My Father’s Keeper. Julie Gregory

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СКАЧАТЬ foster care. Mom would turn on her best behaviour to win Dad back, but once the threat was over, she unleashed a vengeance for her dependency that cast darkness over our family for weeks. And when Dad lost another job, the cycle of regular fights accelerated to almost daily shouting matches over money.

      “Dan, what are we going to do? I can’t pay the mortgage.”

      “Let them take the fucking place, I’ll go live in the garage.”

      “And what about us?” Mom seethed. “You expect your kids to live in that filthy rat trap with you?”

      “They can if they want to,” Dad reasoned.

      In the weeks that followed my father’s last pay cheque, Mom was supposed to budget to stretch out the money but instead went on rampant shopping sprees, buying up the outfits she had her eye on. The cheques bounced at the bank and piled up with fees and penalties and Mom, in a dramatic display of righteous indignation, would stand at the window of a teller and bang her fist on the counter trying to get the charges reversed until they escorted her out.

      As for Dad, he never saw a dime from his pay cheques anyway. The only thing he had that was of any importance was his record collection.

      But without the money to fuel Mom’s fantasy, her world tipped on its axis and rolled straight down to crash into my father’s.

      Mom’s hair is a wild windstorm of stray hairs that stick out from the jet-black hairpiece she has wound up into a cone on top of her head. She stomps through the kitchen, slamming plates down on gold-flecked Formica.

      “You go tell that good for nothing, son of a bitchin, no good motherfucking father of yours, Dannnn, that his dinner is ready.”

      “Hey, Dad,” I sing-song, approaching the dark lair of the garage, “Mom says she’s fixed up your favorite dinner. She’d love for you to come in and eat with us.” I hold my breath, staring into the black abyss of the garage. I can just make out my father’s shadow, stooped on a milk crate sorting through the junk under his workbench.

      “Please, Daddy.”

      “Well, you go tell your mother that she can just kiss my rosy fucking ass, will you?” he shouts. “It’s going to take more from that lunatic than her slop to get me to step back inside that hell-hole.”

      “Okay.” And I crunch back down the gravel walkway.

      “Dad said he’ll be in in a few minutes, he’s gotta finish what he’s doing and clean up. He said to tell you that he loves you, Mommy.”

      Back and forth, lobbing my own lies, rinsing the filth from theirs, until five to six trips later Dad reluctantly opens the aluminium screen door and tromps back down the hall to soap his hands with a goop of orange hand cleaner.

      He looms like a giant at the yellow plastic vanity, with its dainty shell soap dishes scalloped right into the sink. He shakes his hands off on the fake marble of the counter, peppering the mirror. Dirty froth and water streak down the bowl and pool on the counter. Dad stomps out, turning down the hall and I slip in, wiping the basin clean with the guest towel and rinsing the dirt down the drain. I toss the towel into the long cabinet behind my mother’s wigs and pads and the secret stash of Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogues she orders them from. I mean, who’s going to use a guest towel in our house?

      The threat of divorce hung in the air thick as burning bacon and was a constant force being prepared for in various forms of execution. Mom made a big production of having us load clothes into a paper sack and keep it in the back of our closets for anytime she thought we may need to flee under cover of night. That she announced it loudly while pacing in front of Dad and the TV seemed to defy the intended secrecy of it all, but we followed orders.

      And after dinner when she railed on him as he lay beached in the chair, my brother and I sat crosslegged on the floor in the back of the trailer as we once did playing church. But this time we were perfectly still, straining our ears for the recliner footrest to snap shut. If it did, we’d have to bolt to the living room and get between them in their physical fight. Every shout or stomp ricocheted though the trailer and vibrated the glass panels of the hutch, so just as Dad read Mom’s proximity to him by the strength of her voice through the walls, we read the levity of their arguments by the needle on our own internal Richter scale. There was no way to stop them and just as you’d think Dad’s attention might make Mom back off, it only fuelled a desire to make him pay.

      “What do you want me do to Sandy?” my father would plead, “I’ll do anything just to get you to stop. Stop, Sandy, I’m begging you to stop.”

      My father stands trapped in the vortex of the trailer where the living room, hallway and kitchen all meet. He keeps his eye on the front door but Mom blocks the exit, her arm strung out, gripping the edge of the hutch.

      “Dan, you are going to stand here, face me like a man and deal with this.”

      My father sighs.

      Mom cuts, “Stop acting like a little boy, Dannn. I want to be married to a man.”

      Danny and I sneak down the hall to stand guard.

      Mom and Dad wedge into the tiny archway opening, my father’s face dropped in defeat. Mom reads our presence as allies and edges in.

      “C’mon, Dannn,” she taunts, “What are you going to do? Huhhhh?”

      “I’m begging you, Sandy,” my father says quietly, “Please leave me alone.”

      “What!” Mom mocks, “I can’t hear you little boy, going to stand there and cry?”

      Mom points to us crouched in the hallway. “The kids aren’t going to help you, are you kids? They’re here because they know how crazy you are.”

      “Please Sandy, please let me go.” My father looks up from his hand, exasperated. Mom leers with a smirk, “You’re going have to talk louder if you want me to hear you.”

      “Mom,” I whisper. “Please.”

      He can beg, we can beg but she will not stop.

      Her smile fades, “You son of a bitch.” And she gains steam, “You rotten, good for nothing son of a fucking bitch! I do and do and do and do for you and what do I get? You got nothing here, you destroyed this home. I hate you, these kids hate you.”

      Danny squeaks, “We don’t hate you, Dad.”

      “We love you both,” I plead.

      We emerge from the shadows; Danny latches onto the seam running down my father’s jean leg, I slip in against my mother’s hip, placing myself between them. Mom sneers like a heckler in his face, Dad holds his head in his hands inches from her spitting mouth. Pressed against Mom, I can feel my father’s rage building. With a sudden flare his head jerks upright. His fists shoot out of nowhere and he rushes, tangling his hands in her hair, smacking her gutted mouth. He catches her jaw in the crook of his palm, gripping her cheeks. She folds her chin to her chest like a child being tickled.

      My father squeezes.

      “Helllp! Heeelp me Juwelly, Denny.” Mom’s eyes are as wide as golf balls, pleading over the top of my father’s hand.

      “Let СКАЧАТЬ