Families and Other Nonreturnable Gifts

  “You’re just trying to get me out of the room so Mom can clean it before the real estate agents come.”

  I shake my head, laughing. “How did you know that?”

  “It’s obvious.”

  “Well, come on anyway,” I say and tug on his arm, pulling him up out of the chair. “Give Mom a break for once.”

  Mom must hear us coming down the stairs because she suddenly appears at the bottom with a vacuum, a can of Pledge, and some rags.

  “Don’t move my stuff,” Milton says to her as she passes us.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” she says without pausing.

  “She’s going to move my stuff,” he tells me as we make our way into the kitchen.

  “She’s just going to make it look neater. It’s a pigsty in there. You don’t want strangers seeing it like that, do you?”

  “I don’t care. I don’t want them in my room anyway.” He sits down at the booth. “Will you make me something to eat?” His assumption that the rest of us will wait on him always astounds me.

  And yet, of course, we do. “What do you want?”

  “An egg in a frame?”

  That sounds good actually. I decide to make one for myself, too. We still have over an hour before the agents come—plenty of time to clean up any mess we make. I find bread in the freezer where Mom keeps it, defrost a couple of slices in the microwave, pull out butter and eggs, and turn the burner on under the pan. I haven’t cooked in this house for a while, but everything’s where it’s been for the last two and a half decades.

  Milton watches me as I cook. “Make it crispy but not burned,” he says. “I hate when it tastes burned. And keep the yolk runny. Not raw, just runny. It’s safe to eat so long as it’s pretty hot. Salmonella’s killed at fifty-five degrees. Celsius, not Fahrenheit.”

  “What’s that in Fahrenheit?”

  “One hundred and fifty degrees.”

  “And what’s boiling again?”

  “Are you serious? Two hundred and twelve. Come on, Keats.”

  “Right. I knew that—I just forgot for a second.” I cook our eggs and take them on plates to the table.

  “Celsius is so much more logical than Fahrenheit. I wish the U.S. would switch over to it already. Can I have a glass of milk?”

  “Get it yourself. I made the eggs.” He doesn’t get up, just starts eating. I eye him. “You have it pretty good here. I don’t blame you for not wanting to leave. You get half the house entirely to yourself, Mom waits on you hand and foot, and you don’t have to work or study or do anything.”

  “I study,” he says. “I’m taking courses.”

  “Right.”

  “I am. Seriously, Keats. I’m working toward a degree.”

  “And then you’ll get a job?”

  “Yeah, probably,” he says but without a lot of conviction. “And I work, too, you know, it’s just on stuff you guys don’t appreciate.”

  I raise my eyebrows skeptically but don’t respond to that. I stick my fork into the middle of my egg in a frame and the yolk runs out dark yellow and steaming, just like Milton wanted. I feel absurdly pleased with my success. “I’m thinking of going back to school myself and getting a graduate degree,” I say idly.

  “You should.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He shrugs, forks some more bread and egg into his mouth, and chews noisily, his mouth open. There’s yolk at the corners of his mouth and a fleck of white on his chin. His manners are atrocious. He says with his mouth still full, “You’re too smart for that stupid job.”

  “It’s not a stupid job. As jobs go, it’s a good one, but you wouldn’t know since you’ve never had one.”

  “Mom thinks it’s a stupid job. She says so all the time.” He stuffs the last bite of yolky bread into his mouth, chews, and burps. “I’m really thirsty now.”

  “Then get yourself something to drink. You’re a grown man, for god’s sake.”

  He’s so startled that for a moment his eyes actually meet mine. “I know,” he says. “I was just about to.” He rises to his feet. As he gets a glass out, he swings the out-of-joint cabinet door back and forth a few times and says, “Maybe no one will want the house anyway. It’s kind of falling apart.”

  “Someone will want it. It’s a big piece of property in a great neighborhood in a good school district. The house doesn’t matter that much—I wouldn’t be surprised if the new owners tear the whole thing down.”

