Underestimated Too(14)

My mother had to sleep in the same bed with him, cook for him, pack his bucket, he even made her bathe him. My mother wasn’t your average looking girl. My mother was gorgeous, mind you. She’d always been a beautiful woman, right up to the day she died. Can you imagine telling your son these things? She never did tell me that Carson Boyce was my father, not in so many words, anyway. It wasn’t that hard to figure out. I mean, come on, she told me about sleeping with the bastard. I knew why we left, I wasn’t born yesterday. I always felt dirty, like there was something wrong with me because of who my father was.”

“He wasn’t blood,” I pointed out, trying to make it better for him. He acted as though he didn’t hear me, and continued. Deidra placed her finger over her lips, telling me not to talk.

“I remember being on that bus for what seemed like days. I don’t know what she was thinking. We had a paper sack with clothes and no money. I vaguely remember sleeping in a shelter and then in the apartment above the drugstore.”

Drew turned and looked right at me. “I don’t know what it’s like to eat popcorn for supper. I never had that luxury. I ate spaghetti from a can, day after day after day. That’s what my mother made for me: spaghetti from a can.”

Drew hated spaghetti. That explained it.

“My mom never worked a normal job. Her job was done at home. She explained to me that she entertained men to pay the bills. I was too young to know what that meant until I was around ten.”

“What happened when you were ten, Drew?” Deidra asked.

Drew got quiet and stared out the window with a lovely view of an alley full of dumpsters. “She started entertaining Michael. Michael got her a job at the jewelry store down town, moved us to an upscale apartment, and demanded that he was the only man she’d be entertaining from now on.”

“That’s when I started taking care of myself. She would go to his house in the weekends, and I wouldn’t see her until he dropped her back off at our door.”

“Who stayed with you?”

“No one. Michael insisted that I be a man and take care of myself. This was our life until we moved in with him a short time later, very short, like three months. Michael had taken us to a summer fest for wedding planners. That’s when I met Randal Callaway. Randal loved my mother from that first day. I think he really just wanted Michael to settle down and give him a grandchild. At least with my mom, he’d sort of have a grandson, although he never treated me that way.”

“Is that when you moved in with him?”

“Yes, he’d always tell my mother that he was going to marry her, but even at ten, I knew he wasn’t going to do that. She wasn’t the only one that entertained Michael Callaway. She was just the one that was kept in his house.”

“A kept woman?”

“Yes, Michael lavished her in expensive luxuries, and she did everything he told her to do.”

I wanted him to stop. Drew was talking about my father, Michael Callaway. I didn’t want to think of him this way. He was ruining the image of the good-looking man that swept my mother off her feet. He was supposed to be my knight in shining armor.

“You said you started taking care of your mother around the age of ten. What did you mean by that?” Deidra asked.

“My mother was sick, she needed her medication. When she didn’t have it, things happened to her, she saw things. Before we moved to the estate, I made sure she took it religiously. Michael didn’t. He used it as a form of punishment when she didn’t do what he wanted. Michael would keep it from her sometimes and then call the medics to come and get her. She’d be gone for a few days and then he’d bring her back, keep her on her meds until she pissed him off, or didn’t do what she was told.”

“She was schizophrenic?” I softly questioned.

“Yes. She’d see demons, thinking they were coming for her for having a devil child. Sometimes the demons would send allies, spiders, snakes, and armies of insects. She’d hide in a corner, kicking her legs, trying to get them off her. That’s when Michael would call for help and she’d be gone for a few days. I hated when Michael made me go to that hospital. It gave me the creeps, and it was exactly the way my mother described it to me when she had to visit her mother.”

I attentively listened to Drew describe the crazy house, the other patients, and the way his mother would tell him he was a devil’s spawn. She blamed him for putting her there, not Michael. My heart was breaking for him. I’d spent all these years thinking poor me. I never knew. I always thought of Drew as a poor little rich kid.