Breaking and Entering

A short story where the passing of a parent brings forth the unpacking of not just a home, but of a mother-daughter relationship…

by: Jacqueline Cope

The phone call to notify Patricia of her mother’s death was brief, factual. Patricia’s last visit had prepared her. She recalled her mother’s aging body, bulky and soft, sagging into an armchair, as though the bones could no longer support the weight of the last eighty years. Death was a natural next step.

There’d been no need for a funeral. Patricia’s mother was divorced and had no close family other than Patricia. So, it was up to Patricia to travel from San Francisco to New Jersey to pack up her mother’s house and get it ready for sale. At first Patricia’s husband insisted on traveling with her — “I don’t want you to be alone while you’re grieving,” — but Patricia reassured him with a shrug. “It’s not like that. I don’t have any grief.” And that was the truth, but even more than that, the thought of her husband watching her sort through the contents of the house mortified her. She couldn’t imagine anything in her mother’s home that would be worth salvaging. Patricia didn’t want a stack of back issues of Reader’s Digest or a collection of porcelain Beswick cats. She’d considered hiring someone to empty the house for her, but then she sensed her mother ordering her from the grave — no, ordering her from inside Patricia herself — to do the right thing and take care of business. There is so little I have ever asked of you, her mother’s voice said. Patricia was defenseless.

She flew into Newark, rented a car, and drove to the modest two-story colonial that had been her childhood home. It was November, and the cold air numbed her lips and hands despite her coat and gloves. Patricia shivered outside the house for a long time, observing the chipped stoop, broken fencing, and patches of decaying brown leaves scattered around the property.

The inside of the house was just as cold, with a strong mineral smell. Patricia turned on all the lights to combat the oppressive dark wood floors and paneling. A longing crept into her, though it was fleeting and small. Pocketsize. Paint peeled from the window casings. Cracks ran near the edges of the floor slats — probably dry rot. Patricia heard her mother’s voice reverberate through the walls, If it isn’t one thing it’s another. She might be talking about a fit with her nerves or a blinding headache, but frequently during Patricia’s childhood, her mother was up to here with Patricia — her shyness, her pickiness at mealtimes, her bloody knee after a fall off her bicycle. On cold nights, when Patricia’s asthma flared and she coughed through the night, her mother, covering Patricia’s thin chest with a warm compress that smelled of eucalyptus oil, might say, God help me, it’s always something.

She sorted her mother’s possessions into three piles: garbage, donate, keep. The garbage pile grew and grew — paper envelopes of McCalls’ sewing patterns, flattened floral throw pillows, bins of magnetic photo albums. The ugly Beswick cats with their painted glistening eyes sat in a pile of their own. Sell? Sit there for now, Patricia commanded them.

On the bedroom bureau she found the first item that she would keep, a picture of herself displayed in a wood and burlap frame. In it, Patricia, aged nine or ten, stood on a beach in a turquoise bathing suit, toes buried under sand. The picture was taken before her parents’ divorce, when they owned a small beach cottage on Long Island and vacationed there in the summers. Patricia stared into the eyes of the girl in the photograph. Her upper lids were lowered, and her eyebrows were pulled up to form little ridges. Was she squinting from the sun or was she wincing? Her young, delicately thin lips pressed together with one corner pulled back. A lopsided smile.

The twisty expression on her young face reminded Patricia of something that had happened at the cottage one summer, maybe the summer that the photo was taken. She’d left the cottage to play down by the bay and throw rocks in the murky, gray water. On the trail back to the house, she mistook the path to the neighbors’ house for her own. Theirs was a similar cottage except that the façade was cotton-candy pink, but Patricia wasn’t paying attention when she reached the door and turned the knob. The interior of this cottage had some resemblance to her own, but all the furniture appeared to have been shifted. The dining table was on the opposite side of the room, the sofa was a different style and a brighter color, and there was a large vase with fake orange blooms sitting on a strange looking coffee table that Patricia had never seen. Had her parents rearranged the furniture in the time she’d been gone? It took a moment before she realized that she was in the wrong house. Petrified, she backed out the open door and ran, hoping no one had seen or heard her enter. It crossed her mind that her mother had something to do with her error, and had willed her to make the mistake. Wanting to teach her a lesson.

Now, holding the frame, Patricia envisioned her mother peering into this childhood version of her, day after day. What had she seen? What had she noticed? God help me…

That small longing crept in again and lodged itself at the base of her throat. Patricia held the frame to her chest for a moment before she put it next to her purse.

The cats were going, she decided. But rather than place them in the donate pile, she stuffed them into a plastic bag and hauled them out the front door, down the stoop to the garbage bin. She raised the bag over her head then slammed it onto the cement steps and listened to the porcelain shatter inside. Her mother would be furious.

Jacqueline Cope is a physician and writer. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Her fiction has been published in Eclectica Magazine and Five on the Fifth. She lives in Los Angeles, California with her family.