Excerpt: Not Her Father's Daughter

Kelly had started a list of all the stupid things she hated about this kitchen. When Alan finally retired, they were going purchase some land out in the hill country and they were going to build a house. Alan had promised her that she could work with an architect to have the kitchen of her dreams.

Tears stung her eyes. Her throat clogged; she couldn’t breathe.

She was never going to have her dream kitchen. She was going to wither and die, probably cooking her own last meal in this stupid kitchen designed by a man who had never welded a spatula.

The room spun. Kelly grabbed onto the counter to steady herself. Then she sat down in the middle of the kitchen floor, and put her head between her knees. That position wasn’t her best idea, considering she probably wouldn’t be able to get back up without help. She took a couple of deep breaths, holding the air in until she thought she might explode. But the dizziness passed. She opened her eyes.

Wrong thing to do. But it was too late now, she had already seen the stains on the tile. That was another thing she didn’t like about this kitchen. White tile. It was a little textured, and thank God it wasn’t that glossy white like they had had overseas. But the damn white tile was impossible to keep clean. Most days she could ignore the spots and stuff that got tracked across the floor because she took off her glasses as soon as she walked in the door and she simply didn’t see the mess. But not today. Today it bugged her to have a dirty floor.

Okay, Kelly. You know what is happening. Even though you haven’t been officially diagnosed with cancer, not until you see the doctor tomorrow. This is the first stage of grief, the shock. Everybody goes through it. But you don’t have to let it control you. You can deal with it. Yes, she could deal with it, she told herself.

Do something. She looked at the tile floor again. She rolled over onto her hands and knees and crawled to the cabinet under the sink. She opened the cabinet door to get out her cleaning supplies. The cabinet was empty. Well not totally empty, the in-the-sink dish drainer was still there, and the stacking cubes that she kept the sponges and scrubbers in were there.

Where had her daughter hidden all her cleaning supplies when she child-proofed the house? How in the hell was she going to work off all this nervous energy and her mad mood with nothing to clean with?

That was how she had dealt with the shock when her own father had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer. They had only lived in that God forsaken bigoted little hick town in the bowels Oklahoma for about a year when her mother had called and told her about her Dad going in for surgery. Alan had been out of town; she had the two girls in school, and Troy was two years old. She couldn’t drop everything, pull the girls out of school and drive to Tulsa. So, she dealt with it like she always did when she was mad about something: she cleaned her kitchen.

When the man they had been renting the house on the hill told them they would have to find a new place, Kelly wondered where they were going to find a house. There were no other houses in town in their price range. The company had made it clear that Alan could not buy a house in one of the bigger communities and commute to work. He was suppose to promote good will among the landowners he had to deal with on a day to day basis by living in the same town with them.

Alan found them a house, just south of town, across the river. It was an old farm house that had had additions built on as the family had grown: a garage with an upper floor on one side, and a family room on the other. It was pink. Well the brick veneer was pink; it also had white siding. And it needed a lot of work.

Kelly had tried to be optimistic. But the longer they had lived there, the more irritable and depressed Alan had become. He threw himself into his work, rather than come home to that suffocating little house. He always left for the office in town before the girls got up to go to school, and some days he didn’t come home until the kids had already gone to bed. There was one week when Kelly was sure that Alan had not even seen their son.

The day her father went in for surgery, she got the girls off for school and she started cleaning the house. Actually, she started in the kitchen. For an old farmhouse, the kitchen was actually fairly large. There were cabinets and counter tops along part of two adjoining walls. The original owners had put in a dishwasher at some point. The refrigerator stood along the wall that butted up against the master bedroom, and there was room for the washer and dryer next to the refrigerator. Their round oak table was tucked into the corner under the window which looked out on the front porch which no one used.

The floor was covered with the original linoleum. It was a light green with swirls of multi-colored blobs. Kelly had sort of liked the quaint old cracked linoleum; it hid the dirt really well. She couldn’t tell if that was a splotch of mustard on the floor or just part of the pattern. Dried catsup blended in very well too.

So Kelly cleaned while she waited to hear from her mother. The first thing she did was try to find a place to store all the small appliances. Kelly figured that the things that she used all the time should sit out where they were handy. Her husband thought a clean kitchen should have absolutely nothing on the countertops. She rearranged some of the stuff in the lower cabinets. She shoved the flour and sugar cannisters into the cabinet with spices and other baking supplies. The toaster went into a lower cabinet, on the shelf above the skillets. She crammed the Oster Kitchen Center and all its attachments next to the pots that she had stacked inside each other. She wiped down the counters, cleaned the drip pans on the old white range and covered them with foil.

After Kelly fixed Troy some breakfast, she sat him in front of the television and turned on Public Broadcasting. Hopefully, between Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow, and Mr. Rogers, she could finish up the kitchen without her two year olds help. While he was engrossed watching Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch, she cleaned out the refrigerator. That took a while. She carried the full trash bag out to the garage; there were no rural trash haulers, and Alan would take it to the dumpster at the office when he got back into town. Then, she got out the glass cleaner and shined the tempered glass shelves before putting them back into the refrigerator.

She pulled the old canister vaccuum cleaner out of the closet in the little family room. She swept the kitchen floor. She even got out the crevice tool and cleaned along the base boards and the corners of the ceiling. Then she made up a bucket of hot soapy water, opened a package of brand new sponges, and started cleaning the fronts of the cabinets.

She cried silent tears as she scrubbed. The cabinets had so many dings in the paint, it was hard to tell if they were clean or not. When she finished with the cabinets, she made up a new bucket of water, got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the floor.

It was cathartic. By the time her mother called to tell her that her father was out of surgery, she had cried herself out. She wished she could have been there so she could ask the doctor questions rather than relying on her mother to relay the information accurately. Kelly had gone to college to become a medical technologist; she had worked in a hospital lab. She knew the lingo, she knew enough that she could read through the false hope that gushed out of her mother’s mouth. The cancer had spread to his liver.

Kelly shook herself back to the present. Well she hadn’t been given a death sentence yet. But just in case, she would rather not have all the mourners commenting about her dirty house.

She groaned as she got to her feet. She opened the upper cabinet, the one where she stored her phone books, and pulled out the business pages for the greater southwest Houston area. There were numerous listing for maid services, so she closed her eyes and stabbed her index finger on the page.

The voice on the other end of the line sounded like a real person. “Yes," Kelly replied, "I need to see about having someone help me clean for a party.”