Only Uni (27 page)

Trish let out a sobbing whine. What could she do? Where could she go? Things couldn’t get any worse.

Then a white Toyota Avalon coasted into the driveway.
Oh, no.

Trish’s mother had shown up.

TWENTY-ONE

M
om, what are you doing here? You drove from Morgan Hill?”
Why did you have to be here to witness this, the supreme example of your progeny’s stupidity and plain bad luck?

“Your dad drove me into San Jose for the planning meeting for the
Obon
dance.”

Oh, yes. There was the slimebucket now, sitting in the driver’s side. “Are you okay to be doing so much so soon after your . . . you know?” Trish had been going by how Mom dealt with the whole thing, and since Mom had yet to say the words “heart attack,” Trish followed suit.

“Of course. I wanted to see your new place, considering you waited until yesterday to tell me.”

Ah, no disgruntlement in her tone, not at all.

Trish’s petite mother studied the ramshackle building. Her mouth wrinkled in distaste, and she raised a trembling hand to smooth down her hairdo — permed, ultra-short, and a mahogany color too brilliant to be real, although she’d been too ill to get it touched up so the gray roots were showing. “Is the address correct?” Desperation tinged her voice.

“Yes, Mom.” This was the frosting on the cake. Why did her mother have to put in an appearance? Trish already felt abominably stupid in front of her cousins and Mrs. Choi. She didn’t want to have to deal with Mom’s rolled eyes and
Oh my goodness, what kind of
baka
daughter did I raise?
looks.

Mom would needle her until she discovered that Trish had taken the place sight-unseen, and then she’d never hear the end of it.
You didn’t look at the place before you agreed? Triiiiiish!

But Mom didn’t say anything like that. “Maybe it looks better inside?” She gave an over-bright smile, but was so much more reserved than Trish expected that she almost fainted with relief.

“That’s a good idea.”

After introducing a wary Mom to an apologetic Mrs. Choi, Trish appropriated the key, marched up to the front door and hauled the creaky screen door aside. She fumbled to undo the bolt lock.

Venus sniffed. “Do you smell something funny?”

Trish paused. She smelled mold from the eaves, moss from the cracked stone front step, and a hay-ish scent from the weeds on the front lawn. “No.” She shoved the door open with a shuddering groan.

The smell assaulted them in a
whoosh.
Mom scrambled back a few paces while Trish gagged, paralyzed in the doorway.

Decomp.

Trish recognized it from work, but it didn’t make it any more bearable. She ducked sideways and stared hard at the weeds peeping from the base of the exterior wall. She wondered if she would hurl her lunch. Venus, who had been the next closest to the door, had retreated a few feet away, face white and eyes closed. Jenn, Lex, Mom, and Mrs. Choi had backed up almost to the sidewalk.

After a few minutes, the smell lessened enough to allow them to peek inside. The light streaming from the doorway revealed a long hallway. On the left was a rather nice archway into the living room, where various dark stains dotted the carpet.

They inched down the hallway into the kitchen, dimmed by curtains on the window over the sink. She shook them open in a cloud of dust. Sunlight filtered through the grimy glass to reveal walls patterned in faded avocado-green and burnt-orange. To top it off, the light illuminated the puke-yellow color of the curtains.

There was the culprit. The smell of decomposition came from an unfinished hamburger on the counter — George’s trash, probably. Maggots overran the paper plate, and a few flies buzzed.

“Eeeewwww! Ewewewewew!”
Venus ran shrieking from the kitchen back into the hallway. Her screams warned her other cousins to stay back, although Mrs. Choi peeked in with trepidation.

Sissies. Trish called to Jenn, “Give me that extra plastic bag you always keep in your purse. And a few paper towels.” She went to the window and flung open the glass. She managed to knock out the screen frame and started gently fanning it to get the flies and the smell out of the house.

Jenn dug into her gigantic tote bag purse and handed the bag and towels to Trish with an extended arm, not getting any nearer to the kitchen than she had to.

