Just the mention of Adam’s name caused me to shudder.
“You’ll see,” she said sharply. “It’s hard for beautiful women like us, used to having every man look at us and want us, to have those men start looking elsewhere. After you cross into your thirties, the need for male approval consumes you to the point you don’t act rationally.”
That’s you, not me—and it’ll never be me. I couldn’t even take the fact she’d called me beautiful as a compliment, because she said things like that only when she wanted something. “I doubt it. But whatever. Look, I brought work home with me”—such a lie—“and I need to get back to it. Take care.” I hung up.
Then I got up and snagged a beer out of the fridge. I twisted off the cap and took a sip as I stared out the kitchen window that looked into the backyard.
I don’t know what I expected to see, since it was completely dark outside. After the conversation with my mother I felt the darkness pulling me in.
What sucked about my family situation was that it hadn’t always sucked. At age eighteen my mom and her best friend, Maxie got jobs, traveling with one of the big rock bands of the day, selling T-shirts and other stuff at the merchandise stand during the concerts. Mom began sleeping with a roadie—not the members of the band, as she’d planned. When the tour ended, she found out she was pregnant. My father took off. Six months later she gave birth to me.
Yeah, I understood she’d been just nineteen years old and a single mother. In a show of solidarity, Maxie stayed in the Twin Cities with her. They lived together—not that I remember any of that—until Mom married Rick when I was three.
Rick was a rock-solid, dependable guy and a decent provider. We lived in Burnsville, in a tiny house Rick had inherited from his grandmother. I’d had a lonely childhood—even being her only child hadn’t made me interesting to my mother. She did her own thing and that usually didn’t include me. After a while, her activities didn’t include Rick either. The year I turned thirteen, my mom—who’d asked me to start calling her Lisa—scored a job as a cocktail waitress at a bar twenty miles from where we lived. Since Rick was a deliveryman for a grocery supply company, he was gone by five a.m. Some nights she didn’t roll in until he’d left for work.
That was when everything fell apart. Mom and Rick started fighting. He accused her of sleeping around. She accused him of trying to turn her into a boring old woman. I still remember the nasty stuff they shouted at each other as I cowered in my single bed in the room next to theirs. Rick pleaded for her to go to counseling so they could save their marriage, but Mom refused. She was done with him.
One day I came home from school to find she’d packed all of our things in the back of her minivan. I remembered thinking it was sad, how few possessions she wanted to keep. She said we were going to stay with a friend until she’d sorted a few things out.
We lived with Maxie for a month. By month two, Mom informed me she’d fallen in love with Adam, a regular at the bar where she worked, and we moved into Adam’s shitty trailer.
For the first six months, Mom sent me to stay with Rick on the weekends because she wanted to act like an unencumbered single woman. Although I’d lived with Rick most of my life, I’d never been allowed to call him Dad. He’d never really acted like my father; like my mom, he mostly ignored me, but at least he wasn’t mean.
Adam defined low-class redneck trailer trash. He lived in filth, half the time without electricity, and he kept my mother drunk or high so she could sexually service him whenever he demanded it. When I’d had enough, I informed Mom I was going to live with Rick permanently. So in my first rebellious move, I took the bus over to our old house, figuring there was little she could do.
Wrong.
She called Rick and threatened him with child abduction charges, which she could’ve made stick. Rick took me back to Adam’s run-down trailer and I was devastated when he admitted that he legally had no claim on me because my mother had refused to let him adopt me. He was done with her and now he was done with me too.
What sliced me the deepest was my mother’s childish reasoning about why she kept me from him; she was afraid I’d love Rick more than her. She hadn’t been far off, because my resentment grew into hatred. She didn’t give a shit about me and she couldn’t stand to think that someone else did.
My life had gone from tolerable to horrible. I’d always been a straight-A student, but the change to the new school sent my grades spiraling. I started hanging out with the tough crowd—kids like me with a shitty home life. I clicked with a girl my age named Taylar, whose older brother Travis was in a band. The siblings were on their own after a bad family situation, which was why they let me crash with them most nights. I wasn’t a leech, so on Friday and Saturday nights when the band had a gig at one of the local bars, Taylar and I did grunt work—hauling trash out, hauling ice in for the bartenders, cleaning bathrooms—and we were paid cash under the table.