I don’t think that anymore, and neither, I suspect, does she anymore either.
My children were never the problem. Milo, eight, and Dahlia, eleven, both knew how to rinse a plate before I ever taught them formally.
Deloris never learned that lesson, and at sixty-nine, I’d stopped expecting her to.
She let herself in through the side door most Sundays. No call ahead. No knock. Just the creak of that door. And the smell of her drugstore perfume announcing her before she ever said a word.
By the time she left, every room she’d touched looked like she’d fought something in it.
Coffee rings on the counter she swore she’d wipe “in a minute.” Crumbs pressed into the couch cushions. Shoes tracked straight across a floor I’d mopped that same morning.
It wasn’t carelessness exactly, or at least it stopped feeling like ordinary carelessness somewhere around year five. It felt deliberate in a way I couldn’t quite name back then, a small. Repeated assertion that this space answered to her whenever she decided to occupy it. I told myself I was being paranoid. I told myself that a lot, over the years, about a lot of things concerning Deloris.
Once, when I finally asked her to rinse her own mug, she just laughed. Swirling the last of her coffee like the question amused her.
