Tom Murphy waited until his mother left for her nightly novena at the Church of the Good Shepherd before he began packing. The moment the taillights of Gladys’s rusted Toyota disappeared over the low rise leaving a cloud of exhaust hanging in the frosty air, he got busy. He had exactly ninety minutes.
Twenty-four hours earlier while Gladys was praying at the church, he’d prepared for his escape. He stuffed his backpack with small odds and ends that he couldn’t live without and hid it under his bed. Locating a usable suitcase had been pure luck. He made a mental note of where it was, not wanting to arouse her suspicion by moving it too soon.
Now, heart hammering under his sweatshirt, Tom rushed to retrieve the suitcase from the basement. He slipped behind the furnace and shifted boxes of glassware and books and toys onto another stack of junk to reach the suitcase at the bottom of the pile. It was huge and heavy. He unzipped it and dumped the contents. Sheet music and photo albums and handwritten recipes on index cards all tumbled out together with a tangle of Christmas lights and picture frames and garish fake flowers. Gladys would go through the roof when she saw what he’d done, but he was beyond caring. Nothing was left in the suitcase but the stink of mouse droppings and mildew.
Holding the case over his head, Tom climbed the steep stairs, navigating the narrow path between dusty cases of canned goods and bins stuffed with craft supplies. He stumbled once but his quick reflexes saved him from somersaulting back to the bottom.
The kitchen floor had long ago been buried under takeout containers, cereal boxes, and soda cans, crushed flat in dense layers like the ancient limestone lying beneath the foundation of the house. Tom couldn’t remember if the floor was green or gold. He barely noticed the stench in the room. Tiny flying insects found his eyes and mouth, and the muscles of his face twitched like the flanks of a horse in summer.
Walking on top of the garbage heap brought his head close to the ceiling as he maneuvered across the kitchen and ducked through the doorway. He pushed sideways down a hall banked on both sides with junk, bumping an elbow against a leaning tower of plastic storage tubs. Loose papers slipped off the top, fluttering past his face to his feet, followed by a bundle of unopened mail that landed with a thump.
Gladys’s bedroom door was ajar. A wall of cardboard boxes blocked the only window. Gauzy moonlight edged them with silver. In the shadows Tom could make out the hulking shape of a bed sagging under a mound of clothes and magazines. The bathroom door was closed. Just another place to stash things ever since the township cut off both water and sewer due to unpaid bills. Tom had been showering at the gym where he worked part-time, and a bucket in the garage stood ready to sub in for a toilet when he was desperate. He had no idea how Gladys managed and didn’t ask.
He shouldered open his bedroom door and set his burden down. His was the only room in the house where he felt safe, where he could breathe and move normally. His twin bed was made. The floor was clear. He stepped to the window and surveyed the quiet tree-lined residential street. Feathery snow was falling onto the roofs of the 163 residents of Berger Lake who were already in for the night. His breath misted the cold glass, and he wiped it clean before drawing the white shade against the evening gloom. He switched on his desk lamp. How much longer until their electricity was cut off? Their heat?
He needed to be well clear of the house when Gladys returned at 8:15. He hustled between his dresser and the suitcase, removing neatly folded clothes from drawers and arranging them in the open case in the middle of the floor. He tucked socks and underwear in around the edges.
His jaw tightened as he kicked aside bulging plastic bags to get his closet door open. One bag slumped over, and some of the contents spilled onto the pale blue carpet. A giant sparkly candy cane, a plush Santa doll, a candle shaped like snowman. Here was the reason it was time to leave at last.
“Walmart’s having an after-Christmas sale,” Gladys had crowed the day before. Like a proud fisherman with the day’s catch, she’d hoisted half a dozen bags for him to see.
“More stuff? Ma, you promised. For every item you bring into the house, Dr. Schmidt says you need to let one go.”
“That man doesn’t understand anything.” Gladys squeezed her huge body through a jumble of newly delivered boxes of treasures in the entryway, grunting and cursing.
Tom had gone with Gladys to her first appointment in the fall. He’d sat gnawing his cuticles while Gladys smugly described herself to the therapist as a collector, a savvy shopper, a bargain hunter, someone who just needed a little help organizing.
“I’ll just put this Christmas stuff in your room for now,” she called over her shoulder from down the hall.
“No! We had a deal,” Tom shouted, starting after her, heat rising in his cheeks. “My room’s off limits.”
This was the arrangement, his ultimatum. He would stay only as long as she kept her crap out of his bedroom.
