Molly sank onto the downy couch beside her mother. “Oh, Mom,” she said tenderly. “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry.”
They sat like that for a while, quiet, together, and she snuggled against her mother, then went into her parents’ bedroom. Her father was asleep, the quilt pulled up to his chin. He had aged since she last saw him, not that long ago despite her mother’s admonitions, two months. But Aaron, breathing noisily, his face otherwise so still, looked old, like an old, old man. Molly kissed his forehead.
*
“I’m sorry you walked in on such a drama,” Joy said. They were squeezed in at the table in the kitchen drinking the house specialty, decaffeinated tea, weak, lukewarm.
“I’m sorry you have to deal with this, Mommy.”
“Gregor is a nice young man. He and his wife just had a baby.”
“Do you think maybe you should lock the door? At night? Then, if Daddy gets up—”
“What if there’s a fire?” her mother said, appalled. “You’re not thinking, Molly.”
Molly stirred her tea. The sound of the spoon against the teacup was musical, like bells.
“I hate being such an old ruin,” Joy said softly.
“You’re not an old ruin. You’re still working, for heaven’s sake. You take care of Dad all by yourself. I don’t know how you manage, honestly. And you look beautiful, too. Old ruin. That’s a joke.”
“Well”—Joy was obviously mollified—“I am old.”
No one at work knew her real age. Eighty-six. That would give them a jolt, all those potbellied men planning their retirements at sixty-five. Of course, she couldn’t afford to retire even now. She’d cut back to part-time since Aaron got so sick, which was hard enough on the finances.
“I only work three days a week,” she added.
“That’s plenty.”
“Plenty of tsuris.”
The room that had once been Molly’s was now her mother’s office and her father’s study. Those were the terms used by them both, and if an office is a place where you store cardboard boxes of unopened mail and a study is where you sit between spires of those boxes on a convertible sofa and listen to your transistor radio, then those terms were accurate.
Molly transferred the piles of boxes from the sofa to the floor, leaving a little path to the door, and began removing the sofa’s newly visible pillows before she realized that other towers of boxes on the floor would prevent the mattress from unfolding.
“Oh well,” Joy said. “Storage is a problem in New York City. Sleep in Danny’s room.”
Daniel’s room had originally been a maid’s room, a remnant from the days when the building had been built, the days when families had maids. The room was so narrow that the only bed that would fit there was a special narrow maid’s-room bed sold, once upon a time, in some of the better New York department stores. This one was very old, perhaps forty years old, lumpy and somehow inviting. Daniel had always loved his room, fixing it up like a cabin on a boat. In fact, he had made it so cozy and inviting that Molly had tried to get him to switch with her, but he had contemptuously refused. Aaron called it the Nookery, a Dickens reference, he said, and that had clinched it for both children: Daniel had the best room in the house. It even had its own bathroom, the size of a phone booth, with a toilet and a skinny shower. The sink was in the bedroom, which Daniel one day announced was very European, enraging Molly, who was stuck in her conventional American bedroom with its big closet and large windows facing the tree-lined street. The small window at the head of Daniel’s maid’s-room cot faced another building, but he had managed to make a friend across the air shaft and they rigged up a pulley system and paper cup telephone, so even that turned out to be an advantage.
Molly pulled the old cotton quilt around her. She felt far away, missing Freddie, and she felt comfortably at home. Outside, an ambulance went screeching along somewhere in the distance.
She heard her mother padding around in the kitchen, the pop of the toaster, the refrigerator door opening, closing. She would have to check the refrigerator tomorrow, search for the squalid, liquefying slices of tomato, the curled, desiccated turkey slices she knew would be tucked up somewhere in there. She had to make sure her parents were eating properly. There were boxes of Vienna Fingers and saltines on the counter. Minute Rice. Rice Krispies. Cream of Wheat. If it was an empty calorie, her parents were sure to stock it. But she had also seen a banana and a few oranges in a bowl. A good sign. She had tried once to arrange a regular delivery of decent produce through an organic food website. It had not been a success. Her mother did not like the dirt on the vegetables. Her father did not like the irregular shapes. Neither of them liked rutabagas.