A House With Good Bones

Samantha “Sam” Montgomery returns to her family home in the suburbs of North Carolina, where her mother, Edith, lives in the house once owned by her grandmother. Sam, her brother, Brad, and Edith lived there with Gran Mae, Edith’s mother, for a year when Sam was 10 years old and moved in after Gran Mae’s death. Now, with both children grown and living in Arizona, Edith lives there alone. When Sam arrives, a vulture sits on the mailbox in front of the house, and she thinks that it is an obvious bad omen. Sam reflects on the neighborhood, a subdivision of modern, “cookie-cutter” houses surrounded by rural cow pastures and wooded lots. Across the street from her mother’s house lives Mr. Pressley, who has appointed himself “a one-man neighborhood watch” (5). With the vulture watching, Edith welcomes Sam home and assures her the vulture is harmless.

Sam is archaeoentomologist, working with insects in the context of archeological dig sites. She is home on furlough from a dig, in part because Brad is concerned about their mother. Edith, usually vibrant and energetic, is now anxious and alarmingly thin. She has repainted the house, once covered in wild colors, back to the beiges and soft pinks they were when Gran Mae was alive. Sam is confused and concerned but does not know what to say. She takes a nap, planning to broach the topic later.

Sam awakes from her nap disoriented because of the repainted walls. She recalls Gran Mae’s verbal abuse, particularly her attacks on Sam’s weight. Sam describes herself as “fat” and still feels the sting of Gran Mae’s insults. She also remembers Gran Mae’s threats that the underground children would punish her disobedience. The underground children were “Gran Mae’s personal answer to the boogeyman” (12), monsters she invoked to make the children listen to their elders.

Sam goes downstairs and finds her mother in the living room. She is shocked that Edith has an old painting of a Confederate soldier and his bride over the fireplace. The painting belonged to Gran Mae, who had a white Southern racist attitude. Edith hated the painting and removed it the moment Gran Mae died, replacing it with a quirky art print instead. Sam asks why Edith put the painting back up, and Edith responds that Gran Mae loved it. Sam adds this to her list of reasons to be worried about her mother.

When Sam asks about the vulture, Edith explains that Gail, a neighbor down the street, is an animal rehabilitator with a colony of vultures living in her trees. Sam recalls that Gran Mae hated Gail, calling her a witch. They had been rivals, Gran Mae comparing her immaculately pruned rose garden to Gail’s wild “cottage-style” garden. Edith fearfully insists that Gran Mae never said such a thing and Sam must be misremembering. Sam is certain she remembers correctly, but Edith seems afraid of speaking ill of her mother. Sam wonders if she forgot or is belatedly mourning Gran Mae.

The epigraph reads, “Beverly Jenkins: Superb hybrid tea rose […]. Full, mostly solitary blooms, on a tall, upright plant with clean dark green foliage. Excellent resistance to black spot. A superior rose for Southern regions” (23).

The next day, Edith asks Sam to help her search the attic for the quirky art print that used to hang above the fireplace. In the attic, Sam finds a stack of family photographs and an old sepia-toned photograph of a man with a shaggy beard and an intense expression. The man reminds her of Rasputin, but he is Gran Mae’s father, Elgar Mills. The photo is from 1917, which shocks Sam. Edith says he was born in the 1870s and was in his sixties when Gran Mae was born. He died in his eighties, when Gran Mae was a teenager.

Sam remembers Gran Mae always talked about her father via pronouncements of what he would or would not allow: “Father [...] would say that you must never allow your good name to be sullied by other people’s mouths” (27). Sam never saw Elgar Mills before today and knows nothing else about him. Edith admits that he was eccentric and recalls rumors that he was some kind of wizard, which she discounts as small-town gossip. That afternoon, Edith leaves for a work trip.

Sam finds the house creepy once she is alone. She tries to convince herself that she is being silly because the house is “perfectly normal” (31). In fact, Gran Mae always insisted that every aspect of her life, from the color of her house to the 1950s television sitcoms she watched, be “nice and normal” (31). The house nevertheless disturbs Sam, who distracts herself by working, but eventually escapes into Gran Mae’s rose garden. The roses appear the same as they did when Gran Mae was alive, and Sam enjoys it until she realizes there are no insects.

As an entomologist who knows how to find insects, Sam is certain they are entirely absent from the garden. She is upset because she knows this should be impossible. Horrified that someone may be using an industrial-strength pesticide on the garden, she tries to call her mother but barely has a cell phone signal.

The epigraph reads, “Ladybug: An eye-catching striped rose featuring velvety red single blooms stippled with white. […] Fragrance is sweet” (41).

The next morning, Sam returns to the rose garden in search of insects. She inspects the storage shed for insecticide and finds nothing unusual, except that there are no cobwebs, which is deeply unsettling. Again, she searches the roses. She pulls back a thorny branch and finds a single ladybug, to which she says, “There should be a lot more of you” (45). The rose branch snaps back and the thorns cut her finger. Bleeding, she returns to the house.

In the afternoon, she drives to a coffee shop in town for better Wi-Fi access. There, she calls her brother Brad, and they agree that something is wrong with their mother. Brad tells her that the last time he and his wife visited, Edith warned them not to return. He fears it is, because his wife is Latina, except Edith was never racist in the past and always seemed to love Brad’s wife. Brad also says that a glass cabinet door fell on his wife the last time they visited, breaking her foot, and that may have spooked Edith.

Sam mentions the underground children. Brad, who is several years older than her, admits that he feared the underground children even as a teenager. Sam says she had nightmares about Gran Mae stabbing her hand with rose thorns. Brad tells her that wasn’t a nightmare but an incident that happened when Sam was five years old. Gran Mae claimed that Sam had merely grabbed the rose branch without thinking, and no one believed Brad. He feels guilty for not protecting Sam.

Back at the house, Sam considers what might be wrong with Edith, coming to three options: a stalker, depression, or dementia or a similar mental health disorder. She does not know how to determine which it is, or what to do about it. That evening, Edith returns from her work trip, admitting that she was worried about leaving Sam alone in the house for too long.

Sam awakens in the middle of the night to discover ladybugs swarming her bedroom. They cover the floor, the walls, and her bed; there are “thousands of them, a writhing scarlet stain” (57). In a panic, she screams for her mother, who comes running. They are horrified, but Sam tries to think of a logical explanation. She remembers that ladybugs sometimes swarm; a story of swarming ladybugs in England in 1976 purported to be “like a Biblical plague” (58). She consoles herself with this explanation as she and her mother clean the ladybugs out of the room. They guess that the ladybugs got in through a crack in the siding. Sam recalls finding the single ladybug and wishing for more. She sleeps on the living room sofa rather than her bed.