“But I bought it for you!”
Baloney. He was nineteen, for God’s sake. He didn’t want or need any of it. Neither did she. Buying for others was one of her rationalizations. It’s not for me. Thriftiness was another. They were half price. Stocking up just made good sense. I don’t want to run out.
After Tom’s graduation last June his dad left. In a matter of days, Arthur was gone. He’d secretly laid the groundwork right under Gladys’s nose. Rented a furnished studio apartment in town. Collected a few belongings in Dollar Store bags. Stashed them in his car a little at a time while Gladys was at church. Tom saw but kept quiet.
Since then, Gladys’s overbuying had spun out of control along with her overeating. She and her hoard grew bigger every day.
It hadn’t always been this bad. In elementary school Tom used to bring friends over to play, back when the house was only cluttered. There was room on the couch to sit and watch cartoons and enough counterspace in the kitchen to make toast for an after-school snack. The kitchen floor—olive green—needed mopping and the sink was piled with dirty dishes, but it wasn’t a big deal. He’d been invited to other kids’ houses. His wasn’t that different.
By the time he finished middle school, he was too embarrassed to let friends come inside. Gladys’s shopping had increased until the hoard he lived in became his shameful secret, one that he became more desperate to hide year by year. And now the place was unlivable.
The phone rang, bringing Tom back to the present. He scrambled toward the kitchen, pushing past the mountain of unworn clothes—jeans, boots, ball caps, winter coats with price tags dangling from their cuffs—and unopened boxes of housewares—toasters, spice racks, baskets—that blocked the entrance to what was once the dining room.
“Hello?” The old rotary phone was mounted on the wall next to the fridge, the receiver sticky in his fist. He was breathing hard with the effort of reaching it before the caller gave up.
“Hey, Sport. I got your message. What’s up?” Arthur’s voice sounded wary. The last time Tom called his father it was from the ER. Gladys had fallen from a stepladder in the garage while hunting for some precious thing. The doctor said she was lucky, bruises and a sprained wrist but no broken bones.
“Can you pick me up? Tonight? Like, now?”
“Gee, tonight’s no good.”
Tom shut his eyes and leaned his wiry frame against the fridge, the only working appliance in the kitchen. “But you said if I ever—”
“You’re my number one priority, you know that. It’s just not a great time right now. Besides, it’s really coming down out there. The plows won’t be out until tomorrow morning at the earliest.”
Tom tugged aside the threadbare gingham curtain. Barely a dusting. A car passed, it’s tires leaving neat stripes of black on the wet street. “Whatever,” he mumbled.
“What’s the big hurry anyway?”
***
In the center of town, the steeple bells of Good Shepherd chimed eight times, ringing through the thin air as Tom heaved his suitcase out the front door, down the unshoveled sidewalk, and into the trunk of Arthur’s car idling at the curb. The snow had stopped but low clouds obscuring the moon and stars promised more.
“Gladys at choir practice?” Arthur peered at the dark house as Tom slid into the passenger seat.
“Novena.”
Arthur shifted to face him and drummed lightly on the steering wheel. “So, fill me in.”
Tom had kept a lot to himself during the summer and fall. Now he told Arthur about the bucket in the garage.
“We could get the water back on if Mom would only pay the bills. She doesn’t even open them. We’re getting fined too. A code enforcement guy came out last summer and said we had sixty days to clear the front yard, called it a public health risk. He said the tire swing hanging from the dead tree behind the garage is an attractive nuisance or something like that, and having overgrown bushes and weeds so close to the house is a fire hazard.”
Arthur scanned the property—peeling paint, torn screens, humps of trash covered in snow like resting white beasts. “What happened when the sixty days was up? I mean, obviously, not much has improved since then.”
Tom’s chin dropped to his chest. He had tried, but it was a losing battle. With no trash pickup anymore, he had to haul the heavy black bags in Gladys’s car and sneak them into the dumpster behind the gas station after dark. And every time she caught him throwing something away, she screamed at him and made him put it back.
“They gave her an extension. She bought herself more time by agreeing to get help. She has appointments with a therapist every Tuesday, but I don’t think he’s doing any good. Too soon to tell anyway I guess.”
Arthur was quiet for a moment. “I didn’t realize things had gotten so bad.”
“Yeah, and she’ll be home any second. Can’t we just go?” Tom pressed his right foot against an imaginary accelerator. His fingers twitched on his knees. He stared through the windshield at the spot where Gladys’s headlights would appear over the rise. The road was dark.
