Marriage laws are funny. If you want to get married, you can go down to the courthouse, sign a few papers, and be married in less than fifteen minutes.
If you want to get divorced, you have to wait a year. Even if your husband is in prison.
My father was sentenced to ten years, and some naive part of me actually thought that my mother was going to wait around for him. Like he’d get out of prison one day, we’d go out for a soda, and good ol’ Jim and Abby would pick up where they left off. As if he hadn’t killed my sister and put us all through hell.
To my knowledge, my mother has never visited my father in prison. I definitely haven’t. I asked to see him once, when the shock and numbness had worn off, and our lives were beginning to fall back into some kind of regularity. Mom looked like I’d said the filthiest, foulest thing that could ever come out of someone’s mouth. She looked like she wanted to slap me.
Then she said, “We are never seeing him again.”
And then she went into the kitchen and smoked a cigarette while standing over the sink.
I felt like I belonged in prison with him.
A year later, she started dating. I’d just started sophomore year, so I was a little oblivious at first. She didn’t go wild or anything. I really didn’t even know she was dating until she started bringing them home.
At first, this seemed like a great idea. After Kerry died, Mom was constantly in my face. Wanted to know where I was going, who I was with, what was going on with school. You can imagine how I reacted to this kind of treatment. A new boyfriend meant she could dote on someone else.
What came as a surprise was that my mother’s taste in men sucked.
After my dad turned out to be such a winner, I probably should have figured.
The first one didn’t last too long after he met me. Maybe he was fine with the idea of a stepchild in theory, or maybe he thought kids should be like dogs, locked in a crate when you didn’t want to deal with them. Either way, he didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t a trained poodle. He would come over for dinner, and he always seemed irritated that I dared to eat at the table.
Eventually, Mom picked up on it, and he was history.
The second lasted a little longer, but not by much. Only because he didn’t come to the house very often. He was super strict, super religious, and the way he watched me always made me nervous. My best friend wouldn’t come in the house when he was around. I don’t know what happened to break them up, but Mom was talking about him on the phone to a friend, and she called him a “near miss.”
Number three was gay, something I noticed when I first met him, but for some reason it took Mom a few weeks. Number four was secretly unemployed. It ended when he asked to borrow a credit card for a little while. Not because he asked—because she gave it to him, and he racked up seven thousand dollars in charges before leaving town.
You might be noticing a trend.
Number five was still married. Mom found out when she tried to surprise him at home and ran into his wife. She cried for days, telling me she felt like such a fool.
She kept bringing these men into our lives, and they were all wrong. Anyone could see that. Sometimes I wonder if there’s something broken in her head, the way she trusts people who are destined to disappoint her.
Then again, she trusted me, and look where it got us.
By the time she introduced me to number six, I was primed to hate them all.
Unfortunately, Mom was head over heels, as usual. He was a businessman, so a far cry from the dirty fingernails and blistered palms of a guy who works on cars all day. Number six actually got pedicures, if you can believe that. I mocked him to his face, hoping to speed along the inevitable breakup. Mom loved it, though. He took her to fancy dinners, wore shoes with a shine, and swept her off her feet.
He tried to win me over at first. He’d hit me in the shoulder and say something like, “Hey, pal, I’ve got skybox tickets to the O’s game tonight. I thought maybe you and I could check it out.”
Yeah, because everything about me screams “baseball fan.”
I turned him down. I always turned him down.
When that didn’t work, he tried to play the father figure. A teacher would call home, and he would try to deal with it. He’d accuse me of acting out, of deliberately hurting my mother to spite him. He started hating me. I could feel it.
Not like it mattered. It was only a matter of time before we’d learn the truth. Maybe this guy would turn out to be a meth addict. Whatever. I knew it wouldn’t last.
Unfortunately, it did. They got engaged. They set a date.
He asked me to be his best man. I refused.
He said, “Ungrateful punk. Figures.”
Figures.
I’m so angry now, remembering it. The disdain in his voice, the complete and total lack of regard. I’m glad the phone is autocorrecting because my fingers are all over the place. Ungrateful punk. Figures.
I was supposed to be grateful that yet another guy was swooping in to ruin my mother’s life? Apparently so. I didn’t fawn all over him like she did, so he wrote me off. He’d built that snapshot of me in his head, and that was it. That’s how he saw me. How he sees me.
After that, I couldn’t do anything right. I used to mow the lawn, but he started doing it while I was at school, and he’d do it in some stupid diamond pattern that made her gush. He took out the trash without being asked, and she’d make comments about how nice it was to have a man around to take care of the house. Mom used to take me places, but now she goes everywhere with him. After the best man incident, I didn’t want to go anywhere with him—but they never asked anyway.
Sometimes I wish I had died in that car with Kerry. I think it would have been easier on my mother. She had a chance for a new start, but I was still around, getting in the way.
They got married last May.
I celebrated by trying to kill myself after the ceremony.
I didn’t succeed. Obviously.