Chapter Twenty-Two

twenty-two

“Keep or toss?”

Without looking up from my dresser drawer, Mom dangles a pair of Captain America pajama pants from her grip.

“Keep,” I vote. “I still wear those.”

“Fine.” She folds them over her arm and adds them to the keep pile, which is quickly overflowing into the almost nonexistent donate pile.

This is the game of packing, as I’ve learned it: Mom holds up a piece of my childhood, I vote to keep it, and Mom gives me a skeptical look before adding it to the keep pile with some commentary on how everything can’t stay. Rinse and repeat for the entirety of an afternoon. It’s excruciating, but Lord knows I wouldn’t get it done if she left me to do it on my own.

“Murphy? Keep or toss?” Mom reaches back into the drawer and pulls out the next lucky contestant: the threadbare red pajama shorts with my parents’ alma mater printed across the butt.

“Absolutely keep. Those are Kat’s favorite.”

Mom raises a brow. “Then why don’t you just give them to Kat?”

“Because.” I pull my heels toward my butt, hugging my knees to my chest. “Then she couldn’t wear them when she’s here.”

Mom rolls her eyes, but folds the shorts and places them on the pile. “You can’t keep everything, you know.”

“I’m not.” My head tips toward the toss pile, a mass grave of softball trophies and seventh-grade diaries. “I’m getting rid of a ton.” Mom is really the one to thank for that. If not for her, that toss pile would be less than half its size. But also, if not for her, I wouldn’t be cleaning out in the first place. Would it have killed them to wait a week and put the house on the market after my accounting final? When I suggested it, Mom gave me a very calm, apologetic explanation that boiled down to “not a goddamn chance.” Something about closings overlapping and needing liquid funds from the house. The second she started using terms I didn’t recognize, I dropped the subject. With the photographer coming to take listing photos tomorrow night, I have just over twenty-four hours to box away any evidence that someone, god forbid a twenty-one-year-old community college student, lives here.

“Okay, only half a dresser to go.” Mom tugs open a bottom drawer and pinches out a royal-blue softball jersey, holding it up like she’s a human clothesline. “When’s the last time you wore this?”

My stomach bottoms out. “When I played softball.”

“So…four years ago? More?”

“I didn’t keep it to wear .”

Mom frowns, waiting on an explanation that I don’t have. Why did I keep it? Because throwing it away felt like defeat, and donating it would feel wrong unless I could somehow pass it down to the current number nine for the Geneva High School softball team. The damn thing’s probably cursed, though, and that poor girl would end up injured, just like me.

Mom spins the jersey around, giving me a 360-degree view. “So what are we doing with it?”

I chew my lip and think. What would High School Murph say? “Keep.”

She arches one brow toward her hairline, like a cat stretching its back. “Really?”

I hug my knees a little tighter. I guess I’m overdue to officially close that chapter. “Fine. Toss.”

Mom’s other eyebrow joins the one at the top of her forehead. “Really?”

“Is there a right answer here?”

“No, no, that’s just fine. We can toss it.” With all the tender care of throwing out a used napkin of unknown origin, Mom pinches the jersey and drops it beside the toss pile. The nylon fabric wrinkles and pools, forming a royal-blue puddle on the carpet. No sooner has she dropped it than she’s holding up a new shirt, a new memory and version of myself to hold tight to or altogether abandon. “What’s this one from?” She inspects the graphics closer. “Key Club? You weren’t even in Key Club.”

We work our way to the bottom of each remaining drawer in the same way—Mom holding up high school memories while I delegate where they should be dropped. Each goodbye gets a little easier, and I get a little lighter. The toss pile has at least doubled in size, my stash bag has been safely and discreetly placed in the keep pile, and the thud of the last hollow drawer closing sounds like something close to a fresh start.

Mom struggles to her feet, patting the top of the dresser twice with her palm. “Chess said to leave this for staging, so that’s a wrap on that.”

This is about the thousandth time I’ve heard Chess’s name since they broke the moving news. I’m not sure how someone finds themselves in the business of staging houses, but with the way my parents talk about her, you’d think she was the Jesus Christ of Interior Design. Every suggestion is immediately logged as gospel, and every critique is met with a look of bewilderment and shame, as if there were no greater humiliation than realizing you painted your bathroom in the shade Eggshell instead of opting for the ever-popular Water Chestnut.

“How are they going to stage this room, you think?”

“Chess wants to make it into a kids room,” Mom says.

I frown. “Isn’t it already kind of a kid’s room?”

“A little kid’s room. To appeal to younger parents.”

I stare at the room as though I’m playing The Sims , deleting my double bed and rotating a bunk bed until it’s flat up against the wall. “Is she going to get rid of my bed?”

“No, you still have to sleep here. Chess agreed that the bed can stay.”

