All That You Leave Behind: A Memoir(9)

Our dad made it clear to Meagan and me that Jill was not a replacement for our mother. As a six-year-old, I didn’t know quite what to make of her. Upon our initial meeting I eyed her curiously. I knew what “girlfriend” meant—that they liked each other. I liked her short, blunt blond bob and her smile. I liked the fact that she had a goofy chocolate-colored dog that she named Eileen because the dog, well, leaned. But I sometimes found our interactions with her confusing. She didn’t hug or cuddle us the way Grandma or Dad did. Instead, she waited for us to come to her.

They married quickly; he proposed on Christmas Eve—they hadn’t even been dating a year. He knew he had a good thing. Their parents threw a boisterous, loud wedding. Meagan and I were appointed flower girls and wore petite white dresses with flat-brimmed hats. The wedding photos elicit a type of fairy-tale narrative. I don’t remember feeling scared about my family changing; I was just happy to have an occasion where I could eat multiple pieces of cake.

In September 1995, a year after they got married, we moved from Minnesota to Washington, D.C., where my dad had accepted a job working as an editor for the respected alternative weekly Washington City Paper. Jill was pregnant and less than thrilled to be moving so far away from her mom and family. But my dad had a mission and that involved being in D.C. She trusted him. So away we went.



     Dad nicknamed me Beefaroni. You might be able to see why.





     Meagan, angelic in comparison to me, sleeping in her baby bucket.





     Grandma JoJo made us wear bonnets on a daily basis.





     We were nothing if not fashionable.





     We made the perfect eighties trio. Dad was the drummer.





     Jill joins the gang.





6


    The Other Woman





There was, of course, another woman in my dad’s life—one who came before Jill. My mother, Anna.

Our relationship is a painful topic to think about, and I try to avoid it. I know that she wasn’t dealt the best hand in life. Her own mother had her when she was forty and was worn out by the time my mom came along. My mom told me in a Facebook message (one of the few ways we currently communicate) that her mother was a quiet person who taught herself to paint. Her father was an alcoholic, and my mother was scared to death of him. He spent the last twenty years of his life a sober man and she grew to love him, but she never forgot who he used to be. Her brother fought in Vietnam and came back different. She told me he had major PTSD, and no one said anything about it; you didn’t back then. His parents buried him in his mid-fifties. My mother moved away as soon as she could to start her own life, dreaming of love, if not wealth. She would find something else entirely.

When I look at photos of my mom, I search for the woman my dad fell in love with. She already had kids of her own when my father introduced her to smoking crack. He could be violent with her, and there were things that happened during their time together that she could not forgive. She’s told me she feared for her life, but my dad said she left us with him to pursue her drug habit. He eventually filed for sole custody, citing child abandonment. There is no record of her contesting the paperwork or responding in any way. My dad became our sole guardian, a rarity back then for a father in child custody disputes.

I know I am like my dad in a variety of ways. But what about her? I am short, like her. Funny, caustic, same smile. I am a hustler just like she is.

While he raised and cared for us, he still wanted us to know our mother as we grew up. Her financial situation changed as often as her phone number (it’s never the same; when I want to reach her I have to scroll through a long series of missed calls), and she usually asked my father for the money to send us to see her. We’d spend five days in the Arizona or Mexico heat living in her double-wide trailer, its chrome gleaming in the sun. I would devour books in the shade while my sisters frolicked in the ocean. It was a simple time, but the darkness of her life leaked out at the edges. Even as a child, I knew something was off. A boyfriend who shouted, money that vanished, the dog eaten by the local band of coyotes. The time she fell asleep and burned me with her cigarette. I was ten years old.

When I was in high school, my mother, while high on Percocet, hit and killed a man with her car. She had serious back problems her entire adult life and chewed on the pills to ease the pain. She was charged with vehicular manslaughter and sent to the local jail. She wrote me long letters in her beautiful script. I can’t remember if I ever answered them. I have not seen her since I was fourteen years old.

My dad encouraged me to be tender toward this woman. I had a hard time with that. I didn’t want to keep punishing her for choices she made decades ago, but what had she done for me besides give me life?

Racism, drug addiction, and mental illness were regular parts of the ongoing discussion my father had with us when we were growing up. He didn’t hide the truth or even shrink it to kid-sized bits of information. If anything, he shared too much about the darkness of the world too early, hence my fuck-up with my little friend who refused to ride in the car with him. He told us we had to be careful about who we told our story to, but he wouldn’t let us hide from it ourselves.