  Milton puts the glass down on the counter still empty and turns to me. “Mom should put in the contract that they can’t do that.”

  “Once it’s not our house anymore, what difference does it make?”

  “So long as it’s not destroyed, it will still be the same house we grew up in. I was even thinking that maybe one day I could buy it back with my own money.”

  “Come on, Miltie. Be realistic. Is that ever going to happen? You buying this house with your own money?”

  “It could.”

  “It’s going to sell for over a million dollars.”

  He shrugs. He stares down at the empty glass, his face morose.

  I get up and touch his arm. “I know you love this house. I do, too. It’s our home. But that’s going to change. And it should. Just because you’re used to things being a certain way doesn’t mean that’s the way they should stay. Change is scary, but it isn’t necessarily a bad thing.” He keeps shaking his head. I can’t even tell if he’s really listening, but I keep going anyway. “You can’t just cling to something because it’s all you know, Milton. Being an adult is about making new choices, accepting that what was right for you once might not be right anymore, that sometimes you have to give something up to move on to something better, that—”

  I stop. Milton’s staring at me.

  “What?” I say.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “I’m not crying.”

  “Yes, you are. You have tears in your eyes. And your voice is all shaky.”

  “I’m just frustrated that you can’t see this.”

  “No,” he says. “You’re not just frustrated. You’re crying. Why?”

  “Will you just go get your milk?” I don’t want to admit that he’s right, I’m crying, because I can’t explain it. It’s just weird.

  He obediently walks away and opens the refrigerator door. I take the opportunity to rub my face hard against my sleeve. It helps. The tears stop.

  “The milk’s all gone,” Milton says, almost in amazement. “But I know we had some this morning. Mom brought me a glass.”

  “She must have used it up.”

  “Rats.” He shoves the door closed again. “I really wanted some.”

  “Yeah? Then let’s go get some.”

  “You can,” he says, backing away quickly. “I have some stuff to do. Don’t forget: I like two percent.”

  “You have to come with me.”

  “I’m not even really dressed, Keats.”

  “You’re fine. People go out in sweats all the time. You just need shoes.”

  “I don’t know where mine are.”

  I believe him. It’s probably been months since he’s worn them. Maybe years. “I’ll run up to your room and see if I can find them. You wait here.” I don’t trust him to get within a few feet of his computer and be able to tear himself away again.

  “It’d be faster for you to just go by yourself.”

  I get up close to him and fix him with as steely a look as a short, curly, red-haired girl can pull off. “You are going with me to the supermarket if I have to kick you in the butt every single step of the way. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, I understand you,” he says in an aggrieved tone. “I just don’t see what your problem is.”

  “My problem is that my brother never leaves the house. But that’s going to change right now. Don’t move, or I swear I’ll make Mom promise never to run an errand for you again.” Before he can respond, I’m racing out of the kitchen and up the stairs, yelling for
Mom, telling her that I need Milton’s shoes.

  She meets me at the doorway to his room. “What are you talking about?”

  “He’s coming with me to the supermarket.”

  Her mouth falls open. “Really?”

  “If I can find his shoes.”

  “He hasn’t left the house in two years.”

  “I know. Help me find his fucking shoes before I lose my chance!” I don’t think I’ve ever sworn in front of my mother before. Her eyes grow big, and then she nods quickly and helps me find the shoes.

  17.

  An hour later, Milton’s safely back in his room, two large glasses of milk under his ever-expanding, always-elastic waistband, and Mom and I are up in the attic, hiding from the real estate agents who are crawling all over our house.

  I’m telling her about our supermarket expedition. “He tried to stay in the car, but I wouldn’t let him. I had to literally open his door and haul him out. I think I pulled a muscle in my back.” I reach back and rub my knuckle against the sore area.

  “But then he went in with you?”

  “Yep. I marched him in. I was practically shoving him.”

