I careened down the stairs, whooping like a crazy bird to meet my favorite man alive, two steps at a time, vaulting over the carved banister, leaving the scent of Mother’s skin behind me like a fading dream.
“June Bug!” Uncle Toby called from the kitchen in a voice that sounded like Thanksgiving. “Where’s my little mongoose? Hope she didn’t chew off her own tail.”
All at once, the house was filled with the wondrous sound of paper grocery bags, of footsteps from the door to the long, empty table, of leather work boots clomping dirt and germs and forbidden outside-things onto the floor of the kitchen, filling me with a happiness that spread through my veins like helium, making me feel like I could lift to the ceiling and fly.
“June Bug? Where are you?” he called out, pretending to search for me even when I stopped an inch away from him. I stepped on both his boots with my bare feet, and he waltzed me around the kitchen like a marionette.
When the dancing stopped, I watched him put the food away, each item emerging from the grocery bag like a rabbit from a magician’s hat, food I would prepare myself that week without Mother’s help: cold cuts and chocolate pudding, cheddar cheese and Popsicles, hot dogs and cans of chicken soup, yogurt and macaroni, peanut butter and Wonder Bread, purple grape juice (the kind that made your lips pucker), strawberries, and grapes and chocolate chip cookies.
He made me a snack plate so I wouldn’t be too hungry watching him put the food away — a sampler of different treats: a cookie, a hunk of cheese, a bunch of grapes, three slices of roast beef, a piece of white bread smeared with peanut butter.
I wolfed it down.
Uncle Toby sat next to me and rubbed my back while I ate, petting my shoulders and pushing my hair back behind my ears.
“Easy there,” he said. “Not all at once. Give it a chance to go down.”
Mother’s thin voice came from the blankets upstairs. “Hi, Toby,” she called. “You almost finished down there? You’ve been here a long time, and I think you’d better get going now. We don’t want to keep you. Thank you for coming. See you next week.”
“Hold your horses,” Uncle Toby called up the stairs. “Why don’t you come down and join us, Angela? Or I could bring something up to you if you want. You eating anything these days, or are you living on air and eighth notes?”
We heard Mother’s voice try to laugh. She would have lived on air and eighth notes if it had been possible, but as it was, she had to have actual food every now and then. Just enough to keep her alive.
Uncle Toby picked up my wrist between two fingers and frowned. “You’re looking like you could use a little meat on your bones too, June Bug,” Uncle Toby told me quietly so Mother couldn’t hear. “Your daddy would be mad at me if he knew I was letting you get skinny. Maybe I should start coming over more often. Would you like that? Bet you get lonely sometimes now that school’s out.”
There was no way on earth he could know the truth of his words. There was no way he could know how incomplete the word lonely could be when it stood back-to-back with loneliness, or how hungry a girl could get for so much more than food.
“You know, I miss spending time in this big old house. Your daddy and I had lots of fun running around this kitchen, making your poor grandma crazy. How about if I start coming twice a week?”
“I would like that,” I told him simply, because I had no words for the rest of what was true.
“Angie?” called Uncle Toby up the stairs. “Next time, I’m coming up there with a sandwich. What kind do you like? Salami? Liverwurst?”
There was no answer.
“You better go,” I told him. “We’ll be fine.”
“You sure?” Uncle Toby put his hands on either side of my face and looked into my eyes, which everyone said were so much like Daddy’s. “What are you doing with yourself during the day now that school’s out? You staying in this house all the time with your mom?”
“No,” I said, smiling. “I have a new friend.”
“A friend?”
Suddenly, a story about Ziggy Karlo and Nana Jean came pouring out of my mouth, so sweet to say, so sweet to hear, that I almost believed the lies as soon as the first syllables passed through my lips. The lies were almost like a wish, and as soon as I began, I knew I’d have to make it come true.
“We play all the time,” I said, feeling my eyes widen. “And I eat lunch and dinner at his house most days. His nana makes us food. Anything we want. Lasagna. Ravioli. She’s such a good cook, Uncle Toby. And she’s really nice. She helps take care of me. And sometimes, when Mother isn’t feeling good, I sleep in their spare room, and she tucks me in and kisses me good night, and she checks on me three times during the night to make sure I’m okay.”
Uncle Toby wrapped his arms around me. “Oh, June Bug,” he said, sighing. “That’s wonderful news. Nana Jean is exactly what you need right now.”
I hugged him and he pulled me close so I could feel his beard scratch my cheeks.
“You don’t have to worry, Uncle Toby,” I said, still warm from my wish. “Everything is going to be okay.”
Mother waited until she could hear Uncle Toby’s truck pull out of our driveway to finally make her way downstairs in her white cotton nightgown, her hair plastered to her face, one hand holding the railing, and the other holding the neck of her nightgown closed.
“Are you going to take a shower?” I asked her.
“After we get this place cleaned up,” she said.
Usually, disinfection took about two and a half hours, but that was on a normal day when no one brought anything new into the house. On Saturdays, when Uncle Toby came, the time could be doubled or tripled.
There were thousands of possible points of disgustingness on the paper bags and grocery items themselves, which had been handled by strangers — farmworkers, factory workers, movers, packagers, grocery-store stock boys and check-out clerks — and all these people had shaken hands with someone, or wiped themselves without washing, or sneezed into their hands. Even Uncle Toby, who put the food away into our refrigerator and cupboards, could have tracked anything from the world into the kitchen on his hands or the soles of his boots.
For all these reasons, Saturday disinfection could sometimes take all day.
Each step caught the germs left over from the last. There were rules we had to follow no matter what.
Here are some examples of the rules:
Always start from the highest places and work your way down.
Germs from the second floor can fall down the stairs onto the first.
Germs from the walls can fall to the counters, can fall to the floor, can get trapped beneath your feet and then spread back into the rest of the house, so you always do the first floor last with a brand-new bucket of bleach.
It’s important to protect your hands whenever possible, because hands accidentally touch eyes and mouth and all the other inside places and then the germs attack the body and you die.
Mother kept crates of surgical gloves in the pantry and went through five or six boxes during a usual Saturday disinfection.
According to Mother, you could only safely use a pair of surgical gloves for the disinfection of a single large item or three smaller items.