Cornerstone
Authors: Misty Provencher
Cornerstone
By Misty Provencher
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2011 by Misty Provencher. All rights reserved.
Cover and Interior Design by Streetlight Graphics
First Kindle Edition: November 2011
ISBN-10: 1467924628
ISBN-13: 9781467924627
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The Author holds exclusive rights to this work. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited.
For information:
Email:
This book is dedicated to
Doug, Sydney, & Nolan
who make ‘me’ happen.
~More Than Anything~
And to Laura,
who was my very first fan.
I hate paper day. Hate. It. But I still do it every week, sometimes twice a week, because my mom asks me to. I know I shouldn’t. I know it doesn’t help. But I do it because the only people in the world that we can count on is us. My dad’s just a frozen smile in a brushed-brass frame on our living room wall. And since he hasn’t jumped down to run to the office supply store for her in the last seventeen years, it’s all on me.
I lug home three stacks of printer paper every week, even though it kills my arms. The office supply is on my way home from school and the store manager, Buzz, keeps it waiting for me by the register now. Fifteen hundred sheets of their cheapest paper, wrapped up in individual paper packages. Buzz used to ask me what we do with it all. I told him my mom was a writer but I didn’t tell him about how all this paper ends up in storage garages, filled to the rafters. I don’t tell him that the reason I’m in this neighborhood and at his particular store counter is because our old house was so crammed with paper that we had to move. And I don’t tell him that my mom has never even finished one story.
But I think Buzz assumes my mom is a crappy writer anyway because she has never published anything. It took a few weeks before he stopped making jokes about how we keep him in business, about how we buy enough paper to build a house out of it, and about how my mom sure must make a lot of typos. Now he just smiles and asks me how it’s going or we talk about things that don’t matter, like school or the weather.
Even with Buzz behind the counter, smiling and joking with me, I can’t stand handing over the money for three more stacks. The paper is why we don’t have a bank account. And it’s why two different shrinks have files documenting my mom as a compulsive paper hoarder and me as a captive enabler. The paper is why social services keeps threatening to have me removed due to the ‘hazardous conditions’.
My mom hates being labeled as a hoarder, she says it is grossly inaccurate, but it sounds a lot better than the label I have at school. A friend—it only took one, to show up at my house unexpectedly and to stare inside with a horrified face—started calling me The Waste. The name was all over school within a day. People were saying it to me casually in the halls. That’s what makes these stupid stacks of paper feel the heaviest. The Waste.
But I still stop on my way home.
And I still thank Buzz.
And I still fork over the money that could help pay some of our bills on time, because, you know, my mom says she needs this. Once, when I told her I wasn’t picking up paper for her anymore because it was too embarrassing, she almost broke down in tears. She told me that whether or not I helped, she would still get the paper and keep writing because it is important. When I said I didn’t care, she grabbed my hand and squeezed it and said, “Please Nali. I mean it. This is a huge responsibility. I have to do this. It’s for…
all
of us. It’s for
mankind.
”
There was something in her touch that tingled up my arm and into my brain. Like an adrenaline shot of belief. I know it sounds stupid. That’s why instead of telling my mom what I felt, I motioned to the stacks of paper that filled what was once our spare bathroom and made a joke about how much we do for mankind. After that, anytime there was something we didn’t want to do, we’d laugh and say, “just do it for
mankind.
”
It’s a thirty minute walk home from the office supply on regular days, but it takes forty minutes on paper days because I have to stop and give my arms a rest. And today, my arms hurt so bad, I don’t feel like joking about mankind at all. I turn the corner of our street and see my mom waiting on the tiny slab of our front porch. Actually, she’s pacing. She does that when she needs her paper. Once she sees me, she meets me half way down the sidewalk and she takes two of the packages I’m carrying.
“I was getting worried about you. Everything okay?” she asks.
“I’ve got mid terms, you know.” I can’t help but snap at her. My shoulders are aching. I adjust the strap on my backpack to remind her of how full it is. “It stinks carrying all your paper home when I’ve got a big enough load already.”
