Mom wanted to make a nice family, nicer than the one she’d grown out of, so she was thrilled when she got pregnant, and even happier to see that Tom was excited, too. He knew he needed to get his act together, and he reckoned fatherhood was the perfect motivation. He’d clean up some, they would get along better, and they’d be joined by a cute little baby. He loved babies, was good with them. For a while, he calmed down, stayed home more, saved some money. As her little belly got rounder and rounder—friends said she looked “like a pea on a toothpick”—the two talked about the future. But soon Tom went back to partying, once again blowing his cash on old bikes and booze. Even before I was born, Mom started worrying. She told Glenice she wasn’t confident she’d be able to track Tom down when the time came to deliver her baby. “How am I going to get to the hospital?” she wondered aloud. “What am I gonna do, walk?” She didn’t think she’d have the cash for a taxi.
Tom says he managed to be there for my birth, but some of Mom’s friends have cast doubt on this. He was hidden away somewhere, drunk and unreachable, one woman recently told me, shaking her head. He dropped her off and didn’t come back until it was all over, said another. I don’t know what’s true, but I believe everyone is faithful to their own memory. Tom is just as likely to have shielded himself from regret as Mom’s friends are to have created yet another story of failure.
But Mom knew he had it in him to do better, so she waited. She walked the creaky floors at night, calming my cries and listening to Tom snoring in the dark. California was over, but here they could get further ahead; she could contribute more working at the Shop than she’d been able to in Brownsville.
Mom dropped me off at my grandmother’s every morning before she went to work and picked me up at the end of the day, taking me home, where we spent hours on the couch, cuddling or playing peek-a-boo. Sometimes she was so happy she hardly noticed that Tom wasn’t there, but as time went on, his absence burned her. He missed out on so much, and she had to do everything herself.
Mom grew tired of waiting for Tom to grow up with her. Things got harder and harder. He kept drinking his money. Even when there was some left over, it was difficult to get it from him. He would go straight to Sulky’s after work, come home after she’d already gone to bed, pass out, repeat.
One day, Mom came home from work expecting to find cash on the kitchen counter, for basics: baby formula, milk, eggs. Tom had promised. Of course, there was no cash on the counter, no Tom in sight. She called her downstairs neighbor, Ruth, who agreed to babysit for a little while. Although we would leave that apartment when I was still very young, I have a hazy sense of Ruth from those early years: a dark-haired woman with a loud laugh, her kitchen full of spider ferns and cigarette smoke.
That day, Mom pushed open Ruth’s screen door and banged out into the street, marching to the bar, getting angrier with each step. She passed someone she knew walking the other way and could barely nod a hello. She yanked the bar’s heavy door open, and when her eyes adjusted to the light, she found Tom lined up with the others. She walked over as calmly as she could.
“Jesus Christ, Tom,” she hissed. “Where’s that money I asked you for?”
“Crystal, listen . . .” he began, his s’s gone slippery. “Listen, hold on. Les’ talk about this,” he continued as he got down off his stool, taking her thin arm in his hand and steering her outside. Too late. They had everyone’s attention. The afternoon crowd peered out the door, wondering how it would go down this time.
Mom ripped her arm out of Tom’s grasp and starting yelling. “Fuck, Tom, fuck! You don’t have it, do you? What am I supposed to do? You have a daughter now, goddammit!”
He leaned toward her, perhaps to placate her. He was bleary-eyed; she’d never get through. As he bent closer, she cocked her fist and punched him right in the face.
Tom was a violent person, and his temper flared especially hot when someone put him down or acted better than him. He was and is given to fights—in bars, at parties—that he can barely remember later. In his late youth, he had the shortish, muscle-heavy body of a boxer; my mother had lost all sixteen pounds of her pregnancy weight, putting her at about five foot five and 110 pounds. But when she punched Tom in the face, he fell down to his knees on the sidewalk and stayed there. He hung his head and shut right up, with all his friends looking on. If he didn’t touch her then, he may never have hit her at home, despite the screaming fights that kept their neighbors up night after night. But it’s hard to know for sure.
Those fights continued. Ruth and her boyfriend Spencer regularly heard them yelling at each other for hours into the night. They heard plates and chairs thrown. Crystal lost it again and pushed Tom down the stairs. There would be a few quiet weeks, then a huge blowup. A few more quiet weeks, then a series of smaller engagements. This chaos was familiar, and eventually she left it again. She was luckier than Grace; she had the strength to leave, and had only one child to take with her.
I do think Mom may have still loved Tom—at least a little—when she left, although his behavior in the years that followed would destroy any tender feelings that remained. But he wasn’t showing her respect, he wasn’t helping her, and she could see that he might drag her—and me—down with him. It was hard to give up on her dream of a happy family, but she finally had to admit that wasn’t what she had.
But she did have me.
* * *
As the years passed, Mom’s work at the Shop would remain our steadiest constant, the only thing we could really count on besides each other. All through my childhood, the smell of the Shop marked her return home at the end of each day, a sharp smell of leather and glue and dust buried in her hair and in the dye-smudged medical tape wrapped protectively around her fingers. I’d hug her when she came in—the clock reset, the day renewed—and the smell would drift around to envelop me. When I was very young, that smell made me happy but also nervous, although I didn’t understand why. When I was a little older—ten, eleven, twelve—it was a reminder that my mother went places I couldn’t go, that she wasn’t just a mother but many other things, too. Now, when I buy a pair of handmade leather shoes or boots, I bury my nose in them and breathe deeply, and that same smell moves through my body, cell by cell. It’s the smell of her hard work, of her devotion to me.
The Shop operated on a piecework basis, with employees paid for each case of shoes completed. Each case contained twelve pairs, and paid between twenty-one and twenty-four dollars, depending on the style. Moccasins were simpler and softer, so they paid less; loafers were stiffer and more structured, and paid more. Sebago boat shoes, named after the most beautiful lake in the area, paid somewhere in the middle. Under this system, speed was rewarded, and there was nothing to keep a determined young mother from working herself to exhaustion.