I saw this woman as an obstacle to overcome—an obstacle placed by Mom—not as someone who might help. I explained only half of my feelings: that I had no interest in putting a forty-five-minute barrier between me and everyone I had ever depended on so I could replant myself with a man I knew would be sent packing. The therapist obviously understood. What I didn’t tell her is that for the first time in my life, I felt trapped. There was no Papaw, and Mamaw—a longtime smoker with the emphysema to prove it—seemed too frail and exhausted to care for a fourteen-year-old boy. My aunt and uncle had two young kids. Lindsay was newly married and had a child of her own. I had nowhere to go. I’d seen chaos and fighting, violence, drugs, and a great deal of instability. But I’d never felt like I had no way out. When the therapist asked me what I’d do, I replied that I would probably go live with my dad. She said that this sounded like a good idea. When I walked out of her office, I thanked her for her time and knew that I’d never see her again.
Mom had a massive blind spot in the way that she perceived the world. That she would ask me to move with her to Dayton, that she seemed genuinely surprised by my resistance, and that she would subject me to such a one-sided introduction to a therapist meant that Mom didn’t understand something about the way that Lindsay and I ticked. Lindsay once told me, “Mom just doesn’t get it.” I initially disagreed with her: “Of course she gets it; it’s just the way she is, something she can’t change.” After the incident with the therapist, I knew that Lindsay was right.
Mamaw was unhappy when I told her that I planned to live with Dad, and so was everyone else. No one really understood it, and I felt unable to say much about it. I knew that if I told the truth, I’d have a few people offering their spare bedrooms, and all of them would submit to Mamaw’s demand that I live permanently with her. I also knew that living with Mamaw came with a lot of guilt, and a lot of questions about why I didn’t live with my mom or dad, and a lot of whispers from a lot of people to Mamaw that she just needed to take a break and enjoy her golden years. That feeling of being a burden to Mamaw wasn’t something I imagined; it came from a number of small cues, from the things she muttered under her breath, and from the weariness she wore like a dark piece of clothing. I didn’t want that, so I chose what seemed like the least bad option.
In some ways, I loved living with Dad. His life was normal in precisely the way I’d always wanted mine to be. My stepmom worked part-time but was usually home. Dad came home from work around the same time each day. One of them (usually my stepmom but sometimes Dad) made dinner every night, which we ate as a family. Before each meal, we’d say grace (something I’d always liked but had never done outside of Kentucky). On weeknights, we’d watch some family sitcom together. And Dad and Cheryl never screamed at each other. Once, I heard them raise their voices during an argument about money, but slightly elevated volumes were far different from screaming.
On my first weekend at Dad’s house—the first weekend I had ever spent with him when I knew that, come Monday, I wouldn’t be going somewhere else—my younger brother invited a friend to sleep over. We fished in Dad’s pond, fed horses, and grilled steaks for dinner. That night, we watched Indiana Jones movies until the early-morning hours. There was no fighting, no adults hurling insults at one another, no glass china shattering angrily against the wall or floor. It was a boring evening. And it epitomized what attracted me to Dad’s home.
What I never lost, though, was the sense of being on guard. When I moved in with my father, I’d known him for two years. I knew that he was a good man, a little quiet, a devout Christian from a very strict religious tradition. When we first reconnected, he made it clear that he didn’t care for my taste in classic rock, especially Led Zeppelin. He wasn’t mean about it—that wasn’t his style—and he didn’t tell me I couldn’t listen to my favorite bands; he just advised that I listen to Christian rock instead. I could never tell my dad that I played a nerdy collectible card game called Magic, because I feared he’d think the cards were satanic—after all, kids at the church youth group often spoke of Magic and its evil influence on young Christians. And as most teenagers do, I had so many questions about my faith—whether it was compatible with modern science, for instance, or whether this or that denomination was correct on particular doctrinal disputes.
I doubt he would have gotten upset if I’d asked those questions, but I never did because I didn’t know how he’d respond. I didn’t know whether he’d tell me I was a spawn of Satan and send me away. I didn’t know how much of our new relationship was built on his sense that I was a good kid. I didn’t know how he’d react if I listened to those Zeppelin CDs in his house with my younger siblings around. That not knowing gnawed at me to the point where I could no longer take it.
I think Mamaw understood what was going on in my head, even though I never told her explicitly. We spoke on the phone frequently, and one night she told me that I had to know she loved me more than anything and she wanted me to return home when I was ready. “This is your home, J.D., and always will be.” The next day, I called Lindsay and asked her to come and get me. She had a job, a house, a husband, and a baby. But she said, “I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.” I apologized to Dad, who was heartbroken by my decision. But he understood: “You can’t stay away from that crazy grandma of yours. I know she’s good to you.” It was a stunning admission from a man to whom Mamaw never said a nice word. And it was the first indication that Dad understood the complex and conflicting feelings I’d developed. That meant a great deal to me. When Lindsay and her family came to get me, I got in the car, sighed, and said to her, “Thanks for taking me home.” I gave my infant nephew a kiss on the forehead and said nothing else until we got to Mamaw’s.
I spent the rest of the summer mostly with Mamaw. A few weeks with Dad had given me no epiphanies: I still felt caught between a desire to stay with her and a fear that my presence was depriving her of the comforts of old age. So before my freshman year started, I told Mom that I’d live with her so long as I could stay in Middletown’s schools and see Mamaw whenever I wanted. She said something about needing to transfer to a Dayton school after my freshman year, but I figured we’d cross that bridge in a year, when we had to.
Living with Mom and Matt was like having a front-row seat to the end of the world. The fighting was relatively normal by my standards (and Mom’s), but I’m sure poor Matt kept asking himself how and when he’d hopped the express train to crazy town. It was just the three of us in that house, and it was clear to all that it wouldn’t work out. It was only a matter of time. Matt was a nice guy, and as Lindsay and I joked, nice guys never survived their encounters with our family.
Given the state of Mom and Matt’s relationship, I was surprised when I came home from school one day early during my sophomore year and Mom announced that she was getting married. Perhaps, I thought, things weren’t quite as bad as I expected. “I honestly thought you and Matt were going to break up,” I said. “You fight every day.” “Well,” she replied, “I’m not getting married to him.”
It was a story that even I found incredible. Mom had been working as a nurse at a local dialysis center, a job she’d held for a few months. Her boss, about ten years her senior, asked her out to dinner one night. She obliged, and with her relationship in shambles, she agreed to marry him a week later. She told me on a Thursday. On Saturday we moved into Ken’s house. His home was my fourth in two years.