  I’m curled up on the daybed, but Mom is prowling the room, ducking her head when the ceiling gets too low and then circling back around. “I can’t believe you got him out. I don’t know how you did it.”

  “By not giving him a choice.”

  “You have more power over him than I do. He listens to you.”

  “What are you talking about? You’re his mother. I’m just his sister.”

  “He respects you more.”

  “This wasn’t about respect,” I say. “It was about a combination of physical force, threats, and verbal abuse. I bullied him into going.”

  “How do you think he feels about it?”

  I consider that. “When we got to the milk section, he said there’s really only one kind he likes and he was glad he could pick it out. He said you get the wrong one all the time. And he liked doing the scanning at the self checkout. But he was still pissed at me for making him go.”

  “You have to keep doing this,” she says, and I scowl at her because she’s not saying, “I’ll keep doing this.” No, it’s “you have to keep doing this.”

  “I’ll do what I can, Mom, but I’m not the one who lives with him.”

  “I’m just so busy these days. And it sounds like it wasn’t easy.” She’s already back to her excuses.

  I sit there for a moment, running my hand absently along the worn-out sofa arm. It’s a mess, all holey and bumpy. I close my eyes and see Milton’s face pale with anxiety as we walked into the brightly lit supermarket and people swirled around us. But he’ll be less afraid next time, I think. And even less the time after that. It’s the unfamiliar that’s terrifying. “Mom?” I say after a moment or two.

  “What?”

  “Is it scary?” I ask. “Being on your own? Dating random men? Not knowing if any of it’s going to work out or not?”

  “A little bit.” I’m looking down, but I hear her step closer to me. “But once I realized your father wasn’t the person I wanted to grow old with, the thought of staying with him was a lot more terrifying than of being alone.”

  “But Dad’s a good guy. He’s not perfect, but he’s good.”

  “I told myself that for years. It wasn’t enough.”

  I don’t say anything else.

  * * *

  When Mom thinks most of the real estate agents are gone, she heads down to the main floor. I stretch out on the daybed and stare up at the ceiling and think about my life.

  I must fall asleep at some point, because I wake up to my mother’s voice calling up the steps. “Keats? Everyone’s gone.”

  “Even the Evanses?” I call back with sleepy suspicion. I’m in no mood to make small talk with that smarmy duo.

  “It’s just us.”

  I rouse myself and go downstairs. There’s some leftover cheese and crackers from the caravan. We snack on that, and I bring a plate to Milton, who doesn’t thank me, and then I help Mom tackle the cabinets in the family room, which are crammed full with old board games, drawings, homework assignments, photos, and other crap, including—inexplicably—an old cheese knife and a troll doll with pink hair.

  “I didn’t think I needed to bother cleaning these out yet since the doors hide everything,” Mom says as we get to work. “But Charlie said an agent opened one of the doors to see what it was like inside and a chess set fell on her head. Charlie said, ‘The house doesn’t have to be perfect, but it shouldn’t be dangerous.’”

  We both giggle at that. I’m not sure why it’s funny, but it is.

  Mom’s easily distracted from the task at hand. Sometimes she stops to read the papers she pulls out; sometimes she excuses herself to make a phone call or to use the bathroom, and doesn’t come back for a while; and sometimes she just wanders around the room, grumbling about what a huge chore it is to sell a house. But I keep working steadily and make pretty good progress. I stop only once, and that’s because Mom makes me look at something she’s just unearthed.

  “You have to read this,” she says, nudging my arm.

  “What is it?” My hands are dirty from all the pencil and crayon dust in the cabinet, so I swipe a lock of hair out of my eyes with the back of my wrist and peer over her shoulder.

  “Hopkins wrote this. She wanted me to give it to Mrs. Rieper.”

  “She wrote Mrs. Rieper a letter?” We’d both had her as our second-grade teacher, only years apart, of course.

