BEFORE LACEY, MY DEAR MOTHER would tell you, life was an all-you-can-eat buffet of bong hits and Pabst hangovers, which is white trash for the Garden of Eden. Just her and my daddy drinking and screwing and shiny-happy-peopling the seventies away, right up until she went and got knocked up. Ever since then, she’d tell you, she’s been starving to death. My mother, Battle Creek’s very own Joan of fucking Arc. One broken condom; one abortive trip to some dismal clinic where she couldn’t even stand to plant her ass on the rusty folding chairs, much less strip down and let the hairy-knuckled doctor scrape her out; one marriage proposal featuring two six-packs and no ring. One peeing, pooping, puking baby who liked screaming better than sleeping. At the wedding, I was a watermelon-sized lump under a cheap lace gown. They married in a park, and because they didn’t believe in all that bad-luck bullshit, they stood together before the ceremony, holding hands next to a Dumpster while the rent-a-minister got his crap together and the fifteen people who’d bothered to show up pretended they weren’t drunk or high, in deference to the groom’s snotty parents, who hadn’t even wanted to come. Mother and father-to-be gazed at each other, playing happy and love-struck—“even though I knew he was thinking, Holy fuck, let’s get this over with so I can get plastered,” she says, “and you were kicking a fucking hole in my stomach so I was just trying not to puke.”
It was my favorite story when I was a kid, the story of their wedding, of how I was there without being there, of how I came to be. Because my father told it differently, back when he would sit on the edge of my bed, stroke my hair, spin me fairy tales. “Your mother never looked more beautiful,” he told me, “and you know the prettiest part?”
That was my line, and even a four-year-old could remember it: “The watermelon!”
“Damn right. The watermelon. I couldn’t help myself. I reached out and rubbed her belly, just like I’m rubbing your head right now, and that frilly dress crinkled against my hand, and that’s when I said it.”
“Lacy.”
“I was talking about the dress. And how beautiful she looked, and how she felt against my hand, and how I wanted—Well, you don’t need to know about that. But she thought—”
“You were talking about me.”
“And that’s how you became you, little watermelon. That’s how you became Lacey.”
When I was ten, my mother told me she pulled my name from some shitty romance novel. “Lucky you weren’t a boy,” she said, “or it could have been Fabio.”
It was her hobby, telling lies about the past. Making up stories to help her feel better and me feel worse.
Your father left because he didn’t love us.
Your father was a useless fuckup and we’re better off without him.
Unless she was in one of her other moods: It ruined everything, a fucking baby, how could it not. No more fucking on the kitchen floor, suddenly it’s all diapers and bills and how can I blame him for fucking off. I would’ve done it myself if I’d thought of it first.
Before you, he drank, but he was no drunk.
Before you, everything was good.
Back in Jersey, when she was in an especially good mood, she would tell me how they met, both drunk off their asses at a Van Halen show. He worked security, she was a groupie, and she’d fuck anyone if it meant getting backstage.
She didn’t talk about it as much with the Bastard around, because he didn’t like the reminder that he wasn’t her first. But sometimes, when he was out bowling for the Lord or whatever, she’d get drunk and misty and want to play another round of This Is Your Life. Your daddy gave me a coat hanger for Valentine’s Day. I should have used it.
I know what I know.
Lacey, he said, when he put his hand on my unformed head, only that thin layer of lace and womb between us, and he said it because even then he thought I was beautiful.
I’d stay if I could, he whispered, that last night. I’ll come back for you.
He did come back for me, four times that year, twice the next one, always when she was at work or asleep, and I never told her, not once. Sometimes he showed up at night and threw pebbles at my window, like we were fucking Romeo and Juliet, and he would climb up the trellis and crawl into my bedroom with a stuffed animal in his mouth, some limp bunny or three-legged cat that he’d found and saved just for me, because he knew I liked them wounded. He’d put his finger to his lips, and I’d zip mine shut, and we would play in the moonlight, quiet as mice, pretending that maybe this one time, the sun would never rise.