I have to stop and tell you that this is not a place I revisit often in my mind. Of everything, of all the sad things and disappointing things and hurtful things, this is the place in my head that it hurts most to go to. This part, where my mom, my baby, has such a monumental insult added to injury—it makes my heart die a little to even think about it. She was so hopeful, man. So happy. Like a kid finally being adopted after having been passed over in the orphanage dozens of previous times. And all we had to offer her was a couch. A television with all the cable channels on it. Diapers she was too humiliated to wear in front of a man who had chosen the bottle over her love, and pills I had to put in applesauce so she could swallow them because she couldn’t really swallow anymore. She needed a nurse. She needed a bed that she could raise and lower. She needed a feeding tube. She needed a call button and a daily doctor visit and occupational therapy because she couldn’t remember how to use her hands anymore and, for the nine hundred dollars my father had already gambled away on the lottery, she didn’t have any of those things.
You also should know that I was fifteen when this experiment took place, and lest you start to cast me in some sort of saintly light, I was still wholly consumed with fifteen-year-old things: Spanish tests and boys and Tori Amos and things. I was anxious and stressed out and, most of all, resentful. Resentful that, as I’d suspected, all of the caretaking would again fall to me. I had played this game before. Years before my mother had even gone into the nursing home, I had done the “pretend you can have a real life while inadequately caring for this terminally ill person” charade. I felt like my time had already been served, that the payoff was a normal curfew and shoulders that weren’t hunched beneath the weight of adult responsibility.
Mom would sleep sitting up, bolstered on either side by shapeless pillows on a couch salvaged from some rich person’s trash and from which she was rarely moved. She watched TV, ate her meals, took her medicine, and decomposed a little bit more every day. The three of us were such a goddamned nightmare. When she went back to the nursing home, it came as no surprise to any of us; the ambulance slid away from our rented house with her tucked safely inside, malnourished and fragile, deflated by this most recent disappointment. Her meager belongings bounced in the small suitcase balanced across my knees as SB and I silently followed behind them in the Cadillac, his face grim.
Now I stood facing the corner near our dorm room’s door, nose almost touching the wall, because I could feel Cara’s concerned eyes searching my back for a clue. The phone felt hot and slippery against my ear. “Your father is missing, Samantha,” the detective said. “He’s been gone for over twenty-four hours and no one has any idea where he is.” I let silence fill the empty space between us. After thirty seconds he cleared his throat. “We will be in touch with you as things develop, okay? We’re doing everything we can to find him.”
Finally, I whispered, “I’m turning eighteen tomorrow.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. Happy birthday.”
—
This is a tiny little love story.
My mom had three little girls, born when she was sixteen, eighteen, and twenty-one. She raised them on her own and was often seen around town with the three of them trailing behind her, all ribbons and bows and shiny patent leather. She was an emergency-room nurse who mostly worked nights so that she could be home with her children during the day. SB drove a bus for the now-defunct Evanston Bus Company. My striking mother (six feet tall with hair, lips, and talon-length nails all a shocking red) would line up her three little girls a few afternoons a week and wait at the corner of Main and Elmwood for the bus to take them downtown. And WOW-O-WOW MY PARENTS MET ON A BUS, but here’s the thing: every day the four of them, pretty as a picture, would get on my dad’s bus, and every day he would cover the coin slot and refuse to let my mother pay. Fuck, I don’t know what’s sexy anymore. But it’s probably a sign that I am a grown-up for real that the idea of someone saving my weekly bus money is, like, totally hot. THAT IS ROMANCE.
So this cat-and-mouse game continued for a while (my dad covering up the fare box, my mom smiling coyly while taking her seat and never speaking to him), then it took a turn toward next level when my mom decided to repay this charming bus driver’s kindness with an invitation to dinner. When I heard this story as a kid, the thought of inviting some strange dude over to my house to eat dinner with my kids made me go, “Gross, weird,” but it was the 1960s and my mom had three little girls, and driving a bus for a failing suburban bus company was as good a job as any.
They dated for eleven years before getting legally married, which, for those of you who don’t know any black people, is just the way we do things. I guess it takes a while to know what you really want. Carol, the youngest of my sisters, was fifteen by the time I came along to usurp the affections of the only father she’d known, and she expressed her displeasure by immediately trying to suffocate me in my crib. My mom and sisters had been living on the second floor of a duplex where my skinny, mean grandmother fried sardines downstairs while SB lived in a shag-carpeted bachelor pad across town. As a wedding present, my dad conned the bank out of a loan to buy them a large Victorian in a decent black neighborhood not far from where two of my sisters were finishing high school.
There is nothing better than being the product of a late-in-life pregnancy, at least until the shriveling invalids pushing their walkers around your tenth birthday party begin their rapid decline before you even get hair on your privates. But before that? IT’S ALL GRAVY. Before their eventual divorce I was spoiled and coddled and feted and fed Frosted Flakes in front of the television like King Shit of Fuck Mountain. My sisters had grown up sharing clothes and crammed into one tiny bedroom while my mom slept on the pullout couch; I, on the other hand, had a room to myself just off the dining room, with a desk and a television and a little rug for our collie, Trudy, to sleep on. I had every doll imaginable, every Cabbage Patch and Monchhichi and Strawberry Shortcake doll; a toy box stuffed full of Lite-Brites and Hungry Hungry Hippos and Connect Fours; a little record player on which I listened to “Here Come the Smurfs” ad nauseam. I was their opportunity to Do Things Right This Time. There were no missed parent-teacher conferences, no preschool talent shows left unrecorded.
The thing about fucking dirtbags is that no matter how much cologne you splash on them, they’re always going to be fucking dirtbags. My father, ever the entrepreneur, decided that it wasn’t enough to work all day and pay for this prize of a house. He decided to build rooms (read: erect shoddily constructed clapboard cubicles) in the basement of our house (read: where his three nubile stepdaughters and tiny infant baby lived) and rent them out to his friends (read: winos). So yes, I had the limited-edition Strawberry Shortcake doll whose shiny plastic skin actually smelled like actual strawberries (TECHNOLOGY HOORAY), but I also watched my dad hit a dude in his head with a hammer on our front porch in an argument over a dice game. It was like a seedy men’s hotel, except (1) illegal, and (2) IN THE BASEMENT OF OUR HOUSE. Some dude died down there! It never struck me as strange because that is how my life had always been: school bus pulling up to take me to day care at the YWCA while some junkie was passed out asleep on our front lawn. Normal: sitting on my dad’s lap while he cut up my dinner and spoon-fed it to me despite the fact that I was old enough to use words like “tolerate.” Also normal: accompanying my father to throw a wrench through the windshield of his mortal enemy’s car in the middle of the afternoon.