alone and unable to ignore everything that was wrong: the huge water spot on the hall ceiling, the weather stripping coming off the back door, the carpet peeling up from the floor outside the bathroom, which he nearly tripped over, and about twenty other ways the house was falling apart.
He chopped enough wood to start a fire, then went in search of tools. When he came in from the garage, his father was hunched over a walker, about to ease himself into a seat at the kitchen table. He stopped, turned the walker as though he meant to cross to Ash instead of sitting. “Hey, son. Where you been?”
“Dad. Hey. Wait,” Ash said, distracted by the tapered gray sweatpants his father was wearing in lieu of his usual khakis. His polo shirt was tucked in—an attempt, if Ash knew his dad, to not completely let his image go. Still, the sweats and the walker threw Ash. He set down the toolbox, heart pushing up into his throat. “Let me—”
Before he took a step, his dad plopped roughly into the padded chair. “Something wrong with that old car of yours?”
Swallowing, Ash glanced at the toolbox. “I noticed the front door isn’t latching right.”
“The cold makes it do that.”
“I know. I was just gonna…” His eyes fell once more to the walker. A cloth bag hung over the top bar. A pair of glasses stuck out at the top. “You finally get your eyes checked?”
“When you fall off a ladder, people think it’s because you can’t see or something.”
“Looks like people were right.” Deteriorating eyesight was a sign. Ash and his father both knew this. But all the questions Ash wanted to ask came saddled with too much baggage. Aside from the walker and sweats, his dad looked like his dad—clean-shaven, a recent haircut, good color in his cheeks.
“Come over here, wiseass. Leave my tools. Come give me a hug.”
Ash did, and when he half-assed it, his father pulled him in tightly, like he had something to prove. “You’re skinny. You eating?”
“Been running is all. And you’re one to talk.”
His father laughed and palmed Ash’s head, giving it a playful shake. Ash darted out of his reach and dropped into the nearest seat. The melon baller feeling was back, hollowing out his stomach, but his father’s old playfulness eased it some.
Down the hall, the bathroom door opened. Tiny feet pattered to the back of the house, high-pitched squeals followed by Maggie’s stern voice calling, “Walk.” Another pair of footsteps came toward them—his mother’s. That these sounds, these footfalls, these nearly intangible familiarities of home, hadn’t changed in his absence brought Ash another whisper of relief.
His father leaned across the table conspiratorially but didn’t lower his voice. “Your mother’s taking advantage of the situation.” He patted his hip. “She put all the good snacks up high. Got me on this diet against my will since I can’t take myself to a drive-through every once in a while.”
His mom emerged then, sleeves pushed up to her elbows, drying her hands with a towel. She dropped a kiss on top of his father’s head. “A girl could feel unappreciated hearing that kind of talk, you know.”
Ash’s father turned to catch her mouth in a kiss that went on a touch too long for Ash’s comfort. He cleared his throat.
“How was the drive?” his dad asked once they pulled apart.
“Not bad.” Ash rubbed his neck. “Actually, a friend was heading this way, so we came together.”
“What friend?” his mother asked, her voice rising with interest.
His chest filled with breath, like he planned to deliver an important proclamation or a monologue instead of merely the name, Hazel Elliot. Clenching back an involuntary smile, he peered out the kitchen window and caught the bright white glow of the neighbor’s Christmas lights, the bare eaves overhanging their own house. “You haven’t put up your lights yet.”
His mother did a poor job of pretending not to have noticed then offered a weak explanation. “I thought we’d go more minimal this year.”
Ash wasn’t sure if this new stance of hers was about not wanting to hurt his father’s pride, or if it had to do with being stretched thin herself. She still worked, still volunteered, still cooked and cleaned, still mothered her kids and delighted in being a grandmother, and even before his father fell, she was involved in his appointments, the lifestyle measures that kept him well. It took time. Regardless of the reason, here she was, covering for him, claiming it was her own idea not to hang the lights when everyone at this table knew her personal philosophy regarding Christmas: the more, the merrier.
Cosette raced into the living room in underwear and a shirt with a pair of pajama pants on her head. She was laughing in her infectious, breathless way, running from Maggie, whose face was tight with frustration, though she fought for a patient smile. Ash liked his brother-in-law but noticed the dark circles under Maggie’s eyes, how quickly her playful tone turned to exasperated with her kids, and wondered what toll Nick’s frequent absences took on her.
Ash lurched after Cosette, who squealed when she saw him. He scooped her up. “Hey, monkey,” he said, tickling her side. She squirmed and laughed and threw her arms around his neck.
Maggie put her hands on her hips and blew hair out of her eyes. “You’ve got this one?”
“Yeah, I’ve got this monkey.” He lowered her to the floor then tugged the pants off her head and held them open for her. While she stepped into them, he said, loud enough for his parents to hear, “Hey, Cosy, I couldn’t help but notice our house is the only one without any lights outside. Did you notice that?”
She looked out the window, then turned back, nodding gravely.
“Don’t you think we should have lights, too?”
“Yes!”
“You think I should go out there before it gets too dark and put them up?”
“Yes, yes, yes!” she sang, twirling and clapping her hands.
“All right. If that’s what you think, I trust you. I want you to come out later and inspect my work. Got it?”
She low-fived his outstretched hand hard enough to sting before racing across the room and launching herself into his mother’s lap. “Grandma, Uncle Ass is going to put up the lights!”
His mother hugged Cosette to her body then carried her toward the bedrooms. She held his gaze as she passed, a weariness there. “Uncle Ash thinks he’s pretty clever,” she said into Cosette’s damp hair in a singsongy voice, “but Grandma sees right through him.”