Mom seemed bothered that anyone but her was grieving. Aunt Wee’s grief was unjustified, because Mom and Papaw had a special bond. So, too, was Mamaw’s, for she didn’t even like Papaw and chose not to live under the same roof. Lindsay and I needed to get over ourselves, for it was Mom’s father, not ours, who had just died. The first indication that our lives were about to change came one morning when I woke and strolled over to Mom’s house, where I knew Lindsay and Mom were sleeping. I went first to Lindsay’s room, but she was asleep in my room instead. I knelt beside her, woke her up, and she hugged me tightly. After a little while, she said earnestly, “We’ll get through this, J.”—that was her nickname for me—“I promise.” I still have no idea why she slept in my room that night, but I would soon learn what she promised we’d get through.
A few days after the funeral, I walked onto Mamaw’s front porch, looked down the street, and saw an incredible commotion. Mom was standing in a bath towel in her front yard, screaming at the only people who truly loved her: to Matt, “You’re a fucking loser nobody”; to Lindsay, “You’re a selfish bitch, he was my dad, not yours, so stop acting like you just lost your father”; to Tammy, her unbelievably kind friend who was secretly gay, “The only reason you act like my friend is because you want to fuck me.” I ran over and begged Mom to calm down, but by then a police cruiser was already on the scene. I arrived on the front porch as a police officer grabbed Mom’s shoulders and she collapsed on the ground, struggling and kicking. Then the officer grabbed Mom and carried her to the cruiser, and she fought the whole way. There was blood on the porch, and someone said that she had tried to cut her wrists. I don’t think the officer arrested her, though I don’t know what happened. Mamaw arrived on the scene and took Lindsay and me with her. I remember thinking that if Papaw were here, he would know what to do.
Papaw’s death cast light upon something that had previously lurked in the shadows. Only a kid could have missed the writing on the wall, I suppose. A year earlier, Mom had lost her job at Middletown Hospital after Rollerblading through the emergency room. At the time I saw Mom’s bizarre behavior as the consequence of her divorce from Bob. Similarly, Mamaw’s occasional references to Mom “getting loaded” seemed like random comments of a woman known for her willingness to say anything, not a diagnosis of a deteriorating reality. Not long after Mom lost her job, during my trip to California, I heard from her just once. I had no idea that, behind the scenes, the adults—meaning Mamaw on the one hand and Uncle Jimmy and his wife, Aunt Donna, on the other—were debating whether I should move permanently to California.
Mom flailing and screaming in the street was the culmination of the things I hadn’t seen. She’d begun taking prescription narcotics not long after we moved to Preble County. I believe the problem started with a legitimate prescription, but soon enough, Mom was stealing from her patients and getting so high that turning an emergency room into a skating rink seemed like a good idea. Papaw’s death turned a semi-functioning addict into a woman unable to follow the basic norms of adult behavior.
In this way, Papaw’s death permanently altered the trajectory of our family. Before his death, I had settled into the chaotic but happy routine of splitting time between Mom’s and Mamaw’s. Boyfriends came and went, Mom had good days and bad, but I always had an escape route. With Papaw gone and Mom in rehab at the Cincinnati Center for Addiction Treatment—or “the CAT house,” as we called it—I began to feel myself a burden. Though she never said anything to make me feel unwanted, Mamaw’s life had been a constant struggle: From the poverty of the holler to Papaw’s abuse, from Aunt Wee’s teenage marriage to Mom’s rap sheet, Mamaw had spent the better part of her seven decades managing crises. And now, when most people her age were enjoying the fruits of retirement, she was raising two teenage grandchildren. Without Papaw to help her, that burden seemed twice as heavy. In the months after Papaw’s death, I remembered the woman I found in an isolated corner of Deaton’s funeral home and couldn’t shake the feeling that, no matter what aura of strength Mamaw projected, that other woman lived somewhere inside her.
So instead of retreating to Mamaw’s house, or calling her every time problems arose with Mom, I relied on Lindsay and on myself. Lindsay was a recent high school graduate, and I had just started seventh grade, but we made it work. Sometimes Matt or Tammy brought us food, but we largely fended for ourselves: Hamburger Helper, TV dinners, Pop-Tarts, and breakfast cereal. I’m not sure who paid the bills (probably Mamaw). We didn’t have a lot of structure—Lindsay once came home from work to find me hanging out with a couple of her friends, all of us drunk—but in some ways we didn’t need it. When Lindsay learned that I got the beer from a friend of hers, she didn’t lose her cool or laugh at the indulgence; she kicked everyone out and then lectured me on substance abuse.
We saw Mamaw often, and she asked about us constantly. But we both enjoyed the independence, and I think we enjoyed the feeling that we burdened no one except perhaps each other. Lindsay and I had grown so good at managing crises, so emotionally stoic even as the very planet seemed to lose its cool, that taking care of ourselves seemed easy. No matter how much we loved Mom, our lives were easier with one less person to care for.
Did we struggle? Certainly. We received one letter from the school district informing us that I had collected so many unexcused absences that my parents might be summoned before the school or even prosecuted by the city. We found this letter hilarious: One of my parents had already faced a prosecution of sorts and hardly possessed any walking-around liberty, while the other was sufficiently off the grid that “summoning” him would require some serious detective work. We also found it frightening: Without a legal guardian around to sign the letter, we didn’t know what the hell to do. But as we had with other challenges, we improvised. Lindsay forged Mom’s signature, and the school district stopped sending letters home.
On designated weekdays and weekends, we visited our mother at the CAT house. Between the hills of Kentucky, Mamaw and her guns, and Mom’s outbursts, I thought that I had seen it all. But Mom’s newest problem exposed me to the underworld of American addiction. Wednesdays were always dedicated to a group activity—some type of training for the family. All of the addicts and their families sat in a large room with each family assigned to an individual table, engaged in some discussion meant to teach us about addiction and its triggers. In one session, Mom explained that she used drugs to escape the stress of paying bills and to dull the pain of Papaw’s death. In another, Lindsay and I learned that standard sibling conflict made it more difficult for Mom to resist temptation.
These sessions provoked little more than arguments and raw emotion, which I suppose was their purpose. On the nights when we sat in that giant hall with other families—all of whom were either black or Southern-accented whites like us—we heard screaming and fighting, children telling their parents that they hated them, sobbing parents begging forgiveness in one breath and then blaming their families in the next. It was there that I first heard Lindsay tell Mom how she resented having to play the caretaker in the wake of Papaw’s death instead of grieving for him, how she hated watching me grow attached to some boyfriend of Mom’s only to see him walk out on us. Perhaps it was the setting, or perhaps it was the fact that Lindsay was almost eighteen, but as my sister confronted my mother, I began to see my sister as the real adult. And our routine at home only enhanced her stature.