Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 122609 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 613(@200wpm)___ 490(@250wpm)___ 409(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122609 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 613(@200wpm)___ 490(@250wpm)___ 409(@300wpm)
“Yeah, Dad had some problems… You had some problems… We all had some problems. I didn’t realize that most mothers didn’t have a bunch of boyfriends, or that kids didn’t eat cereal for dinner every night for weeks on end, or that other people didn’t have their lights turned off every few months like it was marked on a schedule. I thought that stuff was going on in everybody’s house.” He chuckled, though he was far from amused. “Why you always call when I’m thinkin’ about you?”
She was quiet for a good while. “I don’t know… I didn’t know you was thinking about me, to tell you the truth. But I’m glad you were.”
“Yeah, I was. Not sure why, but you popped into my mind.”
“You still think I’m a whore?”
His jaw tightened and he rubbed it again—harder.
“Everybody is who they are in life, Mama. It either defines us, makes part of our past or our future.”
“I was a whore, but I am still your mama.”
“You’re right. And I love you all the same.”
“I don’t want you going back to prison, James. I don’t ever wanna see my child locked behind bars like an animal. I saw Irish last month and it ripped me apart.” Her voice quaked. Vibrated like a lonely note from a flute.
“Well, maybe that happened ’cause it was like looking in the mirror.”
“I told you that you still blame me. You see how you didn’t waste a second to take a pot shot?”
“No, Mama. That’s not what’s going on at all. I don’t blame you for all the trouble I and my sister had. I’m saying that you two look a lot alike is all. Maybe it’s spooky. Scary.”
Mama got quiet again. “Guilt is a ferocious animal that talks shit in your ear, beats your back while strangling you from behind. It’s a monkey that makes you defensive and jump to conclusions.” He noticed his mother often used analogies to express her feelings, as if just straight out saying them caused her too much pain. “Sorry ’bout that… Yeah, maybe you’re right. Irish looks a lot like me. I sold my ass for over fifteen years to take care of myself and my children. Your father wasn’t workin’, ’cept for those musical gigs that barely brought in any money. I had my addictions. I had my problems, but I loved y’all. It killed me deep inside when your father took you and Irish away from me. Well, the state, but he sounded the alarm.
“He was tryna help us, Mama.”
“Oh, bull, James. He just wanted to hurt me. You were too young to understand…”
No, I wasn’t…
“Y’all split. He didn’t know how bad your habit had gotten until the school called him and said I hadn’t been in school for a few days. It was so long ago, but I remember that much. Doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.”
“What all do you remember?”
Mama had never asked him this before. He found it unnerving that she went from minimizing the situation to guilt, to blame, to wanting to open the festering sore and tear the scab off. Feel the pain.
He lit a cigar and honored her request. “He came to the house and saw you were gone, the lights were shut off, and Irish had on an old diaper. She was too old to be in diapers, anyway, but you hadn’t potty-trained her. I tried to teach her, but she couldn’t get it. He asked me how long we’d been there alone. I wasn’t sure. Dad fished around in the trashcan, and I couldn’t understand why. He picked up what I now know was a receipt. He was trying to figure out when you’d left… He crushed it tight in his hand and started cussing and banging his fist on the wall. Wasn’t no food in the house, and I had been eating ketchup packets and a stick of butter. I gave Irish the few crackers we had. They were stale, but she didn’t mind.”
As he spoke, he had no feelings about it.
It was all like water rolling down the street until it dripped into a sewer. He’d already ran down the twisting road of these emotions, and he always stopped at a dead end. The gutters take all the crap—nobody cares about them until they back up, and vomit piss and shit back into the world’s faces. That piss and shit is a byproduct, the result of neglect. Wounded children turned to survivors are not by choice, but by necessity. The forgotten sewage has to go somewhere, become something… it grows into diabolic adults, stinking of rage and revenge…
“You remember everything, don’t you?”
“Mostly. I ’magine in my childlike mind, some of my memories are wrong because I only had so much to work from in order to figure out what was going on. It’s like tryna make sense of something you don’t know the name of. Something you’ve never seen before. It makes you feel strange to even look at it—but you want to understand it, because somehow, some way, you know it messed up your life.”