Coming Clean: A Memoir Read Online Free Page A

look bigger, as if it spread from wall to wall, the piles becoming makeshift closets and nightstands.
    Inevitably I would wake up in the middle of the night, roused by my father’s clamorous snoring, and stumble my way to their bedroom, where my mother would almost always already be awake to welcome me into a spot between her and my father.
    My job was to wake my father up, so I would tap him on the head until his eyes opened.
    “Why, hello there,” was his usual answer.
    To which I would reply, “Hello, you’re snoring.”
    He would then roll over and the three of us would fall back to sleep.
    “Are you mad at me?” I asked my mom when she put me to bed one night. We only had one more day to learn to be clean before our visitor came, and her exhaustion had taken a serious toll on her bedtime story enthusiasm.
    “I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at what you did.” This was my mother’s standard-issue response, and this time I wasn’t sure that I believed her. She was certainly mad at my father. After she turned my light off and closed my door, I heard the shouting start.
    They had been fighting all week, but this was different; this time she sounded scared. “She’s going to be taken away from us, is that what you want?” I heard her say. “You’re going to lose your daughter because you can’t get rid of a fucking newspaper.”
    My father didn’t sound scared, he didn’t sound like anything at all. He never answered my mother, at least not that Icould hear from my bedroom. What I did hear was a door slam.
    The house was silent until I woke up the next morning.
    Each morning I would wake up amazed at the transformations that had happened while I was in bed, and each morning the barricade of black garbage bags in front of our home seemed to have grown exponentially.
    I was excited for the social worker’s visit. We had never had anyone to our house before, and I spent the morning of the visit anxiously dividing my time between standing in front of the door waiting to let him in and peeking out the front window for signs of incoming cars.
    When the doorbell finally rang, I opened the door to a slim man with a bald head and gray moustache, wearing a short-sleeved button-down shirt. I introduced myself and invited him in. The house was cleaner than I had ever seen it, which only added to my excitement.
    My parents introduced themselves and excused the remaining mess, and then my mom said, “Kim, why don’t you go get Sheryl.”
    The previous night I had carefully planned out Sheryl’s outfit. She would wear a purple and white corduroy dress that I had outgrown. The dress was too big for her, but it was my favorite. I carefully picked out a white undershirt for underneath the thin tie-straps. I didn’t like when the cloth part of her body showed.
    Sheryl was a gigantic Thumbelina doll. Unlike her thumb-sized literary namesake, Sheryl was two feet tall, only slightly shorter than I was when I started kindergarten, and until something better came along, she was my sister.
    Earlier that day I had been anticipating this moment, but as Ileft my room I started to feel nervous. What if the social worker was mad at me? What if he took Sheryl away or took me to jail?
    I made my way slowly down our now clean hallway and introduced the thin man with the short-sleeved shirt to my baby sister. When it became obvious that he wasn’t going to take me to prison, I crawled up on his lap and asked if he would play hide-and-seek with me.
    “You go hide, and when I’m finished talking to your parents, I’ll come find you.”
    I loved hide-and-seek, but the only person who ever played it with me was my dad. He was terrible at finding me. I knew this because he would spend the majority of the game declaring aloud how baffled he was and what an “efficient absconder” I was. Eventually he would find me, though, and a new game of tag would ensue.
    Since I had a new playmate to impress that day, I went to my favorite hiding