First, Mamaw assuaged my fears. A couple of hits of pot over three weeks wouldn’t show up on the screen, she told me. “Besides, you probably didn’t know what the hell you were doing. You didn’t inhale, even if you tried.” Then she addressed the morality of it. “I know this isn’t right, honey. But she’s your mother and she’s my daughter. And maybe, if we help her this time, she’ll finally learn her lesson.”
It was the eternal hope, the thing to which I couldn’t say no. That hope drove me to voluntarily attend those many N.A. meetings, consume books on addiction, and participate in Mom’s treatment to the fullest extent that I could. It had driven me to get in the car with her when I was twelve, knowing that her emotional state could lead her to do something she’d regret later. Mamaw never lost that hope, after more heartache and more disappointment than I could possibly fathom. Her life was a clinic in how to lose faith in people, but Mamaw always found a way to believe in the people she loved. So I don’t regret relenting. Giving Mom that piss was wrong, but I’ll never regret following Mamaw’s lead. Her hope allowed her to forgive Papaw after the rough years of their marriage. And it convinced her to take me in when I needed her most.
Though I followed Mamaw’s lead, something inside me broke that morning. I went to school red-eyed from crying and regretful that I’d helped. A few weeks earlier, I had sat with Mom at a Chinese buffet as she tried in vain to shovel food in her mouth. It’s a memory that still makes my blood boil: Mom unable to open her eyes or close her mouth, spooning food in as it fell back on the plate. Other people stared at us, Ken was speechless, and Mom was oblivious. It was a prescription pain pill (or many of them) that had done this to her. I hated her for it and promised myself that if she ever did drugs again, I’d leave the house.
The urine episode was the last straw for Mamaw, too. When I came home from school, Mamaw told me that she wanted me to stay with her permanently, with no more moving in between. Mom seemed not to care: She needed a “break,” she said, I supposed from being a mother. She and Ken didn’t last much longer. By the end of sophomore year, she had moved out of his house and I had moved in with Mamaw, never to return to the homes of Mom and her men. At least she passed her piss test.
I didn’t even have to pack, because much of what I owned remained at Mamaw’s as I bounced from place to place. She didn’t approve of me taking too many of my belongings to Ken’s house, convinced that he and his kids might steal my socks and shirts. (Neither Ken nor his children ever stole from me.) Though I loved living with her, my new home tested my patience on many levels. I still harbored the insecurity that I was burdening her. More important, she was a hard woman to live with, quick-witted and sharp-tongued. If I didn’t take out the garbage, she told me to “stop being a lazy piece of shit.” When I forgot to do my homework, she called me “shit for brains” and reminded me that unless I studied, I’d amount to nothing. She demanded that I play card games with her—usually gin rummy—and she never lost. “You are the worst fucking cardplayer I’ve ever met,” she’d gloat. (That one didn’t make me feel bad: She said it to everyone she beat, and she beat everyone at gin rummy.)
Years later, every single one of my relatives—Aunt Wee, Uncle Jimmy, even Lindsay—repeated some version of “Mamaw was really hard on you. Too hard.” There were three rules in her house: Get good grades, get a job, and “get off your ass and help me.” There was no set chore list; I just had to help her with whatever she was doing. And she never told me what to do—she just yelled at me if she did anything and I wasn’t helping.
But we had a lot of fun. Mamaw had a much bigger bark than bite, at least with me. She once ordered me to watch a TV show with her on a Friday night, a creepy murder mystery, the type of show Mamaw loved to watch. At the climax of the show, during a moment designed to make the viewer jump, Mamaw flipped off the lights and screamed in my ear. She’d seen the episode before and knew what was coming. She made me sit there for forty-five minutes just so she could scare me at the appointed time.
The best part about living with Mamaw was that I began to understand what made her tick. Until then, I had resented how rarely we traveled to Kentucky after Mamaw Blanton’s death. The decline in visits wasn’t noticeable at first, but by the time I started middle school, we visited Kentucky only a few times a year for a few days at a time. Living with Mamaw, I learned that she and her sister, Rose—a woman of uncommon kindness—had a falling-out after their mother died. Mamaw had hoped that the old house would become a sort of family time share, while Rose had hoped that the house would go to her son and his family. Rose had a point: None of the siblings who lived in Ohio or Indiana visited often enough, so it made sense to give the house to someone who would use it. But Mamaw feared that without a home base, her children and grandchildren would have no place to stay during their visits to Jackson. She, too, had a point.
I started to understand that Mamaw saw returning to Jackson as a duty to endure rather than a source of enjoyment. To me, Jackson was about my uncles, and chasing turtles, and finding peace from the instability that plagued my Ohio existence. Jackson gave me a shared home with Mamaw, a three-hour road trip to tell and listen to stories, and a place where everyone knew me as the grandson of the famous Jim and Bonnie Vance. Jackson was something much different to her. It was the place where she sometimes went hungry as a child, from which she ran in the wake of a teenage pregnancy scandal, and where so many of her friends had given their lives in the mines. I wanted to escape to Jackson; she had escaped from it.
In her old age, with limited mobility, Mamaw loved to watch TV. She preferred raunchy humor and epic dramas, so she had a lot of options. But her favorite show by far was the HBO mob story The Sopranos. Looking back, it’s hardly surprising that a show about fiercely loyal, sometimes violent outsiders resonated with Mamaw. Change the names and dates, and the Italian Mafia starts to look a lot like the Hatfield-McCoy dispute back in Appalachia. The show’s main character, Tony Soprano, was a violent killer, an objectively terrible person by almost any standard. But Mamaw respected his loyalty and the fact that he would go to any length to protect the honor of his family. Though he murdered countless enemies and drank excessively, the only criticism she ever levied against him involved his infidelity. “He’s always sleeping around. I don’t like that.”