“No I don’t believe in that. You’re lucky I don’t or you wouldn’t be here today.” Oh yeah that’s me the luckiest girl around, not sure where my next meal will come from sometimes or scrounging around the thrift stores trying to find something to wear that will make me fit in a little bit. But hey lucky girl right here. Mom wasn’t religious but apparently she had morals. Right.
“Things are going to need to change around here but I’ll make it work,” she had said.
And things did change for awhile. Enough for me to believe a baby brother or sister wouldn’t be so bad. The whole nine months she was pregnant she didn’t have a drink, at least when I was around to monitor her. I even got her to cut back on her cigarettes but she insisted at least two a day was fine, that’s what she had done when she was pregnant with me and I had turned out okay. The father of course wasn’t in the picture and I’m sure his identity was just as much of a mystery as my own Dad’s.
Then the day of delivery finally came, moms water broke while she was in the middle of a shift and one of her customers drove us to the hospital. The minute I laid eyes on the soft brown curls and wide brown eyes I was in love with my baby brother Caleb. He was perfect. Mom not so much. How a mother could not fall instantly in love with her child, I would never know.
Pretty much as soon as we came home from the hospital mom fell into her old routines again. Different guy every day, coming home well after her shift in the wee hours of the morning plastered. She barely gave any of her attention to Caleb, so I had to take over. Luckily Caleb was such a good baby and he slept most of the day when he was home with mom, even though I still worried that she wouldn’t take care of him while I was at school. And when I came home in between homework and studying, I was changing diapers and making bottles. My grades slipped a bit from the late nights and I often showed up barely able to keep my eyes open. A guidance counselor pulled me aside on more than one occasion and asked if there was trouble I needed to talk about but I wasn’t about to let that nosey woman know the situation at home. Even if Caleb was a lot of work, I still loved him and he was not going to be taken away from me.
When Caleb was about three months old, mom piled the three of us up in her old beat up Honda and told us we were going on a road trip. I strapped Caleb into his car seat and packed up his diaper bag loaded down with formula, diapers, and extra clothes. Mom said we would be gone for a few days so I brought along a duffel bag for myself too with a couple changes of clothes.
When we pulled up the dirt road to an old farmhouse I had no clue where we were. Mom had never filled us in on where we were actually going. A woman with a shock of white hair pulled back severely in a clip met us out on the dilapidated front porch with peeling white paint and missing boards.
“Um hi Mom, these are your grandkids, Leah and Caleb.” Mom? I didn’t even know my grandma was still alive, mom never talked about her but yet here she was about an hour’s drive away from us. Caleb started whimpering and I knew he was hungry so the woman who I guess I should start calling grandma led us into the kitchen. She and mom moved into the living room while I fed Caleb his bottle and patted his burps out of him until he fell back asleep.
“Well Leah,” my mom said as they made their way back into the kitchen. My grandma was following close behind with a not so very pleasant look on her face like she had just swallowed a lemon. “I’m gonna take off.”
“What do you mean take off?” I had asked quietly not wanting to wake Caleb back up. “I just need some time right now and I need it alone. I’m going to leave the car here with you if you need it, I know you’ll be getting your license soon so…” she had trailed off, dropping the keys in my hand. My license? My birthday wasn’t for another couple of months, how long was she planning on leaving us here? Who was supposed to take care of Caleb? What kind of mother would leave her newborn baby? Right as I was going to ask her all of the questions that were filling my head I heard a low grumble of an engine and mom quickly headed to the front door.
After mom left we never heard from her again. I think grandma was under the impression that she was coming back but I heard her complain often about her selfish no good daughter. Grandma helped some but we were more of an inconvenience than anything. She did watch Caleb while I went to school and worked but she never warmed up to him like a normal Grandma would.