Ashlynne toweled off, hastily dressed, and double-checked the front door. Shit. Forget to lock the door after you fed the cats, idiot? Maybe you had a visitor, after all. “That’s ridiculous. I would have heard the door shut if someone had been here and then left,” Ashlynne responded out loud to the snarky voice in her head. The house key lay on the kitchen counter. Funny. Ashlynne normally placed it in its hiding spot after unlocking the front door. It was only a quarter ‘til five now; too early for her family to be home. “Ethan?!” Ashlynne cried out. Maybe he caught a ride home instead of waiting for their parents. There was no answer. Of course he wasn’t home. After practice Ethan utilized the school’s weight room until their parents picked him up. Even if he had been home, he wasn’t mean enough to pull this twisted of a prank. Ashlynne locked the front door and returned to the bathroom to blow-dry her hair. “I’ll just start dinner soon. Forget what I saw. What I think I saw. God, I’m going a little crazy,” she muttered. More than a little came the snarky reply.
Fully dressed and hair dried, Ashlynne put the blow-dryer away, started the water for the spaghetti, and threw her towel and gym clothes into the washer. Then it was back to the kitchen, a skillet on the stove for the hamburger. The water was boiling, so she grabbed spaghetti noodles and sauce from the pantry. No evidence a mouse tried to nibble its way into the pasta, so she dumped the whole thing into the pot. When the meat was almost cooked through Ashlynne added the spaghetti sauce to the skillet. She looked at the kitchen table. Why do you live like this? The table was covered with discarded jars and a container of margarine – half-rotted food all over the table with barely enough room for plates around the edges. That’s how it had always been, though. Little roaches crawled among the mess, dead ones floated in the uncovered pickle jars. Ashlynne fought an urge to retch.
“I’m not eating like this tonight.” She grabbed everything off the table and threw it in the trash. Condiments, pickles, moldy bread, scraps of paper, too. Threw everything away until the table was only covered in bugs and whatever stuck-on nastiness had accumulated. The clink-clink-clink of jars hitting each other in the garbage can was almost musical.
Ashlynne soaked a wash cloth in hot water and squirted dish soap all over the table. An faint acrid smell tainted the air – the spaghetti sauce was scorching. She turned off that burner and checked the noodles – still not tender so she turned her attention back to the table, scrubbing and rinsing the wash cloth and scrubbing again until the bugs all crawled away and there was no evidence the table had been covered in jars of spoiled food moments ago. She set plates and forks on the table, drained the spaghetti, and tossed it with the meat sauce, and left it on the stove, covered with a lid. She’d just finished moving her laundry from the washer to the dryer when someone knocked on the door. Ashlynne peeked through the curtain and there was Ethan’s sweating face, blue eyes, and blonde hair. She opened the door and he grabbed her in a slick embrace before she could pull away. “Hey, sister!” he crooned. “Smells good in here.”
She muttered her thanks as she wiped her cheek with her shirt sleeve. Ethan moved off to his room and Ashlynne moved to the kitchen, leaving the door open for her parents. She placed the pot of spaghetti on a folded towel in the center of the table. It was almost as good as dinner at her grandparents’ – their home was impeccably clean. Never any mice scratching the walls at Grandma’s house.
“You’ve been busy,” Kaitlyn’s voice called. She nodded at the table when Ashlynne looked up, Kaitlyn’s face expressionless. Then she turned toward her room, calling over her shoulder, “I’ll be out in a bit and then we can eat.”
Ashlynne’s dad, Randal, came in last, closed the door behind him, and headed to the bathroom, not saying anything. Ashlynne sat on the couch and turned the TV to Jeopardy to start their nightly entertainment. “You need to put your radio –” he called as he came out of the bathroom and headed to the kitchen. Ashlynne turned in his direction when he started speaking, and saw his eyes land on the table when his sentence was cut off. She stood up and headed toward the bathroom to collect her radio and return it to her room. She tried to slip past him, but he pulled her into a hug, squeezed tightly, and softly said, “Thank you.” Ashlynne squeezed back and took care of her radio.
The family ate dinner together, Kaitlyn guessing the Jeopardy questions, Randal and Ethan reaching for additional spaghetti until they emptied the pot. Jeopardy passed and Kaitlyn moved from the table to the couch to enjoy her shows and work on her crafts. She didn’t say anything about the lunchtime conversation. Ashlynne grabbed her bag from its perch by the front door, took it to her room and worked on some homework, radio playing in the background.
Randal peeked his head in after a while and thanked Ashlynne again for cleaning the table that afternoon. “Tomorrow, do you think you could work on the refrigerator or the cupboards? If we get rid of all the nasty food around here, I might be able to get those roaches gone once and for all. Who knows, maybe the mice will go, too.”
He smiled when Ashlynne nodded, then walked across the hallway to his room. He looked back at her like he wanted to say something else, but closed his door without a word instead.
After Ashlynne finished her homework, she closed her door, changed into pajamas, and brushed her hair until it felt soft and smooth. She worked through her nightly stretches, then layered lotion all over her skin and headed to the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face. Kaitlyn stopped her on her way back to bed.
“If you can make it through this week’s lunches, we can start doing something different next week. Maybe you can start taking a lunch so you don’t have to eat in the cafeteria.”
“Okay.”
“Okay. Good night.” Kaitlyn walked toward her room. Ashlynne started to follow her, but something caught her eye. She glanced at the table and saw that she was the only one who had put her dishes in the sink after dinner. Everyone else’s plates and the empty spaghetti pot were still sitting on the table. A small mouse tried to jump out of the pot, disappointed there was no dinner left for him. Ashlynne shook her head and went off to bed.
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