“Julie!” a voice called.
“Weirdo,” Nyssa joked. “Although I’d go to any darkroom with Mr. Granger. Photography is hands down the best club ever.”
“Julie!” said the voice again. Then she heard a hacking cough.
“Who’s that?” Nyssa asked, sounding a little grossed out.
“Um, our cleaning lady,” Julie said, her heart beating hard.
“You should send her home. She sounds sick,” Nyssa said. Then she groaned. “My mom’s calling me. What are you doing this afternoon?”
“Julie!”
“Um . . .” Julie needed off the phone fast. “Actually, I gotta go, too. Call you later.”
She hung up. Then she stood from her desk, her heart beating harder and harder. Her mother called her one more time, her voice rising with urgency. “Coming,” Julie said, her voice choked with a sob.
And then she opened the door.
Every square foot of carpet was crammed with boxes or furniture or Rubbermaid crates full of random collections. She squeezed through the hallway, shoving her way through a maze of boxes. Plastic garbage bags were piled so high they blocked out the sconces. Her heart thudded against her sternum, a familiar nausea blooming in her stomach.
Every step she took she felt cats brushing her shins, swarming around her ankles. In the kitchen, broken appliances cluttered the floor, old stand mixers and ice-cream makers nestled between paper sacks full of the fragments of shattered dishes. An unusable vintage stove Julie’s mother had scavenged from somewhere sat under the window, piled high with stained and swollen cookbooks. Stacks of old newspapers and magazines tied with twine stood five feet tall against the walls. A dingy white cat was curled sleeping on top of one pile, while another sharpened its claws on the stack, leaving tendrils of newsprint drifting across the floor. Cat hair hovered in the air around them, swirling up in eddies every time Julie moved.
Calm down, Julie told herself. She began to count. One, two, three . . .
A cat’s tail brushed against Julie’s bare leg. She thought she might lose her mind. Four, five, six . . .
“Julie? Are you coming?”
Dwarfed by the teetering piles, her mother sat at the table, letting a small gray tabby lap the milk out of her cereal bowl. Four more cats swam around the woman’s pudgy ankles, mewling for food. Mrs. Redding wore a pink quilted housedress, gray at the hem and stained with food. Her face was soft and doughy, her skin dull-looking. Julie fought the urge to run the kitchen scrub brush over her mother’s flesh, to scrape away the outside layer of dirt and neglect. And then turn her sights on the rest of the house. Throw out everything. Burn the place to the ground. Seven, eight . . .
“I’m here,” Julie said, sweeping into the room. Julie snatched the bowl and brought it to the sink, knowing that if she didn’t clean it, it would sit there for weeks, or maybe even months.
“I wasn’t finished!” her mother cried. Then her eyes boggled. “And don’t throw that away!”
She gestured to Julie’s hand, which held a crumpled-up piece of newspaper on the sink as well as a newspaper circular boasting sales that had ended weeks ago. Why her mother needed those two items, she had no idea. But, wilting, she placed them back on the counter. On top of some stacked dirty dishes and a pile of other newspaper circulars that were probably equally as obsolete.
Nine. Ten. Eleven. Don’t get mad. You’ll make her cry, and that’s the worst. Twelve. Thirteen. Julie squeezed the sponge tightly, watching the suds ooze out of its pores.
“I was just trying to help, Mom,” she said, her voice steady. She rinsed the last of the breakfast pans and unplugged the drain. Of course there was nowhere to stack the clean dishes—except for on top of the other dishes. She wiped them down with a dish towel, and then carefully stacked them on the teetering pile. “So, um, you were calling me?”
“Yes. Can you deposit my check today?” her mother said. “And get some kitty litter from the store?”
Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Of course her mother needed kitty litter. And god forbid she left the house herself. Then again, Julie was grateful for that: Her mother might admit Julie was her daughter to someone who’d pass it along to kids at school. And then the jig would be up. “Uh, sure.”
“And can you get me an Entertainment Weekly while you’re out?”
A sudden hysterical need to laugh bubbled up in Julie’s throat as her eyes slid over the towers of paper around the kitchen. “I don’t know, Mom,” she snapped, unable to resist. “Maybe you want to catch up on your back issues first?”