Dirty Little Secrets - C. J. Omololu [29]
Until I got this fixed, I couldn’t let anybody near it. Or near me. It was amazing Kaylie still didn’t know—I’d been getting careless letting her pick me up and drop me off here. What if she’d seen how we really live? What if Josh smelled the house stink on my jacket when he put his arm around me? The heaviness started to take over as I let these thoughts race through my brain. I shook my head and tried to erase the image of him backing away from me in disgust. I couldn’t think any further than right now if I had any hope of making this work.
There was no getting around cleaning the kitchen because that’s where most of the stink was coming from. Like every other horizontal surface in the house, the counters were piled high with everything you’d find in a normal kitchen—times twelve. If a few empty grocery bags might come in handy someday, Mom would save hundreds, because you never knew when the world might run out. Stacks of newspapers stood here and there waiting to be read and clipped. Empty food containers were everywhere—margarine and yogurt containers, water bottles, and cylinders that once held potato chips. Those were some of Mom’s favorite treasures. And it’s not like these just came from us. Mom “saved” empty containers from work and even random trash cans. She always said with some sort of strange, misplaced pride that she didn’t go digging in other people’s trash cans, but if something was sitting right there on top for all the world to see, well, then, she had an obligation to see it wasn’t wasted.
I’d have to clear off some counter space to really get down to it, so I started with the stove. It was piled with miscellaneous junk as high as the range hood. A few years back the refrigerator broke, so Mom just piled groceries on the counter next to the stove, lining up the cans of food instead of putting them away anywhere. This would probably have been okay if she had only bought things in cans, but I was pretty sure she’d stashed things like lunch meat and fruit here too with the idea that as long as it was visible, we’d eat it quickly enough. Which was good in theory, I guess.
In order to reach the stove, I had to make a new pathway through the piles of stuff that littered the kitchen floor. I couldn’t get the trash can in here, which meant my only option was to grab a trash bag and shove anything into it that I could find. Most of the stuff in here was so destroyed by mold, I didn’t bother wondering what was in the bags or boxes. It was better not to think about it, particularly if something was soggy or leaking or smelled so bad my gag reflex kicked in.
I grabbed a can of green beans from the counter beside the stove. It had an expiration date that was two years earlier. And that was probably one of the newer cans in her collection. I started to load a bag with all the canned food, but realized that cans of food would make the bag really heavy really fast. I decided to leave the rest of them on the counter. Once everything else was cleaned up, a bunch of cans sitting on a counter wouldn’t look as weird. Maybe the paramedics would think she’d just gotten home from grocery shopping. If they didn’t look closely, they might not figure out that the shopping trip was from five years ago.
With one hand, I held the trash bag against the stove, and with the other, I swept the containers, plastic bags, cups, and old food packages off the top. A few things missed the bag and bounced onto the floor, but I could deal with that later. I found not one, not two, but three big margarine containers full of those little plastic clips that come on bread packages. It only took one trash bag to clear most of the stove and uncover the burners. Real safe to have things piled on top of something that actually makes fire all these years, but it didn’t seem