Dirty Secret Read Online Free Page A

reason. I need to make sure it’s in decent shape. Except there’s a problem: I haven’t been able to go down to her basement in well over a decade. Even imagining entering that musty jungle makes my skin crawl. I’m not sure I can do it.
    But someone has to. What my mother refuses to believe is that her house is borderline condemnable. If she needs private nurses to come in and care for her after the surgery, they could report her to social services. She could be taken from her house;her house could be taken from her. I’ve told her this many times, but she just laughs and tells me I’m being ridiculous. The cleaning charts, the suggestions about Clutterers Anonymous meetings, my nagging these last few years about getting a retirement fund: all ridiculous.
    It’s a miracle that she finally listened to me about getting health insurance.
    â€œLet’s get started so we can be ready for Joe when he gets here,” I say, intending to put off the basement for as long as possible. My mother huffs up the back steps ahead of me.
    Inside, she says she needs coffee and threatens to go to Perkins without me.
    â€œThat’s fine—you go, and I’ll stay here and get started,” I say, and she waddles out the front door. It’ll be easier for me to work without her here, anyway.
    I decide to start in the living room. I pick up one of the white plastic Savers bags and tear the stapled receipt off the top so I can open it. Inside is a pair, no, two pairs, of those sneakers that have no back on them—the clog meets the sneaker. The white fabric is vaguely gray. I pick up another bag and the contents are identical, except this time it’s three pairs. Then another bag, again with two pairs. I don’t even know where to put anything; I just shove the sneaker-clogs into a garbage bag and hope that she won’t find them. The room is crowded with paperback and hardcover books, five sewing machines with hundreds of sewing patterns heaped on top, two foot massagers still in their boxes, a water-jet-infused bath mat, three electric heating pads that look secondhand, old magazine clippings of restaurant and book reviews, two banged-up motorcycle helmets, at least eight pairs of moldy cowboy boots my mother’s convinced she can sell for
a fortune,
two three-foot-tall antique radios—the wood scratched and warped—hulking in one corner like bullies.Half-consumed boxes of Entenmann’s donuts and empty soda bottles and flattened Lean Cuisine boxes and crinkled candy wrappers.
    Toward the top of the wall, almost to the ceiling, the plate rail supports half a dozen of those round tin containers that butter cookies come in. There’s a tin embossed with the image of two Scottie dogs facing each other, a red one with white stars circling the edge, a rusty one that was originally pink, one with a fat snowman and snowwoman surrounded by snowchildren, and two identical tins with a Rosie the Riveter–type character flexing her muscles. Scattered between the round tins are miniature perfume bottles, many of which I gave my mother when I was a kid, back when she was still a “collector.” They’re relics of a road veered wildly off.
    Tears spring to my eyes and I wipe them away with the back of my hand. I’m suddenly so exhausted that if there were anywhere for me to sit down in this room, in this whole house, I’d collapse right there. But I can’t. Because every surface, every potential spot to sit down, is covered with junk. There’s just so much junk, so much worthless, heartbreaking junk.
    THE GENERALLY ACCEPTED definition of hoarding comes from a 1996 article by doctors Randy Frost and Tamara Hartl: “The acquisition of and failure to discard possessions that are useless or of limited value, resulting in clutter that renders living spaces unusable and causes significant distress and impairment.” Hoarding was once thought to mainly