The Things We Keep(12)

I end my speech with an awkward nod and an attempted smile. The residents continue to stare at me. I suddenly become aware of Clem, standing immediately to my right.

“My name is Clementine Harriet Bennett,” she says. “Very pleased to meet you all.” The residents’ faces, blank a moment earlier, start to upturn. “I’m seven years old and I’m in the second grade. I’m also very good at Irish dancing, would you like me to show you?”

I pat her shoulder. “Clem, we really better—”

“Is a frog’s ass watertight?” says a gray-blond lady with a Southern accent. “Go ahead, young lady.”

Clem shifts uncertainly—perhaps waiting for me to reprimand the lady for using the word “ass”—but she recovers quickly. “Okay, but I don’t have my music here, so I need you to clap. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, got it?” A couple of residents nod, but most look puzzled. A man at the back adjusts his hearing aid.

“Okay, then,” Clem instructs. “Start.”

As Clem kicks and hops around the room, a few residents clap. It’s not a great clap—it’s a little out of time and doesn’t have much force behind it—but Clem manages to keep it together. I feel a little bit proud. She finishes up with a curtsy.

“Thank you very much. Tomorrow, I’ll bring my recorder and play some songs. Would you like that?”

A few people nod, and I marvel at Clem’s unbridled confidence. “It’ll have to be after school, Clemmy,” I say.

“Yes, yes,” she says, waving as though it were a packed audience at the Hippodrome. “After school.”

Before we leave, I’m introduced to the night nurse, Rosie, a girl in her mid-twenties with a blond ponytail so high atop her head, it resembles an erupting volcano. We talk to Eric for a few more minutes, and then Angus walks us to the door.

“Which one is my room?” Clem asks.

“This isn’t our house,” I say, quickly and quietly as I can. “We’re just headed there now.”

“Oh!” Clem covers a giggle and looks at Angus. “I guess I’d better take my bag, then!”

Angus hands her the garbage bag and opens the door.

I hurry through it, but Clem pulls me back. “Uh, Mom?”

“Yes, hon?”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

For the life of me, I can’t figure out what she is talking about. “What?”

She pulls on my shirt cuff, dragging me down until my ear is level with her mouth. “A tip!”

Any hope Angus might not have heard Clem’s stage whisper is extinguished when I see his expression.

“Tell you what?” he says to Clem, throwing her a wink. “This one’s on the house.”

Clem giggles her thanks and scampers down the steps. But when Angus lifts his eyes to me, his expression isn’t quite so warm.

*

It takes twenty minutes to drive to our apartment. Clem frowns as we press open the glass door set in a narrow gap between a pizza shop and a convenience store. The stairs are covered in worn carpet and curved like a row of sad smiles that sink and creak with each step. One patch of carpet is so sunken, I wonder if there’s even a floorboard underneath. I make a mental note to avoid it in the future.

At the top of the stairs, I jiggle the key in the old lock and crack it open. Clem charges in first, does the circuit, then stands before me, all puzzled looking.

“This is it?”

I bustle inside with the garbage bags. “What do you think?”

I’d put off bringing Clem to the apartment for as long as I possibly could. Mother and I had been slowly moving in the few pieces of furniture I had left into the place, hoping we could get it looking cheerful before Clem saw it. I’d lined up her toys on the windowsill and put out pictures in frames. But even the bunch of daises on the table and the Frozen poster on the wall weren’t enough to brighten up the place.

“It smells like salami.”

CLEAN, FUNCTIONAL APARTMENT, the advertisement had said. Which meant a brown vinyl kitchen with electric hot plates, an open-plan living room with brown-flecked carpet tiles, and a shower room boasting a matching wooden toilet seat and vanity. And …

“There’s only one bedroom,” Clem says.

I sit my purse on the counter, trying to find something that Clem will like about the place. But there’s nothing. If Richard were here, he’d have made her laugh; he was the expert at that. But Richard wasn’t here.

Clem’s white-blond pigtails bob as she does another scan of the room. “Well … where am I going to sleep?”

I glance over her shoulder at the double bed. All the parenting books I’d read when Clem was a baby had warned of the perils of letting a child sleep in your bed, and dutifully, I’d heeded their advice, choosing to spend evenings rocking her in a recliner, driving around the block with her in the car, even lying beside her crib on the floor rather than bringing her into the forbidden marital bed. When I lamented to Mother, she’d practically spat her tea. “For Heaven’s sake, Evie! Wouldn’t anyone prefer to sleep in warm, comforting arms rather than behind bars in a dark, scary room?” Now, more than ever, I was inclined to agree.

“Where do you think?” I ask, then tackle her, tickling until we both crumple onto the bed.