Chapter 27
I still remember the night Mama left us. It was my seventh birthday. Mama and Pa gave me a stuffed unicorn I’d had my eye on for weeks, but didn’t think they’d get for me. For dinner that night, Mama brought home a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken with all the fixings. I’m sure for you that was no big deal, but for our family that was like a Thanksgiving feast. We even had a great big store-bought cake with white icing and my name spelled out in purple. I felt like a princess that night.
When Mama put me to bed that night, I didn’t think much about her wearing a coat and carrying her purse. Mama worked a lot, so I thought she must have a new job. I asked her to read to me from the latest Pydlain book—Princess Gwynvale and the Silver Fire—but she said she couldn’t. “Mama has to go away for a little while.”
“How long?”
“Well, I’m not really sure.”
“Where are you going?”
“Somewhere very far away.” When she said that, I thought she must be going on an adventure like Princess Gwynvale. She was probably going to find the Elves of the Sacred Grove so they could make Bobby’s lungs all better.
“Can I come with you?”
“No, princess, not this time.” She kissed me on the forehead and then kissed my unicorn too. “You two go on to sleep now.”
“Mama, I don’t want you to go.”
“I know, princess, but you have to be a brave girl while Mama’s gone. You’re a big girl now.”
I wanted to show Mama I was a big girl by not crying, but I couldn’t help myself. I think deep down I already knew she wasn’t going to come back. I grabbed the hem of her coat before she left, but she pulled it from my grasp. She stood in the doorway to blow me a kiss before she left. I never saw her again. The rest of the night I hugged the unicorn Mama’d gotten me and cried myself to sleep.
In the morning I got up, hoping last night was just a dream and I’d find Mama in the kitchen making breakfast. Instead, the boys were sitting at the table with a box of cereal. “Where’s Pa and Mama?” I asked.
“I ain’t seen them,” my oldest brother Jake said. He poured me a bowl of cereal, but I wasn’t hungry. “Brooke, you got to eat. We all got to pull together now.”
“When are Pa and Mama coming back?” Bobby asked. He and Jimmy were only a year older than me. Bobby started coughing and wheezing until Jake had to help him to the bathroom to take his medicine. If Pa and Mama were both gone, who was going to get Bobby his medicine from the doctor? I didn’t want Bobby to die. I started crying all over again.
Teddy, the second oldest, slapped me on the side of the head. “Don’t start acting like a baby,” he said. “If you ain’t going to eat, then get ready for school.”
I tried to get ready by myself, but Mama had always helped me. I dressed myself in the first things I pulled out of my drawers: a lime green pair of pants and a turquoise shirt. I tried to put my hair in pigtails like Mama did, but I couldn’t do it alone. I threw down my hairbrush and jumped on my bed.
After a while, Jake came in to help me. He picked out some matching clothes and tried to do my hair. He did the pigtails all crooked, not like Mama’s at all. “It’s not fair,” I finally said. “Why’d she have to leave?”
“I don’t know.” That was the first I realized that while Jake was the oldest at thirteen, he was still just a kid. “Just hush up now and go to school. Everything will be better later.”
I didn’t believe him, but I went to school anyway. When Missy Cartwright made fun of my crooked pigtails, I hit her in the face with my backpack. She started crying and screaming, so I jumped on her and kept telling her to shut up. By the time I was through with her, she had a broken nose and a chipped tooth.
As bad as it was for me, losing Mama was even worse for
“He’s feeling sick,” Jake said.
Pa didn’t get any better. He came home drunk every night. Sometimes I would hear him come home, muttering or singing a song to himself. Some mornings we’d wake up and find him hunched over the kitchen table or laid out on the living room carpet. Once I even found him curled up in front of my door like a dog.
He only got worse after Bobby died two months later. That’s when he started bringing home the women. The first time I heard a woman laughing I thought maybe Mama’d come back. I ran out to the kitchen and saw this older lady with a big nose and stringy black hair. She looked like the Wicked Witch of the West. Pa had his arm around her. I screamed. “Brooke, this might be your new mama,” Pa said.
The evil witch bent down to give me a sloppy kiss on the cheek. Her breath smelled even worse than Pa did when he came home from the bar. “Hey there, honey,” the witch said. “We can have all kinds of fun together.” I ran away and locked myself in my bedroom.
The Wicked Witch of the West didn’t last long. She was only the first in a long line of women Pa brought home. I didn’t see a lot of them, but every morning there would be a different smell through the trailer from her perfume. Pa wouldn’t get up before we left for school, so Jake had to take care of us. He did his best, but just like my pigtails that first day, nothing he did was like Mama.
After a while I noticed Teddy acting differently too. He didn’t get up right away in the morning and he was always crabby. Sometimes he smelled like Pa too. I asked Jake about it, but he said to just mind my business. “Teddy can take care of himself,” Jake said.
I minded my own business until one night I got up in the night to use the bathroom. I heard a noise from the kitchen, sort of like a dog panting. I went into the kitchen and turned on the light. That’s when I saw the three of them: Pa, a blonde bimbo, and Teddy. I didn’t understand what was happening at the time, but later I understood Pa and Teddy were working over the bimbo from different ends at the same time. That’s why Teddy seemed so different.
I didn’t even scream this time. I ran into the room where the boys all slept and jumped into Jake’s bed. He tried to ask me what was wrong, but I couldn’t tell him. I didn’t really understand, but I knew it wasn’t right. He finally picked me up and took me out to the kitchen, where Pa, Teddy, and the bimbo were finishing up.
Jake didn’t say anything to anyone; he just kept walking with me right on down the road to Grandma’s. He passed me off to her and then went back for Jimmy. That was the last night I spent with
Pa came over to visit us sometimes on holidays if he was sober enough. Then, about three years after Mama left, he finally got busted having sex with an underage girl in a parked car, both of them drunk. Grandma wouldn’t let us see or read anything about the trial. All we knew was Pa wasn’t going to visit us again for a long time.
I saw him for the last time when I was thirteen. He’d hung himself in his cell with his sheets. Grandma didn’t want us to go to the funeral, but I went anyway. I wanted to see him that last time. What I remember most is how small he looked then. His bald head made him look like an overgrown baby sleeping in that casket. He looked so weak and pathetic I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. That’s how I remember him: as a weak little man who couldn’t take care of himself or his family. I didn’t bother to stick around for the funeral. I left right then and didn’t look back.
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