Chess this and Chess that and Chess thinks we ought to repaint the trim to dress the place up a bit. I wonder if Chess has a degree in being a picky bitch.

“So what’s next, you think?” Mom asks. “The closet? The Wall of Fame?”

I’m a little bit pleased that she remembers what I call that wall, but a lot bit discouraged that it all has to come down. If anyone is going to undo the years of collaging, it has to be me. “You take the closet, I’ll take the Wall of Fame?”

She nods twice and drags over a Sterilite bin, already half full of old birthday cards and notes passed in middle school that I don’t have time or emotional energy to sift through yet. It doesn’t have to be all packed until they actually do the move. For now, it just has to be clean.

When Mom half disappears behind the rolling closet door, I sneak a quick look at my email inbox for the umpteenth time today, pulling down at the top until the whole screen bounces and refreshes. No new emails, not even a promotional one for a sale or something. It’s only been a day, but how long could it take for Ellie to reply to an email that’s only a few words long? Maybe I should’ve been more straightforward. I could’ve made an actual case for myself instead of being cheeky.

“You know, if you spent a little less time on your phone, this might go by faster.”

I snap my head toward the closet, where Mom is still mostly buried among the ghosts of prom dresses past. Maybe she really does have eyes in the back of her head.

“Sorry, I’m waiting on an email.”

She turns over her shoulder, craning a brow at me. “From who?”

“It’s a school thing,” I say. It’s not a complete lie. It’ll be coming from an email with .edu at the end.

“When is it supposed to come?”

I wrestle the lump in my throat back down to my gut, where it belongs, cementing me to my bed like a paperweight. “I’m not sure if it ever will.”

“Oh.” For an uncomfortably long moment, she searches for the right words, but finding none, lands on, “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not any more than this, no.” I slap my thighs, hoping it reads as a hard return at the end of this conversation, then roll off the bed and toward the Wall of Fame. How does one begin tearing down twenty-one years of memories? Well, closer to fifteen, I suppose. Back in first grade, it was mostly coloring pages or bulletin-board crafts we made in school. I must’ve taken a lot of them down at some point, although I only seem to remember putting things on the wall, never taking them off. It’s proof that I’ve done this before. I can take things down. I can start over.

I begin with the small pieces—a theater ticket from a Broadway-in-Chicago production of Rent , then a Polaroid from one of my last softball games. I squint at the Murphy in the picture, sunburn creeping along the bridge of her nose, smiling the way you would if you didn’t know that sting in your shoulder was more than a pinched nerve, and a life-altering injury was waiting a few weeks down the line. I place the first two memories on the top of the Sterilite bin, not that I know what I’ll do with any of them, just that I know I’m not ready to throw them away. I dig a nail under a curling edge of the hands off our bodies sticker that a younger version of me stuck directly to the wall, cringing as I peel off a circular layer of paint with it.

“Are we going to repaint?”

Mom’s eyes narrow. “Do we need to repaint?”

“Probably?”

“Just get it all down,” she says, then dives back into the closet, tossing clothes over her shoulder like a girl getting ready in an early 2000s teen rom-com. My vest from Girl Scouts, patches still not sewn on. A nightgown that matched my American Girl doll that now would sooner fit the doll than me. A black-and-teal floral-print dress we got on clearance at Kohl’s for Kat’s Bat Mitzvah. Why didn’t we clean any of this out sooner? Or rather, why didn’t I clean any of this out sooner? I guess because I didn’t really have to.

“You can just donate all of that.” I gesture to the heap of clothes Mom has piled behind her. “I’m not wearing any of it, obviously.”

The emotions on Mom’s face pass through her so quickly, it’s as if I’m watching them sped up. Sad, then surprised, then relieved. “Sure thing,” Mom says finally, then moves it all to the donation pile, hangers and all. “We’re making good progress, Murph.”

“Yeah, not bad.” I pull a ticket stub off the wall for a matinee showing of one of the X-Men movies, and a whole slew of memories comes with it, figuratively and literally. It’s like peeling wallpaper—one movie ticket is taped to a photo is taped to a colored pencil drawing of Kat and me as Disney princesses. Trying to take just one thing down proves almost impossible. You tug a little and you get a lot. “When does this need to be done again?”

“Yesterday.”

“No, seriously. ’Cause I’m thinking I might do, like, another thirty minutes of work and then switch to studying.”

“Could I quiz you while you work?” Mom offers. “Chess is coming by to stage the house tomorrow morning at ten.”

I squeeze my eyes closed, trying to mental math my way into more available hours in the day. It’s almost three o’clock now, and I need a full eight hours of sleep before working a double tomorrow. According to my incredibly lackluster math skills, that’s not enough hours to get this all done.

“Murph?” Mom says. “Do you have flash cards or something?”

