Page 22 of Brenna, Brat

I was headed there next to find out. Everyone else had a lot of other obligations (except Grace, who was useless anyway, even if she had bothered to respond to us). The task of spying on Mom had fallen to me. So after everything was signed and I had given over more money than I wanted to, I was on my way to becoming a fashion star in Detroit and I was also on my way to my parents’ house—no, now it was just my mom’s.

It had been a long week at the gallery, trying to keep the insurance stuff on track (because I had been unable to watch things flounder, and stepped in to help with that) and also with overseeing the new video installation that Alecta had decided to take on in the midst of the floor refinishing. She had hired a friend to do that job, and he’d gotten as far as creating a mountain of dirty rags and half-filled, smelly cans of chemicals near the door. Then he’d promised to come back later to do the actual work, and we hadn’t seen a sign of him since.

But the video installation had gone in, and now there were screens hung on the walls around the gallery which played short, terrifying films of prehistoric animals eating humans. They played on repeat, but the bloody, vicious murders weren’t even the worst part. The worst part was that the animals were all in disguise, hiding from their prey and popping out to kill them (in really hideous and prolonged ways). One giant bear with vicious claws burst out of a hollow tree trunk to carve into the victim and, in the scariest one, a giant cat with long fangs wasdisguised as a human, wearing a fake-skin costume. Having those constantly on was getting to me and Dion.

Anyway, I was glad to be out of the gallery today, but I wasn’t too happy about confronting the problems at my former home. “Hi, Brenna! Come in and see,” Mom greeted me when I pulled into the driveway.

First, I carefully locked my car. This safe neighborhood had been the place where my phone had been taken years before, after all. “Hi,” I answered. “What are you showing me?” She only gestured at me to follow and I did.

The house where I’d grown up showed several things first. Everything had been in its place for so long, ever since I could remember it—my parents definitely weren’t like Campbell’s mom, who he’d said liked to redecorate all the time. But since the last time I’d been over, things were different. My dad’s favorite chair was gone from the living room and the pictures of his parents, my grandparents, were absent from the mantel. So were several paintings that had always hung on the walls, and only faint rectangular patches remained in their former places. The hallway was bare because the rug that had always lain there was missing and the big fern (the one that had belonged to my grandmother) wasn’t in its place of honor in the dining room window. It wasn’t like the house had been stripped of everything, but it seemed so changed, so much emptier and strange.

“It’s different without your father here,” my mom noted.

“He was never around much.”

She turned on me, anger in her face. “He worked very hard to provide for his family!”

“Ok, but he also liked to work that much,” I said. “He liked to be away. Even when he was home, he was in the garage or in his office.”

“That’s what I have to show you,” she said, and threw open a door. “Look!”

My dad’s home office was a room where I’d never spent very much time. None of us had, really, unless it was to discuss something important like Future Plans (Juliet’s multiple scholarship offers to colleges, Sophie’s investigation business, Grace’s lack of thought about…anything). I’d gone in when I’d figured out how to pay for a year in France, and he’d looked over my paperwork and signed off on it all as he’d sat at the big desk that had dominated the room, with his books and files neatly arranged on the shelves that covered one wall.

That was all gone, even the shelves, but there was a lot of different stuff in its place. “What is this?” I asked.

My mom seated herself on the floor in front of a small waterfall that constantly gurgled into a ceramic pot, her legs crossed upside down. “It’s my new meditation room. I need it in order to refocus my life’s journey.”

“I think you need a job.”

She closed her eyes and seemed to center herself.

“Can’t you meditate in the yoga room that you already have upstairs?” I asked. That had been my brother’s old bedroom,and he had recently moved out (again). There was plenty of space to sit cross-legged.

“Brenna, don’t naysay,” she scolded. Mom never told me to stop being a brat, which I had always appreciated, but she had never liked my attitude. “My life’s journey is beginning here, in this room that I’ve reclaimed.”

I looked around. She had removed all the furniture, or maybe my dad had taken it with him, and someone had painted the walls a shade of blue that reminded me of the hospital scrubs that my sister Nicola wore. I was sure it hadn’t been my mother’s intention, though; people always picked the wrong paint. There were new leather cushions on the floor and pictures of deities on the walls, along with long, patterned silk curtains that needed to be hemmed. Plus, there were a whole lot of candles, and the scent of them was overpowering. She had definitely reclaimed it, but I had to argue with what she’d told me.

“Your life’s journey started fifty-six years ago,” I said. “What do you think that you’re restarting now? Where is this journey supposed to take you?”

She kept her eyes closed and didn’t answer. I watched her nostrils flare a little as she did deep breathing.

“I’m going,” I said, because if I stayed in here, I was going to want to say more and it was very frustrating to argue with someone who wouldn’t do it back. I went to the kitchen and looked around there, too, and I found more problems. There was some food in the refrigerator, but not a whole lot, andmost of the cupboards were empty. It could have been that Mom’s interest in the new meditation space/refocusing room had made her forget to grocery shop, and it wouldn’t have been the first time that her attention got pulled away from boring but necessary tasks like that.

But I also wondered if her finances were getting to be a problem. It didn’t look like she had skimped on furnishing the reclaimed room and she had never been the person in charge of budgeting in our family. She’d blown through their bank account before and I remembered arguments she’d had with my dad about it.

“Do you need money?” I asked when she finally joined me. “Is Dad giving you anything? Are you planning out your spending?”

“You know that I don’t worry—”

“Do you have any thoughts at all about your future besides the next accessory for your mediation room?”

“I don’t appreciate your tone or your message, Brenna.” She checked her phone. “I have plans today.”

That was my cue to leave, made more obvious when she took my arm and walked me to the door. I tried to ask more questions but got nowhere, so when I did go, I dropped a message in our group chat: “She’s a lost cause.”

“That’s not helpful,” Nicola shot back. “What else did you find out?”

I had to describe the meditation room, the missing possessions, the empty fridge. “She has plenty of mustard and relish, but not much else. She’s so immature.”

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