Free The Queen of Everything by Deb Caletti

him.
    He nodded solemnly. "It don't go
down."
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    He pointed to the toilet. He looked
worried.
    "No," I said. "Oranges, yes. Apples,
no."
    "Jordan," my mother said. "No oranges, Max."
She put the last sopping towel on the pile, lifted the whole wet mess, and raced
down the hall to the laundry chute. I followed her.
    "Nathan says last call for
breakfast."
    "It's only us left." The towels stuck inside
the curve of the chute, and my mother poked at them with a broomstick handle.
They inched down as reluctantly as a wet bathing suit over chunky thighs until
finally I heard them land on the washing machine with a splat. "Grant's working,
and Hugh took a shower over at Janey's since there's no hot water. Why would a
stopped toilet cause no hot water? Answer me that."
    "Old plumbing?" I guessed.
    "You could say the same for me, ha ha," she
said. "The Romantic Couple already left for a kayak tour, thank God. You
couldn't get me in a boat on a day like this."
    That is what she called the people who came to
stay for the weekend, the Romantic Couple, or when there was more than
one set, the Romantic Couples. She had said this the way a vegetable
gardener might say canned green beans --superior, sarcastic, and a with
touch of sadness that there were people in the world who just didn't Get It.
Years ago, when mom gave Russ Wagner her
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    last penny to add on bathrooms to convert the
farmhouse into a proper bed and breakfast, these were the people she imagined
staying with her. But after a while she began to see them belonging to two
camps: the real and homegrown, and the false and canned. I tell you, she could
figure out what file to stick them in faster than any receptionist with a stack
of pink phone messages.
    The people who Got It were rewarded. They got
to be Harv and Christine or Barry and June and got blueberry muffins made from
berries from our own bushes. The others were simply Romantic Couples who got
waffles with Reddi-Whip and pamphlets on island activities, and after a while
there were fewer and fewer rooms left for them, because the rooms filled with
other people Mom took a liking to. Permanent people. Like Nathan. Like Miss Poe
with her Red Zinger tea, who got her kicks by letting Homer wear her good jewels
around and who could most often be found sitting out in the meadow
needle-pointing pillows that said stuff like, if you don't
    have anything good to say about anyone, sit by
me . Like Hugh Prince, who had been an air-traffic controller at Boeing Field
for years until one night he gave the okay for a star to land. Now he has a
low-stress job with the Parrish Island Water Department and is a regular at the
marimba classes, though I think he just has the
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    hots for Janey the goddess who runs the school.
Other folks just came at regular intervals, like Grant Manning, an eternal
oceanography grad student who comes in May and stays through September to study
at the university labs, or for extended periods, the way Big Mama did just
before I moved out.
    It started to get to me, when I lived there. I
got tired of everyone always trying to teach me something and seeing people
walking around in their bathrobes and hearing the toilet flushing in the middle
of the night and the back door constancy slamming shut. And I know it sounds
childish, but I wanted to have my mother to myself every now and then too. There are other things to collect, I'd say to her, other than people.
Stamps, say. Spoons from different countries you can hang in a wooden
case.
    And she of course would say, There are worse
things, Jordan. We need good people around us. Like a plant needs good
soil.
    Plants don't have to see Grant Manning in
his skivvies, I would say.
    Plants don't stand outside his door and yell
"Fire!" so he'll come running out, she would say.
    Once, I would say. I did that
once. And then: Okay, fine. Which is the only thing you can say when
you know you've lost an argument.
    We started