to help carry the conversation.
"So, what's the plan?" Brian finally asked. "You're moving here?"
"We have moved," Mom said.
"For good?" I asked.
"That's right," Dad said.
"Why?" I asked. The question came out sharply.
Dad looked puzzled, as if the answer should have been obvious. "So we
could be a family again." He raised his pint. "To the family," he said.
Mom and Dad found a room in a boardinghouse a few blocks from
Lori's apartment. The steely-haired landlady helped them move in, and a
couple of months later, when they fell behind on their rent, she put their
belongings on the street and padlocked their room. Mom and Dad moved
into a six-story flophouse in a more dilapidated neighborhood. They
lasted there a few months, but when Dad set their room on fire by falling
asleep with a burning cigarette in his hand, they got kicked out. Brian
believed that Mom and Dad needed to be forced to be self-sufficient or
they'd be dependent on us forever, so he refused to take them in. But Lori
had moved out of the South Bronx and into an apartment in the same
building as Brian, and she let them come stay with her and Maureen. It
would be for just a week or two, Mom and Dad assured her, a month at
the most, while they got a kitty together and looked for a new place.
One month at Lori's became two months and then three and four. Each
time I visited, the apartment was more jam-packed. Mom hung paintings
on the walls and stacked street finds in the living room and put colored
bottles in the windows for that stained-glass effect. The stacks reached
the ceiling, and then the living room filled up, and Mom's collectibles
and found art overflowed into the kitchen.