“Yeah, I guess we have room for one more,” she said, tilting her chin towards a group of toddlers and dogs. “That’s where you’ll sit. And you’re going to clean the whole kitchen afterwards.”
I nodded, just glad to be in from the sudden freezing rain. The meal went just as every pleasant one does when you’re a visitor to a well-knit family: pleasant questions, briefer answers, overdone noises for overdone breast meat, understated disgust at underbaked casserole. The pie and coffee came and went as all pie and coffee does, there and gone, the same as every slice of pumpkin pie and cup of Folgers before or since, at every happy home in every cozy town on every holiday.
She clapped her hands in front of my face at 7:05, right after the last of her mother’s generation left for good. “Deal’s a deal, turd breath. Chop chop.” She threw a mop and a bucket of Pine Sol at my head, knocking my fillings loose.
I spent the next two hours scrubbing and mopping, washing and drying, sorting and packing. The dining room and kitchen looked as immaculate as I looked haggard, the grime of hitchhiking eight hundred miles now compounded with the sweat of leaving a home free of all human events, the same erasure in every happy home in every cozy town on every holiday. Every bit of a cousin’s trace, an aunt’s perfume, a nephew’s fussy eating, the cigarettes and old records and memories, every trace of humanity, scrubbed clean by 9 pm, only the synthetic smell of pine left in the air.
She inspected every corner with a white glove, even the inside of the oven. “I have to hand it to you, shit lips: you actually did something correct. I might even give you a plate for the road.” She poured herself the last of the Folgers before she gave me a sudden shove into the open oven. I head the door lock as she pressed the self-cleaning setting.
“On second thought: who doesn’t want an extra turkey,” she laughed before returning to her lukewarm coffee.
Keegan Shepherd 