Page 28 of Good Days Bad Days
“You’re a quitter,” she said again, and I stared at the wall where the wallpaper in the dining room didn’t match up quite right.
I turned down the role and stuck with track until I hurt myself two weeks later and had to sit out the rest of the season. Mrs. Robins, the director of the play, let me take a small part once she heard what happened, and then I landed the lead in the spring musical. I never ran again, and my mom has pointed to that as evidence of my “lack of drive” ever since. I’m sure she found my first divorce quite satisfying.
“Here. Four more,” I say from the porch to the small crew in the yard, holding up the bags like a prizewinning fish I’d pulled out of the lake. Tina, Dino’s wife of thirty years and business partner, claps her gloved hands, and Will, one of their assistants, barely acknowledges my declaration.
“We’re up to sixty for today,” Will says dully, stacking items on a folding table under one of the six blue canopies used as sorting stations. “I need approval here,” he adds, stepping back from the spread in front of him.
“Let me toss these and I’ll be by.”
My wrists ache from the weight of the bags, and as I pass Tina on my way to the dumpster, she adds, “I have some items for you to check, too,” with a southern drawl as charming as her husband’s.
She stands by a folding table covered with papers, books, and a few photographs, along with a pair of baby shoes and two unopened boxes with mailing labels on them and yellowed tape peeling up on the corners. I’ll need to look through and decide the fate of these objects—garbage or storage. I lean heavily toward garbage in my decision-making, especially when I’m lucky enough to give approval when Dad is busy inside. I’ve found that what he doesn’t know is thrown away doesn’t hurt him.
I’d like to think I’d be fine with shoveling nearly everything from this house into one of the portable garbage bins sitting in the driveway, but that’s not totally true. Sugar packets, yes. Broken frames and melted candles, most definitely. But little pieces of my mother still linger in this house, pieces I’ve never seen or known or understood. Those items I do want, I desperately want.
It’s been a week since I’ve seen her, a week since she was lucid and accusatory, since she remembered who I was and how deeply she hated me. Nurse Mitchell called me a few days ago, saying Betty was asking for me. Every day I wake up thinking I’ll stop by for a cup of coffee or at lunch or before dinnertime or ... but I haven’t. Every time I pull into the Shore Path Memory Care parking lot and reach for the box Ikeep in my back seat with the items I want to show my mother, I think about her telling Mitchell “I have no daughter” and how much it hurt when I knew she remembered me.
I want to go back. I will go back.
Tomorrow.
Maybe.
Or maybe not.
It takes four tries to get the first bag into the overfilled metal dumpster, but the last three fly in no problem. I remove my mask and take a few deep breaths of clean, unfiltered air as I walk back to the sorting area, where the other team members, including Dino, are transporting another load out of the house. No wonder Will thought my measly four bags were pitiful.
Will takes me through his pile. I end up approving the disposal of 90 percent of the papers, all theReader’s Digestmagazines with corners of pages turned down in each one. Part of me would love to check what stories my mom found interesting, spend a few days or weeks reading them to understand who she was without the risk of another confrontation. But we realize rodents have clearly been snacking on the pages, and that’s an automatic toss. And when I smell the stench of animal urine, I remember I’m not wearing my mask and snap it back into place.
I take the photographs with me; two are of me as a little girl, and one is simply a view of the lake from our back porch at sunrise. Nothing special, but I still want to keep them. My kids have never seen a picture of me as a little girl, and I can’t help but notice how much I resemble Olivia when she was a toddler. I snap a photo of all three pictures with my phone and send them to Olivia with a text:Guess who looks like her mom after all?
“Here, hon. A few more to look through.” Tina gestures to a pile of photographs with a headshot of my mother in black and white on top. She looks young, late teens, early twenties, hair teased toward the sky in an impressive bouffant that looks to be held up by someone asgrand as God himself. She’s downright stunning, and if it wasn’t for a handwritten note on the back of the eight-by-ten photograph labeling it “Betty Laramie-headshot proof,” I would’ve thought it was a picture that came with a frame. The other photos are less telling, more images of random landscapes, houses, a barn, a farmhouse, a kitchen, artfully taken but giving me no clues to why they were taken at all.
“Dad!” I call to my father as he walks out of the house, his hands empty. My curiosity is temporarily displaced by a hot flash of annoyance. How does he have nothing to throw away?
“Hey, honey. It got quiet inside. Thought everyone called it quits for the day.”
“Sun is setting so we’ll be out of here soon. Charlie was just looking through some things, if you’d like to help.” Tina focuses both me and my dad with her comment.
“Yeah, sorry. Found this headshot of Mom.” I hold up the photo with a question in my voice. He takes it with a smile without giving any detail about its origin. “And a bunch of these,” I continue, passing him the small landscape images, keeping the two grainy photos of myself in a white dress and bonnet, playing in the grass on a summer afternoon. I wait for him to take a hint and explain the pictures, but instead, he tosses all of them into the garbage pile.
“Whoa, wait. Why are you throwing those away?”
“Eh. A silly old hobby.”
“Photography?”
He nods and I fish the pictures out of the garbage.
“Why did Mom have a headshot? Was she an actress or something?”
“Or something,” he says vaguely. “But she won’t want this. You can throw them out.”
“What about these?” Tina points to the sealed boxes. Up close, I can see the corner of one box has lifted, showing stacks of papers inside.
“Those can go, too,” he says. Tina nods and places them in the “throw away” side of her station, praising my dad for tossing two whole boxes without picking through them.
“What do you mean, ‘Or something’?” I ask. “And you didn’t even look in these. What are they?” I read the label. “Betty Laramie at WQRX” and an address in Janesville, Wisconsin. Janesville, again. That station, again.
