Moving

"Well, that’s the last of it." I looked up. The house she worked so hard to save was empty.

I knew this was coming for about a year. For Christmas, mom and I went to visit my brother in San Francisco. Over Christmas dinner mom casually told us that she was divorcing Tom as soon as Grandma died. Tom was our stepfather. He was always, always an asshole, but I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. "What about the house?"

"We’ll sell the house."

When dad left, it was hard. We were glad there was no more hitting, no more yelling. What we didn’t know was that mom would be leaving, too. Oh, she still lived with us. But now mom had three jobs, plus school on the nights she didn’t work. My brother and I became responsible for our meals, laundry, cleaning house, even our own discipline.

We would fight all the time. I would come home and immerse myself in some book. My brother would come in and start needling me. I’d get mad and we’d fight. We loved each other so much, but we needed to fight. We were hurting and going crazy and we had to lash out. When mom came home, the stories of our battle royale of the day would get her attention, her anger, her frustration. We needed that, too.

Things got worse. This was before the era of the deadbeat dad, before they were profiled on TV, shamed in local newspapers. All dad had to do was move across the state line. We went on food stamps. We started getting the free lunch at school. There are a lot of humiliations in grade school, and I’ve experienced most of them. The free lunch is right up there near the top. You can’t pretend you’re paying. You’re not. People would say things, but it hurt more when they didn’t. It hurt more when they just looked at you, looked at your white ticket, and were ashamed for you.

There was a lien on our house. Then another one. I literally can’t count all the times we almost lost that house to the bank or the town. Several times mom sat us down and, crying said "That’s it. We can’t do this anymore. We’re going to have to move." But every time there was someone to bail us out. I found out years later that our minister, the atheist, gave us over $3,000 out of his own pocket.

Of course, there was no money for upkeep. Wallpaper peeled off the walls everywhere. It seemed normal to me. I remember standing in the doorway of the kitchen and spacing out, peeling the paper away with my thumbnail; my body swaying back and forth. It made me feel good. Touching the house, the thing that held us together, the thing we were fighting for. I can remember thinking "Why are we doing this? Why don’t we just give up and move to an apartment?" But I knew why. This house represented independence to my mother. And she knew that every second we stayed in "his" house made our dad that much angrier. And we all hated him.

And then there was Tom. Our savior. He was still married when my mom started seeing him. And he was old, twenty years her senior. He was red faced and Irish, with white blonde hair. He was possibly the most obnoxious man I’ve ever met. But he had money. And that’s what we needed more than anything.

His grown children hated him for being a strict disciplinarian growing up. Mom told us, and him, that he would not be joining her in disciplining my brother and I. She stood her ground, too. We would occasionally have screaming fights about hanging up the towel, or putting our shoes away, but he knew there was only so far that he was allowed to go.

Now he was gone, finally. Now we packed, going through the lost contents of the attic, deciding which childhood treasures should be tossed away forever, along with our home, along with Tom. I was angry. We had gone through so much for that stupid house. My mother had married a man she admittedly never loved for that house. My brother and I almost killed each other, and ourselves, dealing with the stress of holding on to that house. And now it was being sold for the settlement, because now the tables were turned.

When Tom moved in mom finished school and became a math teacher, while Tom’s unending anger got him fired over and over again. By this time he was 70, and in poor health, and my mom would be paying him alimony for the remainder of his life, even as he paid alimony to his first wife. When you leave your wife for a woman twenty years younger, the settlement tends to be huge.

We went through the boxes of memories. With each passing hour the filter of what was a priceless childhood memory became wider and wider. "Do you want this?" my mom asked. It was a small brown bear, fur worn almost all the way off. The thing I needed. The thing I carried around for years for safety and comfort. Do you remember that thing that you had? That blanket or bear or dog? The thing that made you cry if someone took it away even for a second to wipe it off or to repair it? I looked at her, incredulous, and started crying. "Do I want this?"

Then she knew. She knew why I’d seemed so hurt during this whole process, why I’d shown up late and was slamming things around all day. She started crying too.

"I’m sorry," she said. "I know, it’s our home. But I can’t hold on to it anymore."

I put the bear in the trash bag, and went out for a cigarette.