Aunt Jean looked around the room. “No. No, honey. We’ll get this straightened out in no time. Your mom is going to have to stay in the hospital for a couple of weeks—that should give us just enough time to have this place spic and span.”
I blinked back a fresh set of tears in disbelief. “She’s coming home?” I said. “I thought she was dead.”
Aunt Jean laughed and gave me another hug. “No, honey, she’s not dead.” She took another look around the room. “Your mom is one hell of a slob, but she’s definitely not dead.”
As we drove to pick up mom from the hospital on the last day, Aunt Jean turned to us. “Now remember, we want this to be a surprise, so don’t say anything until we get home.” She sounded cheerful and confident, but she looked nervous as she said it, her hands gripping the steering wheel so tight her knuckles were white.
I looked down at my own hands. Aunt Jean had told us to wear gloves as we cleaned and scoured every surface in the house, but I could never get any gloves that fit right, so I’d just gone without. Now my hands were an angry red, and all of my nails were broken down to the bare edges.
But it had been worth it. For two weeks, Aunt Jean and Phil and I had dragged bags of trash out to the Dumpster she had rented that stood sentry in front of the house. The plumber had been called, and every dish shone from its place in the cupboard. Once the floors and tables were clear, we had sorted through the closets and drawers. Finally, every surface was scrubbed and bleached until there wasn’t a speck of mold left in the whole house. Aunt Jean had done most of the work; I could see the light from the hallway streaming under my door late into the night. It was like she couldn’t sleep until the house was spotless.
Phil was chewing on his fingernail and staring out the window as the streets rushed by. “Auntie Jean,” he said quietly.
I could see her glance at him in the rearview mirror. “What’s on your mind, babe?”
“Do you . . . do you think she’s going to like it?” he asked.
Aunt Jean glanced at the road, and then back to him. “We did it out of love,” she said. “How can your mom not like something we did out of love?”
“Then why couldn’t we tell her?” I said. “Or Sara?” Sara hadn’t bothered to come back once Aunt Jean showed up, spending all her time either at the hospital or at her apartment.
“Well,” she said. “Your sister is busy with her own life, and your mom might have felt bad because she couldn’t help. You know that even though she’s getting out of the hospital today, she’s going to need lots and lots of rest. Isn’t it better that she recuperates in a nice, clean house with all of us there to take care of her?”
“I guess,” Phil said, not looking convinced. I didn’t know what he was so worried about—it’s not like we did anything bad. He shot a glance at me and I shrugged.
“Watch your step, Joanna,” Aunt Jean said as she guided Mom’s walker up to the house. “Put your wheels on the stoop and then take the step up slowly.”
“I’ve got it,” Mom said, clearly frustrated at having to rely on someone else for help.
“I just don’t want you to fall,” Aunt Jean said.
Mom stopped her slow progress up the walk and leaned on the handles, her breathing coming hard, like she’d just run a marathon. “I know. I’m sorry. I really appreciate everything you’ve done for the kids the past few weeks. You must be anxious to get home.”
Aunt Jean leaned over and kissed her sister on the cheek. “It was nothing. I know you’d do the same for me. The only thing that matters now is that you get better.”
Phil and I walked behind the two of them, me carrying several bunches of flowers from her hospital room and Phil carrying Mom’s small suitcase.
I was so excited I felt like I was going to explode. We’d worked so hard to get everything finished—even the big Dumpster had been taken away just this morning, leaving only two parallel scrapes in the street to show it had ever been there. “Can we tell her now?” I asked. I was practically jumping up and down, and wished they would hurry up and get to the door.
“Tell me what?” Mom smiled. It was probably the first smile I’d seen since her accident. The worry lines in her forehead had gotten so deep they looked like scars from a lifetime of hurt.
Aunt Jean concentrated on finding the right key on her key ring. “Oh, just a little surprise we cooked up for you.”
Phil hung back and didn’t say anything.
“Open the door already!” I practically shouted.
Mom had a confused smile on her face as Aunt Jean swung the door open.
I scooted past the two of them and into the sparkling hallway that still smelled faintly of pine cleaner. “Ta da!”
Mom placed the front legs of the walker in the hallway and pulled herself into the house. She took two tentative steps and stopped, craning her neck to see into the dining room and then back to the living room. “Oh no,” she said quietly. The walker rattled on the tiles as she tried to hurry down the hallway. Her voice got louder and more frantic as she went. “Oh no . . . oh no . . . oh no!”
Aunt Jean followed behind her, but Mom didn’t seem to notice. “Now, Joanna, it just needed a bit of sprucing up in here,” she said. “It’s no big deal, really. Joanna?”
Mom continued her noisy scraping along the hallway until she got to her bedroom. One hand gripped the walker as the other flew to her mouth. “Where are they? Where are all my things?” She turned and started back down the hallway to where Aunt Jean had stopped. “My papers and photos? All of my quilting supplies—some of those fabrics are irreplaceable!”
“You need to calm down,” Aunt Jean said. “We kept everything that was valuable. It’s all put away. The kids did such a wonderful job—”
“The kids? You made the kids do this to me?” Mom looked at Phil and me. He hadn’t even made it through the
