Entry - dripping smug drawer record

The water dripping down the front steps was the first indication that anything was wrong. The silence was the second. There should have been the sound of dogs announcing his arrival. He couldn’t remember a time when he had come to visit without being greeted by the high pitched, frenetic barking of these or the many other dogs she had owned over his lifetime. To say he wasn’t an animal lover was putting it mildly but while he hated those dogs he had to admit they were good company for an elderly woman on her own.

But now there was just silence. No dogs, no grating voice calling “Brian, is that you?” Yet when he stood, quietly, listening, he could make out the faint sound of the water, slowly making its way down the steps.

He paused for a moment. He could just get back in the car and go home. No one would know. No one but him.

He pulled out his key and opened the front door.

It looked like every light in the house was on and he could easily see the water that was pooling on the floor of the foyer. It was an old linoleum pattern of white and light blue, worn with scratches and dirt. Now it was under the water that was already soaking into his thin sneakers.

“Ma? You here?” His voice echoed into the house with no reply.

He went up the stairs as quickly as his knees would allow, sloshing into the wet carpet with each step. He gripped the railing firmly, not even looking at the gallery of pictures of himself as a child. Only as a child. She had stopped putting up new ones over fifty years ago so the man he was now was not represented.

At the top of the stairs the bathroom door was open and he could see the salmon colored tub overflowing with water. He turned off the faucet and looked around the room but there were no clues. No clothing on the green tiled floor, still no dogs. He pulled open the drawer in the old vanity but there was nothing there. Not that he was sure what he was looking for. A suicide note? Pills? Dog treats?

He shut the drawer and pulled the plug on the tub, watched a moment to make sure it was going down and then headed back out to the hallway. One by one he looked in the rooms in the upstairs but there was nothing. No body, no dogs, dead or alive.

The squelch of his sneakers on the stairs was the loudest thing in the house and only added to his mounting anxiety. He looked out at the small back yard but his mother wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the kitchen or living room either but when he got to the den he stopped.

On the desk – on his father’s desk – there was his parent’s old turntable, set at an angle. An ancient picture of his parents was next to it. It was usually across the room on the bookshelf. For that matter, the turntable was usually in the closet, not out like this. In the picture the two of them stared back at him from a table in some nightclub, happy and child free. Probably drunk. He put it back down.

The turntable wasn’t on, but there was a record set in place, the needle on it as if someone had been about to play it but then changed their mind, unplugged it and just walked away. 

He leaned over the turntable and looked at the record. Glenn Miller. Of course. The soundtrack of his childhood. The music that was played every night at dinner. The music that was played at anniversaries and Christmases. The music that played while he cried silently in his room, wishing he was any place but there. He hated Glenn Miller almost as much as he hated dogs.

He left the room quickly.

The foyer was still a pond but outside on the front steps the water was drying up in the august sun. He looked up the street at the other houses. All post war boom builds. Ticky tacky houses as the song went. All similar enough to have trouble finding yours when you stumbled home drunk at closing time as his father often had. Different in tiny ways such as the new paint job on the one next door, the red azalea bushes on the one across the street. The cracked and faded façade on his mother’s.

He stared up the street and down, not sure what to do. So many times he had wished she was no longer there. He hadn’t wished her dead exactly, just gone. It wasn’t a nice thing to wish on an elderly woman but he was elderly himself wasn’t he? His 70th birthday had come and passed with nothing from his mother but a complaint about how he didn’t visit enough and if he cared he’d come put in her air conditioner. Didn’t he deserve to retire, relax, spend his days sitting in a chair, resting comfortably instead of caring for an elderly mother who had never shown that same care for him?

He pulled out his cell phone and held it tightly, wondering what to do. He could call his daughter but then, he didn’t want to be a burden to her as his mother was to him. Or his ex-wife, but then, he could already imagine the smug look on her face and her voice telling him that she had said this would happen.

He stood for a moment more and then, slowly, sank down on the front step, cell phone firmly in hand, wondering, not for the first time, where his mother was. And wondering if he really cared.