Trish got the plate and maggots into the bag. “Outta my way!” Women scattered. She headed down the hallway out the door.

She started when Dad met her at the front step. His face had screwed up tight. “What’s that smell?”

Intent on her mission, Trish didn’t have time to feel awkward. “Old hamburger. Out of the way, Dad.”

“Oh. Give it here, I’ll take care of it.” He reached for the plastic bag.

“What? No, this is gross, Dad.” It startled her, although it shouldn’t. Dad always took care of the dead squirrels and birds in the backyard, the dog poop in the front yard, even that possum roadkill on the street when she’d been twelve years old.

It was just weird, seeing him be so
normal
when things should be horribly
abnormal
between them.

He snatched the bag out of her hand and headed toward the old garbage can on the side of the driveway. “Might be bleach under the sink,” he threw over his shoulder.

Trish stood there a moment, watching him. Then she turned back into the house.

Sure enough, a dusty bottle of Clorox under the kitchen sink, along with a stiff sponge. Trish turned the faucet handle over the stained porcelain sink. The water flowed brown at first but lightened to clear. She wet the sponge.

Dusty beige tiles ran in rows on the countertop, and missing grout left dark rough crevices between. She poured some bleach over them and scrubbed with the sponge.

By this time, her mother ventured into the kitchen and grimaced at the grease-coated cabinets. Lex glanced up. “Eew.”

Trish followed her gaze to the ceiling, stained dark and dotted with rounded blobs of grease. While they took in the horror over their heads, the kitchen light flickered on, blinding them.

“Moooom!”

“I wanted to see if the electricity was turned on.”

“Oh, it should be.” A smile trembled on Mrs. Choi’s mouth. “Until he flew to Missouri a couple days ago, George lived here.”

“He did?” Trish tossed the sponge into the sink.

At that moment, the refrigerator rattled violently like an old asthmatic man clearing his throat, then hummed. Lex opened the door before Trish could shout a warning.

Luckily, there wasn’t anything living inside. A couple soda cans and a Hostess fruit pie —
George refrigerates his fruit pies?
— but the rubber sealing around the edge of the door caught Lex’s attention. “What’s this?”

They both peered at an icky brown substance slathered into the folds of rubber, cracked with age. Then a distinctive smell teased Trish’s nose. “Peanut butter.” They slammed the door shut.

Trish scurried from the kitchen but tripped over a lump in the hallway where the carpet bunched up. She slammed into the wall, and her hand came away sticky. She glared at the carpet. “Great, it’s loose.”

Venus glanced down. “Humph.” She bent to look closer. “Hardwood floors underneath.”

Trish didn’t care. She hesitated at the door to the bedroom before easing it open.

George had camped out here. Literally. A North Face tent sat in the middle of a rather clean shag carpet, but there was no other furniture. The sliding closet doors revealed wire hangers dangling from a dusty, sagging wooden beam.

Emboldened by the marginally habitable room, Trish pushed open the bathroom door — which opened a foot before stopping with a
clunk
against the toilet. “You’re kidding, right?” She squeezed in, but had to step into the open shower to close the bathroom door.

An old-fashioned sink crowded the toilet, with a teeny mirror that sported a narrow shelf. Talk about no counter space. She tugged at the mirror, relieved to open a rusty but somewhat clean medicine cabinet, although it missed one of its shelves.

She glanced down to inspect the linoleum — old, browned, and curling at the edges. But something small and white lay near the door and the edge of the shower. Trish stared hard, then realized that where the linoleum curled away from the wall, a mushroom grew in the floor.

A faint drip reached her ear. She folded in half to squint in the dimness under the toilet. She heard the
clunk
of the bathroom door against the toilet bowl and Jenn’s voice. “Trish?”

“Is there a light switch near the door?”

