JoJo and her mother Justine have a party every Thanksgiving Eve, so JoJo’s old high school softball friends can drop by. The entire party takes place in JoJo’s wheelchair-accessible bedroom. She sits by the huge flat-screen TV mounted on the wall by the bathroom door. Her long blonde ponytail hangs over the back of the wheelchair. Every few minutes, she reaches both hands under a thigh and lifts it from the seat, readjusting the leg. Then she lifts the other.
In her junior year of high school, JoJo dove off the rocks at low tide, six blocks from her home, and broke her spine. She’s fifty-three. She’s lived at home with her mother, 91, all this time, on Cordova Street, while her siblings, all older, got married, had kids, bought houses—some nearby.
Five years after JoJo’s accident, her mother’s house burned to the ground. A wiring problem. JoJo and Justine had been a few blocks away at JoJo’s sister’s house for a barbecue. They heard the sirens. No one we know, I hope, Justine said. With the insurance money, they rebuilt the house to accommodate a wheelchair.
JoJo’s bed stands in the center of the room—a regular full-size bed with a knobby wooden headboard and footboard, blue sheets, a brown comforter. One side of the bed has been slept in—the covers rumpled, thrown back the way you do when you get out of bed in the morning. On the smooth side, aging high school friends sit in a row, calling out memories. Remember, remember? I remember, JoJo calls back, laughing.
JoJo’s clothes hang in a closet without doors.
Justine sits on a folding chair a few feet from JoJo, her walker within reach. She wears a royal blue fleece zipped to her chin. Her luminous white hair is short at the sides and back, with a soft, thick wave towering above her forehead, almost punk-rock. One of JoJo’s brothers—a deep-voiced man wearing a t-shirt tucked into ironed jeans—brings Justine a paper plate of pizza.
“No, honey, I want that other stuff—isn’t there pasta or something? And get a bowl to toss that salad.” He returns with a small bowl of pasta and a small bowl of salad. “No, dear, I meant a big bowl for the whole salad, so you could toss it before people serve themselves.” He smiles, rolls his eyes, shakes his head. Justine says, “I know I irritate you. It’s my job, long as I live.”
The bathroom is getting retiled—JoJo’s siblings pooled their money. It was already wheelchair-accessible but hadn’t been updated since the fire, decades ago. The work’s been abandoned for the holiday weekend, but the workmen re-hung the mirror above the sink. They placed it at the level a standing woman applies make-up.
A Sticky Note with spidery script clings to the middle of the mirror: “Hey Einstein, my daughter isn’t up here. Hang this lower.”
I wash my hands with a Sticky Note for a face. I’m a stranger to JoJo until moments ago, a new friend of one of those high school friends, swept along on the way to yet another party, a different one, my evening’s actual destination.
But I never forget this house, where burning is a blessing and some jobs last as long as you live.
Halina Duraj’s work has been published in journals including The Sun, The Harvard Review, and Ecotone. She teaches literature and creative writing at the University of San Diego.