“Was there a last straw today? To make you call me?”
“She put her crap in my room.” Tom pressed his fingers against his eyelids and tried to keep his voice even. “She broke her promise.”
“Could you maybe give her another chance? I mean if my leaving triggered this downward spiral and you leave too—”
Tom slammed both hands on the dashboard and gripped the edge. “Don’t put this on me! This is your fault, Dad. All those years of turning your back on her problems. Not doing anything to help make things better. Instead you made it worse. Arguing and criticizing, escalating everything! And when you’d had enough? You ditched. You bailed on us.”
The memory of the day Arthur walked out still enraged Tom. It was supposed to have been him starting a new life. He was getting ready to leave with his big plans, his high hopes, a bright future. He had enrolled in trade school in Winona, planned to get a job as an electrician or a mechanic and get a decent place to live. It was finally his moment to escape the mess his parents had made of their lives and begin to live his own. His eyes burned. He sat back and rubbed hot tears away with the heels of his hands.
It was too warm in the car. Tom rolled his window down a crack. Snow had started to fall again, and it glittered in the harsh streetlight overhead. A car approached from behind and Arthur reached to adjust the rearview mirror, his fingers brushing against the Rosary beads that hung there and setting them in motion. Tom studied his father’s face in profile as the car passed, its taillights bathing them momentarily in an eerie red glow, before disappearing around the corner.
“I’m sorry. I failed you,” said Arthur. An oily sheen of sweat glistened on his upper lip. Pale and bloated, he looked old, stupid. Weak. Guilty. A repentant sinner.
My God, I am sorry for my sins with all my heart. Tom knew the Act of Contrition from memory, and recited it every Saturday in confession. He learned it in second grade to prepare for his First Communion, a happy day full of glowing praise. But the day before that he’d been terrified, his small body trembling as he waited with his classmates to make his first confession. He held a damp bit of crumpled paper and read over and over what he’d written there with his mother’s help, committing it to memory. I told a lie. I disobeyed my parents. I cheated on a spelling test. It was a short list, but he was afraid he would forget what to say once he stepped behind the curtain. I told a lie. I disobeyed my parents. I cheated on a spelling test. The little sins of a little boy. But when at last he said them aloud in the cramped space of the confessional, hearing his own timid voice deadened by the wood-paneled walls and the velvet curtain across the narrow door, they produced tears of deep shame.
“I’m sorry for these and all my sins.” Tom choked out what he’d learned and practiced in Sunday school, racing to the end, compressing the last syllables together into a single high-pitched word.
“May God grant you pardon and peace,” Father Turner said, his gentle voice the voice of Jesus, sifting through the perforated screen between them, “and I absolve you from your sins.”
There had been a lightness in his chest afterward, a giddiness as he knelt in the pew. He was sure a gold halo floated over his bowed head as he prayed his three Our Fathers, his penance.
Living in the house with his mother these past seven months had been a kind of penance too, his sense of duty stronger than his desire to be on his own. He had stayed out of fear for his mother’s safety, yes, and because he loved her.
He thought of the note he’d left on his pillow for his mother to find. He couldn’t face her, face the tears, the yelling, the promises. But what would happen after, when she was alone? Would Gladys bury herself in her hoard and die in that house? That fear was the reason he had changed his plans in the first place and stayed with her after Arthur moved out. But now she had pushed him too far. Anger canceled fear.
But there was something else swimming at the edges of his thoughts. Another reason he stayed. Something mean. The true reason? What Tom wanted was to shame his father. He wanted to show Arthur—to show everyone—that he was the better man. A loyal son, looking after his troubled mother who’d been abandoned by her selfish husband. He imagined neighbors patting his arm after Mass, murmuring, “You’re a good boy, a saint. We’re praying for you,” and all the while shaking their heads at Arthur and snubbing him in town. It was a sin to want that, he knew. Thoughts as well as actions could be sinful. He was supposed to honor his mother and his father.
On Saturday he would make a good confession, and Father Turner would give him a penance and grant him absolution. He would feel that lightness again, see again that gleaming halo of gold marking him as holy, clean, pure.
Tom folded his hands in his lap, and gradually his breathing slowed. His gaze traveled up the path to the front door, took in the shabby house, the littered yard. His penance was complete. It was time to leave. God would forgive him. Gladys too, eventually, and Arthur. No one would hold it against him.
A faint glow bloomed beyond the rise in the road. Then tiny snowflakes swirled in a bright pair of headlight beams.
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