The kitchen light was dim, but I could see the splotched red skin on the tops of her feet. She was scalded, but not burned. I sighed, stood, and dumped the hot water into the sink, then let the faucet run cold. I filled the pot again, put it on the floor in front of a chair at the table, and told her to sit with her feet in the water. She looked at me like I’d lost my mind, and I wondered how the hell this woman had managed to care for three babies.
“You need to cool it off, or it’ll get worse,” I explained, grabbing her by the shoulders and maneuvering her to the chair.
Without another word, she sat and put her feet in the water.
“Where are Lucy and Grace?” I asked, using the dish rag to mop up the floor.
“I don’t know.”
“Are they upstairs?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
I looked up at her, already exhausted from this interaction. For a split second, I was glad she had spent so much of my life in her bedroom, and then I scolded myself for allowing that thought to enter my mind. Whatever was wrong with my mom wasn’t her fault. She was messed up and sick, and I didn’t know why, but I knew enough to know she hadn’t done anything to cause it.
“Did they come home?”
My mother looked like she was about to fall asleep right there in the chair. Her eyes fluttered, and her head nodded.
“Mom!”
Her head lifted. “Huh?”
“Lucy and Grace. Did they come home?”
“Oh, y-yeah,” she said, nodding as though her head weighed twenty pounds.
I finished drying the floor as best I could, then left my mother in the kitchen to call up the stairs to my sisters. They answered immediately, and relief washed over me as they ran from their rooms to hurry down the stairs.
“Hey, Max,” Lucy said, leaning against the banister.
“What’s up?” Grace asked.
“I need your help getting Mom upstairs,” I said. “She can’t cook. She’s too out of it.”
“Daddy will be mad if she doesn’t make dinner,” Lucy said with a grimace.
“I’ll deal with him. Let’s just get her to bed.”
Lucy and Grace led Mom through the living room and carefully up the stairs while I set out to cook the pasta Mom had attempted to make. Dad came home shortly before it was done, and when he saw me in the kitchen, he demanded to know what I was doing.
“Mom can barely keep her eyes open,” I said as I stirred the meat sauce I’d made into the pasta. “She’s in no shape to cook over an open flame. Unless, of course, you want her to set the house on fire.”
Dad only grunted.
My sisters came downstairs and quickly set the table as our father looked on, watching this dance we had practiced many times before. When I glanced at him, I thought I might’ve seen the faintest glint of satisfaction flicker in his cold eyes, but I could’ve been mistaken.
Then we sat down to eat.
It struck me as funny when I realized I couldn’t remember meals outside of our birthdays where my mother sat with us. And I found it even funnier that I had never noticed this until now, how the things you were used to just seemed so normal when they weren’t normal at all.
“Why doesn’t Mom ever eat with us?” I asked my father before shoveling a forkful of pasta into my mouth.
“Because she’s tired.”
“She’s been tired almost every day for eighteen years?”
“It hasn’t been eighteenyears,” he grumbled defensively. “You just don’t remember.”
