Managing Helen
  by Marta Randall
The children clatter up the steps and across the back
stoop to the screen door. Between them they clutch a
brown paper grocery bag. The older, a girl, reaches up
for the metal handle.
   "Max! Hilary! Hold the door for me, please." But by
the time Miri rounds the corner of the house they are
already inside, their voices fading toward their
grandmother's bedroom.
  Miri frees an index finger to hook through the handle
and pull the screen door open. She pauses for a
moment, shifting the bags in her arms, and looks across
the back yard. Gladiolus grow along the garage wall, red
and gold against the cream stucco. Lilies and a hedge of
pink roses bloom under the apple tree, edging a neat
square of trimmed grass. Alejandro must be doing a
good job.
   She frowns, the groceries heavy in her arms. No,
Alejandro worked here last spring, followed by Ramon,
followed by Benito. Miri and her husband pay for the
gardeners, but Helen fires them; five since last
Thanksgiving. Her tote bag pulls at her shoulder. She
sighs and goes into her mother's kitchen.
   "My babies!" Her mother's voice, from the bedroom.
The children stop arguing about cartoons as their
grandmother exclaims over them. The kitchen is clean
and neat, appliances gleaming as though never used,
the smell of disinfectant still lingering from the
house-cleaner's visit yesterday. The children have left
the bag on a chair. Miri puts her own bags on the
scrubbed wooden table. She pulls out a bottle of wine
and puts it in the refrigerator, moving aside bowls and
plates of leftovers. She will have to throw most of them
out, before her mother gives herself food poisoning. As
she opens the second wine bottle the voices in the
bedroom become murmurs – her mother is asking
about the children's father, Theo. She always drops her
voice when she does that. Hilary's clear voice says,
"Mom says he'll be home when we wake up tomorrow."
She is seven. Max, who is four, chants "Fa-ther!
Fa-ther! Fa-ther!" The television clicks on.
   Miri lines ingredients along one side of the table:
onions crackling in their yellow skins, the bag of peas, a
jar of home-made chicken broth, green herbs, flour. She