I shake my head. “Not yet. Just a study guide. I guess you could quiz me from that.”

Among the half-packed plastic bins and piles of junk destined for Goodwill, finding my backpack is a game of I Spy on expert mode. After shifting some things, the little red Fj?llr?ven fox winks at me from under my newly cleared desk. I dig through my backpack, smoothing down the curled edges of the packet before handing it off to Mom. “Most of the answers should be right.”

She frowns. “How are you supposed to study with answers that might not be right?”

“I don’t know, Mom! How am I supposed to correct all my answers if I have to spend the whole day packing?”

She speaks to me in a calm, unaffected voice that brings my blood to a boil. “I told you, you don’t have to make decisions on all of it now.”

“I know, I know.” Inhale, exhale. I focus on the things I can control, like the way I arrange my memories within the Sterilite bin. “A little more warning just would’ve been nice. I could’ve gotten this all done on Thanksgiving or something. I could’ve planned around it.”

“I’m sorry, Murphy. This isn’t entirely in our control.”

“It could’ve been,” I grumble. “You didn’t have to randomly buy a condo and decide to move.”

Mom’s face puckers, and the ground suddenly feels like it’s shifting beneath my feet. “I’m sorry,” she says, her tone razor-sharp in the way that means whatever she’s going to say next she’s 100 percent not sorry about. “Do you think this was a spur-of-the-moment purchase? Do you think I’ve been keeping the house in ready-to-sell shape for the last four years just because I want to? That we looked through the house listings in Florida just for fun? We never planned on retiring in Geneva. But when you opted to do your first two years at community college, we adjusted our plan, because that’s what good parents do. They adjust and they make sacrifices for their kids. We worked around what you wanted.”

Her voice breaks in the middle of a word, and I watch her eyes plead with mine, only I don’t know what for. I hate seeing her like this. Vulnerable and hurt and human.

“I’m sorry,” she says again. “We didn’t do any of this to hurt you. We thought you were going to be at U of I this year and I’m sorry you’re not, I’m sorry you’re stuck here, I’m sorry your plan didn’t work out how you wanted it to. But you’re not the only one with plans, Murphy, and your father and I have always built ours around yours. It didn’t work out this time, and I’m sorry, but that’s how life goes. You’ll just have to make a new plan.”

I wish she would stop apologizing and I would start, but before I can come up with anything good to say, she lets out a long, tired sigh, and for the first time, it occurs to me that my parents might be old. The pepper-gray hair spraying up from Mom’s roots, the way her skin creases and droops from the corners of her lips like a marionette. Who knows if she’ll even renew her real estate license in Florida. I haven’t even thought to ask. A day will come when her bad knee catches up to her and the elevator in their new condo building will be a necessity, not a luxury. Dad will retire from his IT job. They’ll live the life they should’ve started already. One where they’re people first, parents second. They deserve that.

“I didn’t realize that was your plan,” I whisper. “The whole moving to Florida thing.”

“And maybe we should’ve told you sooner.” Mom’s voice wavers just a bit more with each word. “But we never wanted you to feel pushed out before you were ready or like you were the last thing tying us here, but…”

“But I was,” I finish for her. “I get it.”

I sit on the edge of the bed and stare down at the carpet, waiting for her to excuse herself, to hide away in her bedroom for the cry she’s dancing on the brink of. But she doesn’t. When I look up, her throat bobs, then she forces a smile and returns to the closet and gets back to work. Because that’s what the Konowitz women do. They feel something and they keep moving.

I guess there’s nothing left to do but pack.

After a painful ten minutes of working in silence, I finally drum up something to say. “I could pass accounting, I think.”

“Really?” Mom says through a sniffle.

“Maybe. If I get an eighty-nine on the final.”

“Can you do that?”

“I’m gonna try.”

“Good for you.”

It’s a flat, lifeless exchange, but it’s better than silence. I peel back picture after poster from the Wall of Fame, choosing to toss more than I’d originally imagined, while Mom slowly removes the last evidence of my childhood from the back corners of the closet. The more we strip away at the old Murphy, the more room there is for a new one, built in the blank, empty space where I’m no longer a kid, not quite an adult. I’m still adjusting to the in-between. Old enough to drink but not old enough to fear the consequences. Old enough to worry about where I’m going but not old enough to know. Hovering in the sort of intermission between one life and another, one Murphy and the next. But I’m ready to move forward.

When I pull back the ring of tape on the last Polaroid, the Wall of Fame is officially just a wall, completely blank besides the few dozen places where the tape stripped up the paint. A clear canvas. I decide I’ll print a fresh copy of the study guide tomorrow. I’ll focus on the back half of the textbook and give it another go. Pass or fail, I’m not sure what’s next for me, but I do know I’m ready to move on. Step one: Pass this class and get out of community college. Step two: TBD.