Just Like Home(19)
Vera started under the sink, pulling out cleaning supplies and dish towels and an absurd volume of plastic grocery bags. She put all of them into the KEEP bin—she didn’t know how long she would be staying in the house, and it seemed smart to hang on to the cleaning supplies. The plastic bags would be useful for bagging up the things that accumulated in the TOSS bin.
There was a thermos, too, all the way in the back of the cupboard, under a pile of debris. It had been lost back there and forgotten. Vera knew that, knew it without question, because she recognized the thermos.
It had been her father’s.
The green plastic that coated the metal was as bright as she remembered. Vera smiled, gently rolling the thermos between her palms. She hadn’t seen it in ages; she could only assume that no one had. She wondered if this was how some people felt when they unexpectedly bumped into an old friend.
Vera closed the empty cupboard and sat back on her heels, relieved at how easy it had been to clear it out. The rest of the house wouldn’t compare to that one half-empty cupboard, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that this whole project felt more surmountable than it had an hour before.
It occurred to her that a lot of the kitchen would probably be like that cupboard below the sink. It would be full of things that she would need to keep for as long as she was staying in the house, things that she might as well leave where they were so she could keep using them. Things she wouldn’t be able to deal with until after her mother was dead.
The thought startled her with how awful it was, and with how little it made her feel.
Her mother was in the dark dining room, either asleep or pretending to be. Asleep and dying and alone. That knowledge should have buckled Vera’s knees. It should have knocked the wind out of her, or at least a few tears.
But it just made her feel awkward. She was here, in this home, for the most vulnerable and uncontrollable moment of Daphne’s life. And she knew beyond a doubt that her presence was the last thing Daphne wanted. She was a last resort, a backup to the backup to the backup. Daphne had only called Vera home because there was no one else to call. They had nothing to say to each other that hadn’t been said when Vera was a child, nothing that hadn’t been communicated by the years they’d spent as strangers.
Vera rose from her crouch in front of the cupboard, stirring a few loose plastic bags that remained at her feet. There was no point in dwelling on this, on what was and what might have been, on the relationship she and her mother would never have. It was a distraction. There was work to be done here. Best to shake it off and move on.
She decided to clean out her father’s old thermos, to make it useful again. Something he’d carried with him to work for years—something his big calloused hands had wrapped around every day, something that he’d thought of as useful and good—shouldn’t just sit around. It would be wasteful.
The silver cap squeaked when she twisted it off. The faintest whiff of coffee lingered inside, even though the thermos must have been under that sink for twenty-some-odd years. Vera brought it closer to her face to breathe in that smell.
Something inside rustled.
Vera frowned. She gave the thermos a tentative rattle, and there it was again: a rustle, like the wings of a beetle settling.
She knew better than to look inside, because if something sounds like a bug, it might turn out to be a bug, and while Vera didn’t mind looking at bugs, she certainly did mind them flying up at her face. Instead of looking, she flipped the thermos upside-down over the sink and gave it a good hard shake.
Nothing came out. She shook it again, and then again, and still: nothing. Finally, she tipped it sideways and craned her neck to peer inside, keeping the opening of the thermos as far away from her face as possible.
Something small and white looked back at her. A cocoon, she thought at first. Then, as she looked a little closer, she realized that no—it wasn’t a cocoon at all. It was a piece of paper, rolled up into a tight tube.
She held the thermos over the countertop and shook it hard from side to side until the little cylinder of paper stopped catching on the inside of the lip. It fell out and rolled nearly to the edge of the counter, where Vera caught it in her palm. It was the size and length of a cigarette. Really, Vera thought, she should have mistaken it for a cigarette at first, except that as far as she knew, her father had never smoked.
If he’d smoked, she would have known. She almost definitely would have known.
She unrolled the slip of paper. It was white and thin, low-quality unlined notebook paper, torn along one long edge and one short edge. The script was immediately familiar. Her father’s handwriting had always been tiny and round and even, the letters bubbling across the page in steady, straight lines.
It was a page ripped out of his journal. The journal Vera had hidden under the front porch. The journal that she’d assumed—that she’d hoped—had long ago turned to pulp.
It was an entry about her.
VERA IS GROWING UP SO CREATIVE AND SO SMART. SHE IS STILL JUST A KID BUT I’VE NEVER LIKED ANYONE SO MUCH AS I LIKE HER. SHE IS GOOD AT MATH AND AT SCIENCE BUT NOT SO HOT ON READING. JUST LIKE ME. I KNOW THAT SHE WILL STAY GOOD SO LONG AS I REMEMBER TO KEEP BAD THINGS AWAY FROM HER. DAPHNE DOESN’T AGREE BUT WE DON’T HAVE TO ARGUE ABOUT IT. I HOPE VERA KNOWS HOW MUCH I LOVE HER AND THAT I’LL ALWAYS
That’s where the page was torn off. That’s where the words ended. Whatever was supposed to be on the line below always, it wasn’t here. Vera flipped the thermos over again, peered close inside it to see if there was another curled-up half page waiting for her in there—but of course there wasn’t.