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By Root 1095 0

” she’d said when she’d opened the box, “oooh, it’s like something a grown lady would wear, ooh, I love it, Mommie.” She pushed her hands into the oversized slit pockets of the soft, sweet-smelling robe. Her finger went straight through a hole in the pocket. Her mother had cut a small square of the fabric when Shern went to a sleep-over party at the home of a new friend. Clarise didn’t know the people well enough to feel entirely comfortable, so she’d cut the square and put it under her pillow and told Shern to make sure that she slept in the robe that night so that she would return safely to her. Shern had laughed at her mother and called her silly and superstitious. Now she swallowed the cotton that came up in her throat at the thought of her mother. Wished she had a piece of her mother’s robe that she could put under her pillow to make sure her mother was returned safely to her.

She pulled back the bedroom door ever so slowly. The hallway smelled like the barbecued chicken Ramona had cooked for dinner. She hoped the barbecued chicken smell wouldn’t get into her robe; she didn’t want to carry the smells of this house back with her when she finally returned to her real home.

She half skated, half slid down the hallway. The plastic runner covering the wall-to-wall carpeting was cool and slick against her bare feet. She held her breath until she was at the opened bathroom door, rushed in and closed the door, and quickly and firmly affixed the lock.

The bathroom was small and warm. A pink night-light softened the black-and-white ceramic tile, and Shern felt safe in here with the door good and locked. She sat on the toilet for a long while and listened to the sounds of the cellar heater hum and pulse through the radiator and mix with her own stomach growling. She hadn’t eaten dinner, had stayed cloistered in that bedroom all afternoon after she’d bungled that phone call, tensed up, expecting Ramona to rush in the room any minute and berate her the way she’d expected when Ramona caught her with the phone in her hand.

The radiator clanged, and Shern jumped; she settled back down when she realized it was just the heater shutting off. The bathroom went silent. That’s when another sound came into focus. A quiet and dark sound. She squinted, as if the squinting could help her hear. The way she’d squint when she’d heard Ramona’s bed creaking and Tyrone’s muffled breaths, which seemed to sift through the walls and land sharp and hard against her ears and made her feel nauseated and clammy, and warm and confused. This sound she heard now didn’t come from Ramona’s room, though; this sound came from the basement straight up through the radiator, it seemed. She could almost taste the dust on her tongue as she tried to picture the basement filled with all of Mae’s retired furniture, couches and end tables and lamps turned sideways or upside down to take up less room because there were so many pieces down there, much of it looking practically new. She wondered why Mae seemed to replace her furniture so often. Her own mother had prided herself on the mahogany china closet that had been the uncles’, the handmade cedar chest that had been the aunts’. “Junk, they make such junk now,” her mother would say, and turn up her aquiline nose as she fingered a mass-produced vase, or lamp, or bookend.

Then Shern heard the sounds again. As if the air in the basement were being chewed and spit. She could make out the words, horrible words, now they were piercingly clear. She could hear Victoria’s name, so now she had to listen as Mae called Ramona a worthless, whoring hussy.

“Let that child fall and hurt herself, I should knock the living shit out of you.”

Crying. “I’m moving from here. I’m not putting up with you anymore and your deranged self.”

“You just try it. I don’t know where in the hell you think you going where you can live as cheaply as you do here.”

“Cheaply! All the money I give you.”

“You don’t give me shit.”

“And all I do for you around here.”

“You don’t do shit.”

“All the money you gamble away.”

A slap.

“Hit me again, here.