“Eugenia, my head, my head,” she slurs, her head rolling back on her shoulders. The living room has been dark ever since Dad covered the windows with black garbage bags so that they wouldn’t have to look at the hole in Manhattan. But a ray of sunlight comes through the kitchen window and I can see the dust thick in the air. I put Ma in her chair. “Eugenia!” She shouts my name, then mumbles, just before her head hits the headrest of the La-Z-Boy and she falls asleep. She snores. I cover her with a fleece blanket. The one with the three white kittens in a basket on the front.
I pick up the beer cans and half empty boxes of chicken wings, Chinese food containers thick with mold. Dad is doing the best he can but he can’t keep up with driving the bus and taking care of Ma. So it’s the housework that he’s let go. He says the driving is therapeutic. By which he means it gets him out of the house so he doesn’t have to be with her all day. I can’t blame him, for not wanting to be here, for not being able to carry her grief when he’s got so much of his own. He drives his around all day. She drinks hers. I cry on public transportation, sometimes without noticing until I catch my reflection in the glass of the subway doors as they close.
I clean the house like Ma taught me. I do things how she likes them, vinegar and baking soda to get the crap off the stovetop, the cheap vodka she keeps under the bathroom sink to make the faucet shiny and to disinfect the bottom of the tub. I wash the dishes, remember why they’re all melamine and not ceramic.
I dust the frame of Frankie’s high school graduation picture. She was never one for keeping our childhood things, but since he died she’s been combing through the house, finding any artifact he once handled and taping it around his picture in the kitchen. A forgotten half pack of cigarettes he kept under his mattress. A Domino’s menu where he wrote down a phone number without a name. A letter to Santa, God knows where she found that, asking for a bike that he never got. An expired MetroCard she found in one of his jacket pockets.
When everything is clean I make soup. Her favorite, Campbell’s Cream of Chicken. I open the can, turn it upside down, add water, heat, stir. The solid block of soup indented with the ridges of the tin can eventually melts into liquid.
I hear Ma behind me, shuffling into the kitchen. “When did you get here, Eugenia?”
“A few hours ago, you want some soup?”
“Aspirin, where’s the aspirin?” She sits down at the kitchen table and lights a cigarette. I give her two aspirin and a cup of water.
“You want some coffee?” I ask. “I just made a pot. I found you by the door again, Ma, were you trying to go somewhere? Do you remember?”
“Yeah, coffee, is there Coffee mate? If there’s no Coffee mate I want the half-and-half, did he buy the fuckin’ half-and-half?” She ignores my question. Keeps smoking. Dad and I have found her all over the house like that, passed out, seemingly in the middle of doing something before giving up and lying down on the spot.
I open the fridge. “Your lucky day, Ma, Coffee mate and half-and-half. Take your pick.” I pour the coffee and put both containers on the table. I turn around to stir the soup.
“You don’t need to take care of me now, you can go,” she says. I don’t let her see that I notice her hand shaking when she pours the Coffee mate.
“I came to see you, Ma, I don’t have to be anywhere. I’ll just hang out for a while.”
“I don’t need a babysitter.”
“Have some soup, you’ll feel better.” As I bring it to her at the kitchen table she knocks the bowl out of my hands to the floor. The soup scalds the back of my hand as the bowl hits the ground.
“Get out! No more fucking soup!” she screams, but with her voice so hoarse from all the drinking and smoking it doesn’t make the impact she wants it to. On automatic pilot I bend down to start cleaning up the mess but then I catch myself. I stop.
“OK, Ma, OK. I’ll go.” I say it calmly. I say it this way every time she yells at me to get out. Once a week.
I pick up my coat, put my bag over my shoulder and say, “Bye, Ma.” I close the door behind me and sit down on the front steps. I’ll wait outside until Dad gets home. At least it’s springtime now and it’s warmer out. This routine was much worse in the winter, when I had to stand outside the house in the cold. I give it about fifteen minutes, then I walk around to the back and stand by the kitchen window. I left a small gap between the kitchen curtains while I was cooking so that I’d be able to see in from outside without her noticing. I look in and see her sobbing. The smoking and drinking make her crying sound like coughing—raw, wheezy, like she can’t get any air. Her cigarette has burned down to the filter. When she stops crying she stares at Frankie’s shrine, bites her nails, rubs her eyes, finishes her coffee.
Then my eyes well up with tears and I try to swallow the lump in my throat. I’m flooded with relief. I watch her pick up a roll of paper towels and start mopping up the floor. Once a week for six months—since we
