Just Like Home(2)

The front door of the Crowder House was, mercifully, the same as it had always been. It was the door Vera’s father hung when he built the house, the door Vera had closed behind her when she left home for good so many years before. It was painted a deep velvety green, with a brass knob and a diamond-shaped window a foot above Vera’s eye level. It’d been just the right height for her father to peer through when he’d wanted to see who was outside.

Her old key still fit sweet and snug in the lock. The paint on the door was warm under the flat of her hand. She wrapped her fingers around the smooth brass of the doorknob, and with just a little pressure and almost no resistance at all, she was inside the house that her father built.

The door shut behind her without a sound.

It had been twelve years since Vera had last stood on the inside of that door. The sweat on her skin dried fast in the air-conditioned dark of the entryway, leaving her goosefleshed and sticky.

Without looking, she held out her hand and dropped her housekey in the bowl on the little table that stood beside the door; the bowl that was for keys and nothing else, the bowl that had been there since before she could remember, that would remain where it was until she sent it away along with all the rest of her mother’s things. The key landed with a bright chime.

The house swallowed the sound immediately, because it was a house that knew how to stay quiet.

Vera breathed in the windows-shut smell of the place where she’d been born. The place where she’d grown up. The place she’d abandoned.

The place where her mother was going to die.





CHAPTER TWO


In hindsight, Vera could see that she’d started turning toward home two jobs ago. She’d been doing data entry at a plastics manufacturer, and a coworker had seen Daphne on the news. That was a pre-deathbed Daphne, a Daphne who had no interest in her daughter, and she was on the news announcing her plans to host a new artist-in-residence at the Crowder House. There was going to be a series of paintings, an extended tour, a disgustingly lucrative auction. The coworker had seen the announcement and spotted the uncanny resemblance between Daphne and Vera (who wouldn’t), and they’d put that together with Vera’s last name and they’d figured out who she was. Who her father had been.

It wasn’t a hard riddle to solve.

Then had come the usual fraught few days of office friendships disintegrating, emails going unanswered, the break room emptying as soon as she entered. Vera had presented herself at HR to save them the trouble of summoning her. They’d called it a redundancy instead of a layoff, which she thought was kind.

It felt like fate: her next job falling apart in just the same way, and then the lease renewal on her apartment coming up fast, and then Daphne calling just as Vera was about to start looking for her next new temporary life.

Vera told herself that a good daughter would go home after that phone call without hesitation. Besides, it would be a relief to not have to find another furnished apartment, to not have to try to mold her spine into the shape of a new-old mattress and spring-stiff sofa. It wasn’t like she had more than a few things to pack.

She’d gifted her three remaining fish to a nine-year-old boy who lived in the unit below hers. He’d promised to keep them alive.

Vera didn’t give the fish great odds, but that wasn’t her business anymore.

It had been easy to uproot her life and leave it behind. She’d done it so many times before. And because that part had been easy, and because nothing could be easy all the way through, she knew to expect this next part to be hard.

In Vera’s memory, Daphne Crowder was a tall, thin, square-jawed woman with a tennis bracelet she never wore and a habit of biting through thread instead of cutting it. She was a woman who swept up broken shards of china and packed lunches in crinkling brown bags and frowned at the laundry as she folded it. She was a woman who had let Vera grow up for exactly seventeen and a half years before shutting the door behind her and bolting it for good.

Daphne had kissed Vera on the cheek that day without looking her in the eye, and then Vera had been outside of the house her father built with a dark blue duffel bag over her shoulder and a light blue suitcase in her hand. When she heard the bolt slide home she knew that the house her father built would never hold a place for her again. The way back, she knew, was closed to her.

Except now, the way was open again.

Vera stood under the arch that separated the dining room from the entryway, holding that same dark blue duffel and that same light blue suitcase, and her head swam. The house was the same, but everything everything everything was different.

The dining chairs had been pushed up against the walls. The dining table had been replaced by an adjustable bed. In the bed was a woman.

The woman was looking at Vera with her mother’s eyes. But this woman, who was made of paper and wax and seemed too small for her own skin, could not be Daphne Crowder.

A strange hot flush of mortification climbed Vera’s throat. It was as if she’d interrupted her mother in the middle of some terribly private moment. Something like bathing or masturbating or digging a kitchen knife into the palm of her own hand.

Dying, Vera supposed, was even more personal than any of those things. She was gripped by the urge to apologize for intruding.

“You look tired,” the woman in the bed said. She spoke with the same voice that had once told Vera the reason for the box of baking soda in the refrigerator, the voice that had told her what ovaries were for, the voice that had always been flat and loveless but had turned hateful the year Vera turned twelve.