I was on my knees in the bathroom where I once bathed my son. The tub had a crack running from the faucet to the drain, and somebody had stuffed a blue shop towel into it. The towel was black. The baseboard behind the toilet had swollen and come away from the wall. A can of Bud Light was propped under the window to keep it open, and snow had blown in onto the tile.
I had driven from my apartment in Cuyahoga Falls to the brick condo on Merriman Road in Akron because the woman in 2B called me for the third time that month. Her kitchen ceiling was dripping again. I still had a key then. I let myself in. The door stuck on a pile of tear-off mail and a pair of soaked sneakers. The hallway smelled like rotting onions and something sweeter, like sour candy.
The plumbing under the sink was wrapped in packing tape. The refrigerator had been dragged into the middle of the kitchen, turned off, its door closed with a bungee cord. In the living room the carpet had been peeled back and left in a heap. The wall below the front window bubbled with water damage. There were cigarette burns in the windowsill, as if someone had put out cigarettes and then forgotten them there.
I opened the door to the second bedroom, the one that was supposed to be the nursery. The crib rail was tied with zip ties. The blind was gone, and a baby blanket had been duct-taped over the glass. On the floor, a diaper had been stepped on and left.
I didn't cry. I took out my phone and started taking pictures.
That place had been a two-bedroom condo on the third floor of a 1920s walk-up near Highland Square. My husband Dale and I bought it in 1995. We carried a new toilet up three flights of stairs because the elevator had been broken since the Clinton administration. I raised Brandon there. I scrubbed that tub every Saturday. After Dale died, I moved out and rented the unit for eleven hundred a month. The money covered the property taxes and my blood pressure pills.
Eleven months before the black towel, Brandon and his wife Tiffani sat at my kitchen table in Cuyahoga Falls and told me they couldn't make rent. Tiffani was six months pregnant with Paisley. Their landlord wanted to raise their rent from seventeen hundred to twenty-two. Brandon said, "Ma, if we could just have the condo, we could start clean." Tiffani said, "We'll take care of it. We'll raise the baby where Brandon grew up."
I thought about Dale. I thought about the second bedroom. I went to a title office on East Market Street and signed a quitclaim deed. I didn't put any conditions in it. The notary's pen had a bright orange cap. I remember that because I kept turning it over in my hands.
For two months, almost three, things seemed okay. Tiffani sent me pictures of a new shower curtain from Target. They hung a string of little lights in the nursery. I brought over Dale's old toolbox. I gave them my mother's Dutch oven. Then Paisley was born and I started coming by with casseroles and diapers.
The first thing I noticed was the smell of sour milk in the kitchen. Then the dishes piled in the sink. Then the cat. They didn't have a cat when they moved in. Tiffani had taken in a stray from the parking lot, and it had shredded the doorframe to the nursery. The place started to feel wrong. The bathroom sink leaked. The kitchen faucet dripped. The living room wall had a hole where Brandon had thrown a controller at the TV. I told him to call a plumber. He said, "I don't have time, Ma. I work twelve hours at the Amazon hub." I said, "I worked while raising you." He said, "Here we go."
Tiffani liked to have people over. I didn't mind that. But after one Saturday, I came by on Sunday morning and found a futon in the living room with a stranger asleep on it. The coffee table was sticky. There was a burn mark on the arm of Dale's recliner. I said something to Tiffani. She laughed. "Denise, no one told you to give us the condo. If you wanted it to stay a showpiece, you should have kept it."
That sentence did something to my spine. I looked at Brandon. He was on his phone, scrolling. He didn't look up.
The call from downstairs came on a Tuesday in January. The neighbor, a woman named Carmen, said, "Your son's place is leaking into my kitchen again. I left three notes. He said he'd fix it. I can't keep putting buckets out." I drove over that afternoon. I let myself in. That's when I knelt in the bathroom and took the pictures.
I waited until Brandon came home. Tiffani was in the kitchen, eating Flamin' Hot Cheetos and wiping her fingers on the counter. I said, "This place is not safe for Paisley." Tiffani said, "Paisley is at my mother's in Wadsworth. She's fine. You need to stop checking on us like we're children." I said, "Then stop living like children."
The argument went where I expected. Tiffani said I was controlling. Brandon said I was dramatic. He said, "We'll get to it when we get to it." I said, "The black mold in the bathroom is already in the drywall. The HOA has sent you seven letters. Carmen's ceiling is water-stained because of your mess." Tiffani said, "If you love the condo so much, take it back."
I told them I would. They didn't believe me. That was their mistake.
I called a lawyer in Akron named Erica. She said the quitclaim made things hard, but not impossible. She called it gross ingratitude and waste. I gave her the photos, the HOA letters, the text messages where Tiffani told me to stop coming over. I gave her a statement from Carmen about the water damage. I gave her a copy of the original purchase agreement from 1995 and receipts for the roof assessment Dale and I paid.
When Brandon got the legal notice, he came to my apartment and kicked the door. I opened it and he was shaking. "You’re going to make us homeless? I’m your son." I said, "I already gave you a home. You made it a mold-covered flophouse." He said, "I wish you weren't my mother." I said, "Me too, today."
He slapped the doorframe with his hand. The picture of Dale and me at Cedar Point fell off the shelf in the hall. The glass cracked right across Dale's face.
The next few months were a dentist's chair. The court didn't give me the condo back. But the judge ordered Brandon to pay the HOA arrears and to sign a note for the damage to the unit below. He was given ten months to either repair the place or list it. A lien was put on the unit in my favor. It wasn't everything, but it meant the condo wasn't a no-strings gift anymore.
Brandon lost his job at the warehouse. Tiffani moved to Wadsworth and filed for divorce. The condo went quiet. I stopped dropping by. I didn't want to see what was left.
Then one Sunday in March, Brandon called. He said, "Ma, can I borrow your shop vac?" I said, "Come get it." He showed up at my door unshaven, in a coat I didn't recognize. I handed him the shop vac and a roll of contractor bags. He said, "I don't know where to start." I said, "Take the trash out first. Then the carpet. Then the bathroom."
He did. Over the next eight weeks, the trash went out. The carpet came up. The black drywall came down. He called a plumber. He called Carmen and paid her for the water damage out of his last check, in two installments. He and I went to Huntington Bank on a Tuesday afternoon. We opened a 529 account for Paisley. The starting balance was twenty-five thousand dollars, from what I had saved for his inheritance. I told him he couldn't touch it, couldn't borrow against it, couldn't change the beneficiary. He looked at the confirmation slip. "Why not just give it to me?" he said.
I said, "Because I already gave you one roof. You taught me what happens with a gift."
We drove back to the condo in silence. The elevator still didn't work. We walked up three flights. The bathroom no longer smelled like rot. He had painted the walls the same pale blue I'd used in 1999. The mirror was new, still had the sale sticker on the corner. He took out his phone and showed me a picture of Paisley sitting on the new floor in the second bedroom, eating Cheerios off a plastic tray.
I set the 529 confirmation on the kitchen counter next to the Dutch oven, the one I'd brought over when they moved in. It was clean. He had scrubbed it.
"Leave it there," I said. "Paisley will need something that's still good."
I walked to the door and let myself out. The hall light was working again.
