“No, I don’t want you to do that,” her mother said, shooting out of her chair. The ashtray toppled over onto a stack of newspapers. “I don’t want you back there. I don’t need you to pick my clothes.”
Alexa frowned and gingerly stepped out of the way so her mom could get around her, and nearly tripped over the broken poles of a lamp as she did so. Making decisions as simple as what to wear sometimes caused Mom a great deal of difficulty, so her strident refusal to let Alexa help probably meant her bedroom was as bad as the living room. Or worse. Alexa had been so busy getting settled into Grant’s house—well, their house now—that she hadn’t spent the time she usually did over here cleaning and trying to cull through the piles. It was only through Alexa’s constant battles with her mother that the place had remained as livable as it was for as long as it had. Left to her own devices, her mother would’ve filled the place floor-to-ceiling by now. Just like when Alexa and Tyler were kids.
It was why her father had left them when Alexa was almost nine and Tyler was thirteen. Their dad hadn’t been able to deal with the hoarding. Alexa could still remember them fighting about it. After each new loss, it just got worse.
“Have you eaten breakfast?” Alexa asked. Entering the kitchen, she cursed under her breath as a rancid smell hit her smack in the face. Dirty dishes filled the sink and spilled over onto the adjacent counter. She hoped it was just days’ old food causing the smell and not a dead mouse somewhere.
“Yes,” her mother called back.
Alexa opened the refrigerator, which was emptier than she usually let it get. She mentally added a grocery trip to her to-do list for the weekend. “What did you eat?” she asked loud enough for her mother to hear.
“A frozen breakfast. Now get out of my fridge,” came the agitated reply.
Rolling her eyes, Alexa closed the bottom door and opened the upper freezer door. A few frozen meals remained. She hated that her mother’s diet consisted largely of microwavable food, but considering that the stove was often covered in crap—like today, for instance, when there was a huge bag of . . . something sitting on it, the microwave was often the only accessible means she had of cooking anyway.
Between her mother’s habit of stacking things on the stove and her smoking, Alexa was terrified that her mom was going to accidentally start a fire and get trapped inside the blaze by the mountains of junk. A fire had broken out in their place when Alexa was fifteen. Luckily, Tyler and Maverick had been at the house that day and had been able to put it out before it damaged much more than the kitchen, but Alexa still sometimes had nightmares about it. Sighing, she lifted the bag off the stove and put it on the floor.
“Now it’s in the way.” Her mother appeared in the kitchen doorway wearing a floor-length black maxi dress and a pair of flip-flops. She’d pulled her hair into a neat, low ponytail and put on a pair of earrings and a matching necklace.
“It’s not safe to put things on the stove like that,” Alexa said.
Waving a hand, Mom shook her head. “It’s not like the stove can magically turn itself on.”
Alexa didn’t take the bait. “Better safe than sorry, that’s all. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to do it today, but tomorrow I will come back with groceries and do a little cleaning for you.” Do a little cleaning was code word for get rid of as much stuff as I can without causing you to have a panic attack, and her mother knew it.
“You don’t have to do that,” her mother said as she tried to stack a few of the dirty dishes from the counter into the too-full sink.
“You know I don’t mind,” Alexa said. It wasn’t exactly the truth. There had been a time when she first moved out of her mother’s house when she’d sworn to never deal with hoarding again. As a kid, not even her bedroom had been safe from storing the unneeded and unwanted things her mother brought home. At one point, she’d lost the use of her bedroom closet because she’d put all the stuff her mother kept dropping into her room in there until it was filled to the top.
“Still, I don’t need you to take care of me. I’m fine on my own. Always have been.” Mom shuffled to the kitchen table and retrieved her purse from the back of a chair. Grocery bags filled with things Alexa couldn’t make out buried the table next to the chair.
Her mom’s words were a lie and they both knew that, too. “Well, I like to take care of you, so it’s no problem. You letting me help makes me happy.”