  “At the beginning of the school year.” Mom tilts it so I can see it more clearly. “But I never gave it to her.”

  I read the note.

  Dear Mrs. Rieper,

  I know you and I had what you might call our differences when I was in your second-grade class. If I remember correctly, you once told me, “You think you know everything, but no seven-year-old knows everything, so maybe you should just listen and learn once in a while.” Does that ring a bell for you? I’m writing now because my sister is about to be a student in your class, and I want to assure you that despite her last name, she’s nothing like me. Keats is a very sweet and good-natured little girl, and her teachers always love her. In fact, her preschool teacher once told my parents that she would adopt Keats if she could. (She was joking, of course, and simply meant she enjoyed Keats immensely.) She deserves to be judged on her own merit and not as the sister of a student you frequently showed a lack of patience toward. Please try to keep an open mind and make her feel welcome in your classroom.

  Yours,

  Hopkins Sedlak

  I read it twice, torn between laughter and horror. “Is this for real?”

  Mom nods and folds it up and puts it in the Save pile. “You can see why I didn’t send it on.”

  “Yeah, good choice.” I turn back to the cabinet but then just stand there for a moment, thinking. “It was kind of sweet of Hopkins. Misguided, but sweet.”

  “I think she really did mean well. Can you believe she was only thirteen when she wrote that?” Mom laughs. “Only Hopkins…Do you remember Mrs. Rieper at all?”

  “Vaguely. She was perfectly nice to me.”

  “I told you before: teachers liked you better than they did Hopkins.”

  “Only because I didn’t challenge them, and she did. They had to appreciate how brilliant she was.”

  “I’m sure they tried to,” Mom says drily.

  It takes us—me, really—several hours to get through the cabinets, but finally we have two huge bags of trash, one bag of papers to be recycled, three stacks of drawings and stories that seemed worth saving (one for each child), and a box of games and toys in decent shape that Mom wants to donate to a hospital or shelter.

  I carry the trash and recycling out to the sidewalk and load the box into Mom’s car. Since we never had a real lunch, we’re both starving by now, and we figure we’ve earned a nice meal out. I ask Milton if he wants to come with us, but I’m not surprised
when he says we should just bring something back for him. I don’t push him to go. He made it all the way to the supermarket today. That’s enough for now. It’s more than he’s done in two years.

  He tells me to close the door on my way out of his room.

  So Mom and I go out alone to a local Italian restaurant, where she gets a seafood salad and I get pasta marinara and a call from Tom, who wants to know when I’m coming home. I tell him I’m at dinner with my mother.

  “You’re eating with her? But it’s Saturday! And it’s not even six yet! Why didn’t you wait for me?”

  “Because I was hungry.” I tell him I’ll meet him at home in an hour or so and get off the phone quickly.

  I drop Mom back off at the house. She’s got one foot out of the car when she stops and turns back to me. “You know, Keats, wherever I live, if you ever need a place to stay, for any length of time…You know you’re welcome to come stay with me, right?”

  A month ago, a week ago—maybe even yesterday—I would have gotten annoyed at her for even saying that.

  But today I thank her and say, “It’s good to know.”

  She doesn’t ask me any questions, just nods and gets out of the car.

  * * *

  As soon as I enter the apartment, Tom turns off the TV and jumps to his feet. “I’m starving,” he says. “Let’s go to Jo-Jo’s. I’m dying for a burger.” He’s changed from the golf clothes he was wearing that morning into a T-shirt and jeans.

  “Do you mind going without me? I’ve already been to one restaurant tonight.”

  He crosses his arms over his chest. “Come on, Keats. The least you can do is keep me company—I still can’t believe you blew me off without even checking. You knew I’d want to have dinner with you.”

  I go with him to Jo-Jo’s. It seems easier than arguing. He orders a double burger, and when it comes, he shoves his plate toward me. “Take some fries—you know you want them.”

  But I really don’t.