The Cellar

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

By the end of our first week in Virginia, my mother and I had already established a kind of routine, which seemed to be built around her avoiding me. We ate dinner together, but the rest of the time, she shut herself in the library. One of the things she talked about when she first brought up the idea of coming to Virginia was painting again. She’d been working as a fashion buyer for Macy’s in New York, but she’d been an art major in college. She found an art supply store our second day here, and now there was an easel set up in the library and the desk was covered with a tarp and various art books and supplies.

I didn’t know what she was working on. She always shut the door and I wasn’t invited in. When I knocked a few days earlier and asked what she was up to, she answered, “I’m working, Julia. Mind if we do our own thing in the mornings?” Of course I said that was fine, fine being the go-to answer lately, but I couldn’t help wondering why she brought me with her if she didn’t want to talk to me. And if she wasn’t talking to me, how I was supposed to help her get better enough to go home?

My phone buzzed in my pocket. It was my friend Sarah, who’d already left me three messages.

“Julia!  Oh my gosh, it’s about time!”

“Sorry. Things have been kind of busy here.”

“That’s okay. So what’s it like?”

“All right, I guess. It’s a really old house. Creaky floorboards and all that, which is kind of cool, but no air-conditioning.”

“Ugh. You poor thing. I’d die without air-conditioning. So,” she said, her voice turning tentative, “how’s your mom? Is she doing better?”

“Sarah, it’s only been a few days.”

“Right.” I tensed at the disappointment in her voice. “But I’m sure she’ll be doing better soon,” Sarah continued. “I mean, without having everything around her, you know. And some space and all that beautiful countryside. I’m sure it will be very healing for her.”

“Yeah. I hope so.” Sarah didn’t seem to hear the doubt in my voice, because she started talking about Jacob, the boy she was dating, and how he was starting to blow her off. Hanging up an hour later, after we’d analyzed everything he said to her in the last two weeks, I realized that I was a little bit glad to be away from my friends. They kept wanting me to be happy and my mother to be better, and it felt like I kept letting them down by still being sad and not having better news about my mom. So I faked being okay and faked being interested in all the same things I used to be interested in, and it had started to get exhausting. Down here, at least I’d only have to fake it once in awhile.

I headed down to the cellar, where I’d spent most of the hot, mid-afternoon hours the last several days. I’d set up a chair and a tray table I’d found, where I could set a glass of iced tea. Not exactly plush, but a good enough place to sit for an hour or more, listening to music, my eyes closed, memories flickering in my mind like pieces of film. Family dinners, wrestling with Matty for the remote control, my mother putting her feet on my dad’s lap and rubbing my head while we watched a movie. How had that all changed so quickly? How was it that when Uncle Denny died, we didn’t just lose him but our whole way of being a family together? But that was just it. Uncle Denny was part of our family being together. He had no wife or kids of his own and was over at our place all the time.