Read They May Not Mean To, but They Do: A Novel for Free Online

world. She had been the same as a child, not particularly obsessive or compulsive, although she did refold her clothes when Joy brought them up from the laundry room, come to think of it. But it was more a show of strength, this insistence on order, her own order, a demand rather than a need.
    That would keep anybody busy, never mind her job. Look at her, poor dear, so antsy-pantsy. She was looking good, though. Fit. Always fit. An obsession. There were worse obsessions. She resembled her father with that long face. Sculptural, Joy liked to think, though others might call it craggy. The face was frowning ferociously now. Of course! Joy hadn’t told her about Aaron yet. No wonder! “Where was I? Oh, I came here into the living room and I read a little and then I must have fallen asleep—”
    “Mom!” Molly snapped. “Could you just tell me what actually happened, for god’s sake?”
    Her mother glared at her and snapped back: “Your father got out of bed and pulled his urine-soaked pajama pants and adult diaper down around his ankles and went out, like that, with his urine-soaked pajamas and adult diaper around his ankles, into the elevator to the lobby, okay? The doorman brought him back.”
    “Jesus.”
    “ Gregor —Jesus retired last year. All right? Okay? Direct enough for you, Molly? Delivered quickly enough? Sorry I was not as concise as you would have liked. I’m sorry I didn’t describe your father’s humiliation with the clarity and alacrity you demand…”
    Molly sank onto the downy couch beside her mother. “Oh, Mom,” she said tenderly. “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry.”
    They sat like that for a while, quiet, together, and she snuggled against her mother, then went into her parents’ bedroom. Her father was asleep, the quilt pulled up to his chin. He had aged since she last saw him, not that long ago despite her mother’s admonitions, two months. But Aaron, breathing noisily, his face otherwise so still, looked old, like an old, old man. Molly kissed his forehead.
    *   *   *
    “I’m sorry you walked in on such a drama,” Joy said. They were squeezed in at the table in the kitchen drinking the house specialty, decaffeinated tea, weak, lukewarm.
    “I’m sorry you have to deal with this, Mommy.”
    “Gregor is a nice young man. He and his wife just had a baby.”
    “Do you think maybe you should lock the door? At night? Then, if Daddy gets up—”
    “What if there’s a fire?” her mother said, appalled. “You’re not thinking, Molly.”
    Molly stirred her tea. The sound of the spoon against the teacup was musical, like bells.
    “I hate being such an old ruin,” Joy said softly.
    “You’re not an old ruin. You’re still working, for heaven’s sake. You take care of Dad all by yourself. I don’t know how you manage, honestly. And you look beautiful, too. Old ruin. That’s a joke.”
    “Well”—Joy was obviously mollified—“I am old.”
    No one at work knew her real age. Eighty-six. That would give them a jolt, all those potbellied men planning their retirements at sixty-five. Of course, she couldn’t afford to retire even now. She’d cut back to part-time since Aaron got so sick, which was hard enough on the finances.
    “I only work three days a week,” she added.
    “That’s plenty.”
    “Plenty of tsuris .”
    The room that had once been Molly’s was now her mother’s office and her father’s study. Those were the terms used by them both, and if an office is a place where you store cardboard boxes of unopened mail and a study is where you sit between spires of those boxes on a convertible sofa and listen to your transistor radio, then those terms were accurate.
    Molly transferred the piles of boxes from the sofa to the floor, leaving a little path to the door, and began removing the sofa’s newly visible pillows before she realized that other towers of boxes on the floor would prevent the mattress from unfolding.
    “Oh well,” Joy said. “Storage is