“It is for mankind, after all.” she smiles. When I don’t, she winces. “Sorry.”
I sigh. I hate when she’s sorry for needing her paper.
“I know.” I tell her. “Just wish mankind weighed less.”
“Hey,” she gives me another grin. “I’ve got cookies.”
I feel the hope nudge inside me. “Oh yeah? What kind?”
“Oreos.”
“Oh.” It’s stupid that I keep hoping my mom will surprise me with real cookies one of these times. The kind you make at home, with a wood spoon and a stove. It has never been possible, even after one of the more adept social workers made my mother remove a stuffed, cardboard file box from inside our oven. Once the social worker left, I could almost see the thought-balloon expanding over my mom’s head. She just disconnected the stove and filled it back up. She thought it was clever, since we only use the microwave anyway. I didn’t bother to mention that we only microwave because we can’t clear out enough paper to make real cooking safe.
My mom goes up the porch steps and holds the door open for me.
From the outside, our townhouse apartment looks normal. We live in a burnt-orange brick building, the middle black door in a row of five black doors. Every apartment looks exactly the same from the street. It is only by stepping inside that anyone can see how completely different we are.
I remember the first time I visited a friend’s house and realized that you are supposed to be able to walk into a house and cross the room and open a window if you want. You should be able to see living room furniture and be able to tell what color it is. It shouldn’t be a mystery, whether or not there is carpet under your feet or if you have a kitchen or a staircase.
In our house, no one notices the tiny square of clean wood floor where we kick off our shoes. That little patch is lost in the blinding avalanche of white paper that hides the rest of the house. Heaps of it fill every inch of our living room, an efficient blizzard of orderly, white stacks. My mother’s teeny tiny scrawl covers every inch of every sheet but when they are loaded into piles, all you see is the whiteness of it.
The living room is parted down the center, leaving a thin walkway that only allows one person through at a time. No one would ever guess that there is a dining room buried under the paper wall to the left and that the boxes that pour beyond it are really the edges of a foxhole around our kitchen. On the right side of the room, there are sharp, swirling pillars so high that they appear to be holding up the ceiling but really, there is a staircase hiding behind them. Each step is flanked with loads of paper, leaving only enough room to maneuver up and down the stairs on tiptoe. Every once in a while, one of the stacks falls over and cascades down the steps, making what should be a simple walk up to my room as slippery and treacherous as scaling Mt. Olympus.
I drop my backpack on one of the two available couch cushions. There is enough room to seat my mom and I, but the end cushion is compressed beneath milk crates, filled with paper.
“So what’d you do today?” I ask.
“Write.” she says. It’s what she always says.
“Did you finish anything?”
“Not yet.” She looks away, hearing the insinuation in my voice. “But they’re all important, Nalena, remember that. Every single one of them.”
“I know.” I tell her, even though I don’t. My mom doesn’t write full poems or full stories or full novels or full anything. Instead, she fills pages with her miniscule print, listing shreds of plot ideas and characters. Her pages will have stuff like “
Christos DelMinos, 14, stabbed, instead of his 3 year old niece; Martin Fowler, 24, returned the money he’d stolen but not all of it; Linda Hayes, 63, invited depressed neighbor in for long talk
.” Sometimes it even sounds sweet: Olga Zitov, doesn’t know her age, still believes in fairies. I probably started asking my Mom to finish a story when I was about six years old and I gave up begging when I turned seventeen, almost three months ago. The last time I asked her, I’d been specific.
“Could you finish this one?” I held up a piece of paper and pointed to one of the lines on the sheet. My mom leaned over my shoulder to read it.
“Grace, one, saves us all
.
” she mumbled and then she smiled.
“This one’s not like the rest.” I pointed out. “This one sounds mysterious, you know? The rest of them sound like endings and this one sounds like it could be a great start. Saves us from what? What could the rest of the story be?”
My mom had just shrugged.
“I suppose that’s it.” she said wistfully.
“How could that be it? It’s only a sentence.” I argued. “Why don’t you make this one into something? It seems like it could really be interesting.”