"Hey," Josh said, glancing up. "Hi, Aunt Diane."
"Hi, honey," I said. My voice sounded strange to me. "Where's Mom?"
"Kitchen," Mark said, too quickly. "She's — she's doing something in the kitchen. Mom! Diane's home!"
I walked down the hallway toward the kitchen, my suitcase still in my hand, and I heard it before I saw it: the rhythmic squeak of a sponge on linoleum, and my mother's voice, humming something tuneless under her breath.
Margaret Keller was on her hands and knees on the kitchen floor.
She was seventy-one years old. Eighteen months ago she had hip surgery. And she was on her hands and knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor with a sponge, a bucket of gray water beside her, her hair coming loose from its clip, her knees — her surgical hip — pressed into the hard tile.
"Mom," I said.
She looked up. Her face went through three expressions in two seconds: shock, joy, and then a naked embarrassment so complete it made my throat close.
"Diane," she said. "Oh, honey. You're early. I was just — the floor needed — I wanted it nice for you."
I set down my suitcase. I crossed the kitchen. I took the sponge out of her hand and I helped her up, and I felt how thin her arms had gotten, how light she was, like a bird, like something that could be carried off by a strong wind.
"Mom, what are you doing? You had hip surgery. You can't be on the floor."
"It's fine," she said, not meeting my eyes. "I'm fine. It's just a floor."
From the living room, the television laughed. Nobody came to help. Nobody had come to help, I understood, with a clarity that felt like ice water down my spine, for a very long time.
I got my mother to the couch and brought her water. My hands were shaking so badly I nearly spilled it. Mark finally wandered in, saw the bucket and the sponge, and said, "Mom, I told you I'd get to the floor this weekend," in the breezy tone of a man commenting on the weather. Margaret said nothing. She drank her water in small sips, like a child who has been scolded and is trying to be good.
Dinner was takeout pizza, eaten in front of the television. Nobody asked me about Singapore. Nobody asked me about the flight. Josh asked if I had ever eaten a scorpion, because he had read that people eat scorpions in Asia, and I said no, and he seemed disappointed, and that was the most genuine exchange I had all evening. Tina cleared the boxes. Mark talked about the dealership's October sales event. My mother fell asleep in her chair with her head tipped back, and I watched her breathe, and I counted her breaths the way I had counted them when I was small and she had the flu, and I thought: I have been gone six years, and this is what I bought with the money I sent home. Not her comfort. Just the house around her discomfort.
That night, after Mark's family had gone to bed — in the bedrooms of the house I had bought for my mother — I sat at the kitchen table with Margaret and tried to ask the right questions. She deflected every one with the skill of a woman who had spent a lifetime not wanting to be a burden.
"Mark and Tina needed a place," she said. "Three years ago. His job — things were hard. Family helps family."
"And you scrub the floors."
"I like things clean."
"Mom."
She looked at me then, really looked at me, and I saw something in her face I had never seen before, not even in the months after my father died. It was shame. Not the embarrassment of being caught on her knees — something deeper, older, settled in.
"Your brother takes care of me, Diane," she said quietly. "You should be grateful. You've been gone a long time."
We sat in silence after that, the refrigerator humming, the clock ticking. I wanted to ask a hundred questions — about the truck, the television, the missing swing — but every question felt like an accusation, and she was already braced for accusations, I could see it in the set of her shoulders. So I asked about small things instead: her garden, Eleanor, whether she still made the lemon cake. She answered, and her voice warmed by degrees, and for a few minutes it was almost like the Sunday calls, except that I could see her hands — the knuckles swollen, the skin thin — wrapped around her teacup, and I kept thinking about those hands on the kitchen tile, and about the sound the television had made, laughing, while my seventy-one-year-old mother scrubbed the floor eighteen months after hip surgery.