768 Union Street

I am standing on the worn metal footstool that has a seat that lifts so as to double for a chair when there’s too much company. I am standing, sweating, high up on this footstool. I am cleaning the top of the brown metal hood to my Grandmother’s stove. It is greasy and dusty back here, and I kick myself for not cleaning it more often. I take down the four or five nick nacks and put them in a pail of soapy warm water. The green statue with the orange hair (no doubt someone’s St. Patrick’s Day gift from long ago.) The salt and pepper shakers in the stand that double as a cork screw and church key (Grama Be’s old word for bottle opener), a ceramic bank for change that is shaped like a big mushroom house. The paint is chipped on the spotted mushroom and the plug to the bank has long since dried up and fallen out. If you shake it you can hear one old penny stuck somewhere inside, never to buy a wad of Bazooka or be called good luck on the street.

It is hot today. The apartment is like an oven under the tarpaper black roof, baking us. I open the dumbwaiter and put away the baking pans from the drain and fill the pitcher and water the plants hanging in the small window over the kitchen table, water leaking onto the window sill. Be is in the dining room, playing solitaire and having coffee. It is still early. She comes into the kitchen and mixes boiling water into her instant apple and cinnamon flavored oatmeal. I hug her skinny frame from behind, careful not to break her.