The sound of fumbling, then the buzz of the light and a coughing chug from the electric bathroom fan. She found herself staring at a puddle of grimy water under the toilet. The drip came from a loose valve. She reached to see if she could tighten it, then heard a bloodcurdling screech.

Trish jerked and smacked her head against the toilet bowl. Rubbing, she peeked up at Jenn, then the ceiling.

At first she thought someone had painted a mural on the flat ceiling, using designs of dark-colored oil paints in subtle shades of grey, brown and forest green.

Then she realized it was a huge layer of mold.

She shrieked and leaped over the toilet, but her action slammed the door shut. The giant mold seemed to snicker threateningly. She screamed again and jumped into the shower so she could yank open the door. She shimmied out of the bathroom.

She and Jenn cried and clung to each other for a moment. Still panting, Trish turned when her mom called her from the door to the garage.

The stale airless smell enveloped her at the same time as the cool dimness, but the crack at the bottom of the slightly open garage door shone a narrow strip of white. At a flick of the light switch, a bare bulb buzzed to life. A cockroach scuttled away, and she noticed dusty cobwebs, dead leaves and tiny black pellets along the walls.

Venus noticed them too. “Ew, rats.”

“But the smell in here is stale.” Mom snapped off the light. “They may be old, and the rats might be gone.”

“Let’s hope so.”

“I’m so embarrassed.” Mrs. Choi wrung her hands. “If you don’t mind staying here while you look for a new place, I won’t charge rent.”

Trish ran her eye over the dingy walls, into the danger-zone kitchen, and glared at the closed bathroom door. But she could use George’s tent in the bedroom. She could bathe at the showers at work. As for the toilet . . . well, the green monster was only partially over the toilet, so if she had to, she could sneak in, do her business, and sneak out without disturbing it.

“Thanks, Mrs. Choi.” She didn’t really have much choice — she was friends with the security guys at work, but they couldn’t turn a blind eye on boxes in her office any longer. They’d transported the boxes here, and she had no where else to put them. “The only thing is my futon bed.” No way was she putting it inside this house.

“Why don’t you run it over to our home?” Trish’s mom raised her penciled eyebrows as if to say,
Isn’t that the obvious solution?

“My bed isn’t going to fit in the house.” Not that it fit all that well in the puny living room at Venus’s condo. She’d used that men acing growl of hers as she made Trish promise to have the bed out in a week.

“You can put everything in the garage, and we’ll park the cars in the driveway until you find a place.”

Her mother’s calm voice and sensible suggestion eased Trish’s worries. “Thanks, Mom.”

“Why don’t you all come on over now and stay for dinner? I made chicken
hekka
.”

“Yummmm.” Lex and Trish both smacked their lips.

At Mrs. Choi’s inquiring look, Trish translated, “Japanese country-style chicken stir-fry that’s actually kind of soupy.”

Jenn rolled her eyes and turned to head outside. “Trish, you could make
sashimi
sound complicated.”

She followed her cousin down the hallway. “Well,
sashimi
must be complicated even though it’s just raw fish, since the sushi chefs in Japan have to train for years before they can work — ”

“Don’t be lecturing me
,
of all people, about culinary arts.”

“Oh. Yeah.” She shut up. Jenn could cook circles around most of the aunties, although none of them would ever admit it.

They tromped down the hallway, sprinted past the living room archway and escaped out the door. Trish turned to Mrs. Choi. “Thanks for letting me stay here.” Sleeping on her office floor in a sleeping bag was making her back hurt.

“It’s the least I could do. I’m so sorry I didn’t look at the place before offering it. George only told me that he had bought it, where it was, and how much rent to charge.”

“That’s okay. At least I have a temporary place to stay that’s close to work.”

“Do you think you’ll be able to find something?”

“Now that I’m not under time pressure, I’m sure I will. This last week must be a fluke — normally there are plenty of apartments available.”

Mrs. Choi smiled. “That’s good, dear.”

“I promise I won’t be here long.” Trish walked toward their cars. “One week, tops.”