Chapter 14: Claire
The phone rang in Claire Ellison's kitchen in Phoenix at twenty past seven, while she stood at the counter with a cup gone cold, looking at nothing out the window.
"Mrs. Ellison?" A man's voice, low and careful. "My name is Cole Rafferty. I'm calling about your mother. Now β before your heart does anything β she's fine. She's better than fine. It's just that her house is full of motorcyclists."
A silence.
"The good kind of full," he said.
He said more, in that same deliberate voice β that there was no emergency; that her mother had once done his family a good turn he was still measuring, and friends of his were in Juniper Flats doing repairs, and if Claire heard things she should hear the first of it from him. It worked: she was already reaching for her keys, heart hammering, angry at being managed and grateful for it in the same breath.
She drove north rehearsing disasters in ascending order: a scam, a cult, a news crew, her mother β eighty-one and stubborn as a fence post β signing something in a crowd of leather. She had not spoken to Evie Marsh in two years, not since the graveside argument about the house had said things underneath its words that neither could take back. She had the whole two years ready in her mouth, all the way up the highway.
The street undid her before she reached the porch.
There were motorcycles ranked like a dark orchard as far as she could see, and tarps, and ladders, and the smell of brisket and new lumber, and her childhood roof half stripped and half brand-new. And on the porch, in a folding chair someone had plainly enthroned her in, sat her mother with a cup in her hand, directing traffic β pointing a roofer toward the flashing, sending a boy for nails β a general in a housedress, small and grey and entirely in command of an army Claire could not have imagined.
"Mom."
Evie looked up. Whatever had been on her face for the crowd put itself away, and something older and more naked took its place, and Claire felt her two rehearsed years slide sideways in her chest.
"You didn't call," her mother said.
"Neither did you."
It was a terrible thing to say on a porch, and an ordinary one, and both of them heard the smallness of it hang there like a cracked cup. Below, a nail gun fired in bursts. A man carried a sheet of plywood past the steps like a sail.
Then Claire did the only thing her hands knew how to do at her mother's house in a crisis, which was find work. She came up the new steps, set her purse by the chair, and picked up the broom leaning against the rail, and began to sweep the porch boards, shingle grit and sawdust, in the short furious strokes of a woman sweeping two years into a pile.
Evie watched her a moment.
"You're getting the corners wrong," she said.
"I know how to sweep a porch, Mom."
"You sweep like your father. All enthusiasm, no geometry."
And Claire laughed β one cracked, startled laugh that hurt in a place she hadn't let anything touch β and her mother looked away quickly at the roofers and gave the broom its room, and for a while that was the whole of it: a broom, a porch, and two women working at the same small job from opposite ends, meeting in the middle the way they always had.
Claire swept past the rail she'd carved her initials into at eleven and been made to sand out again, and the familiar work did what two years of phone calls never had β it let her be in her mother's house without arriving all at once. She could belong to the porch first. The rest could come at porch speed.
"They came at dawn," her mother said, nodding at the street below. "There's three hundred of them. I've counted twice and keep losing my place at two hundred. That one there's a CPA."
Claire leaned on the broom and looked at the old woman sideways, and her mother looked at the roof and not at her, and both of them began, quite carefully, to smile in the direction of different things.
"You could have told me about the taxes," Claire said, quietly, when the pile was made.
"You could have asked about something besides the house."
That was the whole argument, right there in its skin, and they let it stand unsolved, the way you let a pot sit lid-on β not finished, but cooking. Claire set the broom against the rail and took the chair beside her mother's, and a girl came up with two glasses of lemonade, and they drank and watched the roof go on, and neither said the word sorry, and both heard it under the nail guns.
Chapter 15: The Tax Receipt