Good Bones

"Dad wanted you to come by."

"Yeah."

"He needs help, Em."

"Mine, specifically?"

"He won't hire anyone, you know that. It's Mom's house, it's special to him."

My brother's eyebrows knit like a sweater when I scoff.

"You look thin," I say.

"Yoga. Stress. Cigarettes."

"So he called you, huh?"

"He said you changed your number."

"I was tired of that automated voice telling me I was getting a call from the correctional center."

"I guess that's fair."

"Thanks."

"You won't talk to him?"

"What would I even say?"

Eleven hours later, Hazmatted and masked, we walk up our old front steps, subconsciously skipping the loose board like we always have. The smell is incredible; Mom was one of those animal hoarders, dying amid a menagerie rivaling that of the Ringling Brothers. They didn't find her until the dogs started roaming the streets looking for food. Thank God they still had their collars on.

The front room is lined with boxes and hair. Hair and boxes. I've never seen such a mess in my life, and it breaks my heart to think my mother laid somewhere in here for days after suffering what the coroner called a phenomenal stroke. Morbid, specific thoughts try to edge in and I push them aside by diving into the nearest stack of boxes. Cal joins in.

"We should make a pile of keep stuff and sell stuff," he says. "And anything we wanna donate."

I pull out a broken coffee maker from 1987. "I really think we should've rented a dumpster."

"I'll call Dad."

"What for? He can't do anything about it."

"There might be stuff he wants."

"So? That's not our concern right now."

"Why are you so against him?"

"Why are you taking his side?"

"I'm not, I just think you're being unfair."

"Yesterday I wasn't."

"Yesterday we didn't have this mess to clean up."

"It's all a mess," I say, and drag the whole stack to the door. "We should just bulldoze this whole place."

Cal and I grew up here but we spent as little time inside as possible. Even back then Mom was intense, almost greedy with her acquisitions. Dad left her when her spending got out of control to focus on the bar he owned downtown, leaving us behind to tend to the dozens of dogs, cats, parakeets, and, of course, Mom herself, though we were only nine and ten at the time. They got him on tax evasion a few years ago, which was satisfying if not the ending I'd envisioned for him--killed in a booze-soaked brawl was the preferred daydream for much of my adolescence, giving way to the less angry, run-of-the-mill blackbag kidnapping fantasy of my adulthood.

We tried to get Mom help so many times over the years the people at City Hall knew us by name. Her property was a public nuisance, an eyesore and often a nose-sore as well, stinking to high heaven of animal heat and shit. When we walked in that day to clean up after her yet again I had not set foot in the place in over fifteen years.

Cal's presence was the only thing keeping me rooted in the present; together, though, we ruminated on our shared traumatic history, room by room.

"Remember--" I'd start, and he'd finish the memory he already knew I was referencing.

"Finding the kittens by that heat register on Christmas morning, oh yes. What was the blind one's name again?"

"Prince Charles, I think," I mused. "Or maybe Princess Di?"

The kitchen had always been yellow and white, a perfectly preserved slice of 1950s Americana, very Raymond Carver with a little window over the sink looking out into the backyard, but over the years it had browned and peeled like an old banana left in the sun. There was the scorch mark from where a mouse had gotten stuck under the left front burner on the stove. There was the pantry I used to hide in and scare Cal, which also always scared Mom and made her drop whatever it was she was holding. Such a skittish woman. I wondered aloud if Dad had ever hit her as I pushed the crusty kitchen table aside. Dead things fell to the floor, bugs and mice and more hair.

"Honestly, probably," Cal sighed. "I think he drank back then, but it's hard to remember."

"Mom drank sometimes, but never out of a glass because they were always dirty. The water spots."

"We really should just bulldoze this place."

"Glad you're finally on board."

On the second day of cleanup we do end up getting a dumpster, and also make some piles of things we find that, like our mother before us, seize some sentimental part of our souls and refuse to be forgotten. Cal puts an old lunchbox in his pile. I lay down a Raggedy Ann Mom made for my birthday one year. We toss much more than we keep. It's hard work, emotionally almost more so than physically, because sifting through all the junk is like dredging a filthy lake. The mossy shipwrecks of our past coming to the surface, feeling air for the first time in decades.

We sit and cry in our childhood bedroom, which is where they found her. There's an unspeakable outline of her on the blue shag rug.

Later we find a radio that somehow still works and dance and sing to the oldies station. It feels like we're working through and towards something, an impossible task becoming less daunting through the sheer willpower of performing it. All the windows are open. We take all the doors off their hinges so we can move some of the bigger furniture out. Twice I have to excuse myself to scream outside after cockroaches fall into my face and hair. We find two cat mummies and a clamor of bones in the upstairs closet.

We fill the dumpster twice over. Just clearing all the junk out takes four days total. Cal stays with me and my wife the whole time, but we leave each other alone at my house to recharge. I try to make Rachel understand but I know she doesn't. Only children never do.

Dad calls to check on Cal (but really me) on the fifth day. He pretends I'm at the store and lets me listen to the conversation, which is typical Dad, telling us things we already know and a few things we didn't want to. Prison is hard, he says, but losing Mom was harder. I worry my eye roll can be heard through the phone.

"He's not reformed," I say when his allotted thirty minutes are used up. "He thinks he is but that's not the same thing."

"I know," Cal sniffs. "Have you found a realtor yet?"

"Rachel said she'd do it."

"Mmm, spousal benefits. Is that the same as nepotism?"

"Close cousin."

Instead of hiring a cleaning crew, like you normally would to sell a house someone died in, we decide to take on the task ourselves. Rachel comes along to assess the value and keep me sane. For hours the three of us are nearly silent, scrubbing baseboards and sweeping up dead cat hair and mopping and bleaching the absolute hell out of the bathroom and kitchen. It feels good to cleanse the place with my own hands after all is said and done; I really didn't think I'd be able to connect to it, but the act becomes broadly symbolic.

"We'll have to paint, of course," Rachel says. "But not until I get the assessment approved. It looks good, though. Good bones."

"Good bones," I repeat, giving her hand a squeeze. "That's all it's ever been."