When I pushed the dented metal door of our HUD-funded apartment open that afternoon, I expected more of the morning’s jubilant party atmosphere, but the house was quiet and it smelled like stale beer and cigarette ash, a scent I recognized from the many hours spent in my grandfather’s dingy sports bar. As soon as I entered, I stopped and stood lock still. I was holding on to the knob of the open door, icy Appalachian air colliding with the static electric heat of the apartment.
Mom was where she normally was when I got home, curled up on the side of the couch that my granddad had bought us from Heilig-Myers Furniture. But, on this day her “stories” weren’t on. Our tiny town’s comic-book sized phonebook was open on her lap, but she wasn’t looking at it. Her head was slowly slumping forward like a willow that had just started weeping.
And, she was as naked as the day she was born.
I slammed the door out of shock and fear that some bus stop stragglers may wander by and see my mom’s perky breasts.
The door’s slam startled her and she jerked her head back and started vigorously rubbing her nose. Her eye was puffy and starting to yellow and her mascara, black, and her eyeliner, blue, had run down her face and formed garish Rorschach patterns.
“Mom, what’s the matter?” My voice shook as I fought back the tears that were threatening to leak from my lower lids.
“I’m looking for your g*****n daddy! He came back from the doctor acting like he was the f****n’ cock of the walk and then he and Terry left out of here and didn’t leave me nothin’! He’s a no good son-of-a-b**ch, Sosh.” She attempted to sound forceful, but her words were slow and soft like they were struggling out from molasses.
The living room looked as if it had been picked up and shaken. Mom’s pretty hand carved jewelry box, a gift from my grandparents from one of their cruises to the Caribbean, that normally sat proudly on the warped and bubbled hand me down coffee table was in two pieces on the floor. Crushed red capsules, relieved of their medicinal powders, were dotting the carpet like wild strawberries. The brown waxy tape from an Eagles cassette was dangling down from the love seat.
I dropped to my knees and scurried to pick everything up.
She slurred out, “What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m just gonna pick this stuff up, ma’am.”
“Don’t you ma’am me. You can brown nose those teachers all you want, but I ain’t buyin’ the sh*t you’re selling, little one.”
“What? What are you talking about, mom?”
“Just get the f**k out of here, Sosha!”
“Where do you want me to go, mom? Gran and Granddad are out of town.”
My tears had breached the levee by this point and were dripping down onto the stained carpet.
“I don’t care where you go. I gotta have time to think! I gotta figure out where that slimy piece of sh*t has run off to and I damn sure don’t wanna look at you!”
I grabbed my bike, a gift from my grandparents, and headed to the woods on the far edge of our apartment complex.
I gathered up rocks and threw them into the partially frozen creek, but it didn’t take long for my hands to tingle and my ears to burn as the already frigid temperature began to drop.
The sun was setting and the street lights would be on at anytime- that’s when I was supposed to be home. My stomach tightened and flipped. I was afraid that I’d be in trouble if I wasn’t home on time, but I was afraid that I’d be in more trouble if I went home.
I decided to go to Steve’s mom’s, my newly minted maw-maw. I was fairly sure that she was a witch. Other than the light-colored, high-waisted jeans and grey cardigan that she wore, she looked just like one. Witch or not, her apartment was always clean and quiet and she was a good cook. I don’t think she liked me, but my dad was clearly her favorite child, and, really, she was the only option that I had.
I knocked on her door and she surprised me when she hugged me and said, “Lord, sugar, get in here. You’re gonna catch the pneumonia.”
She fried me some pork chops, warmed up a can of creamed corn and poured me a glass of Kool-Aid.
“Why don’t you stay with Maw-Maw tonight? It’s Friday so you ain’t gotta worry about school tomorrow. I’ll call Starr and let her know.”
She took her tissue from her sweater pocket and wiped her nose. I wasn’t sure what to say so I just nodded, momentarily content with my full stomach and warmed skin. That night, after arranging the creepy dolls that she kept on the spare bed so that they were facing the wall, I climbed in wearing one of my dad’s old Lyrnrd Skynrd t-shirts that she had, inhaled the bleach scented sheets and cried until I hiccuped.
When I woke up the next morning Steve had morphed from a ghost that I tried to avoid to a drooling, snarling monster that lurked around every corner and laid in wait under my bed. I picked at the white peeling letters of his shirt and dreamed of stabbing him through the heart.
My monster wasn’t after me in a physical sense. He never even yelled at me. Not once did he whip his thick leather belt across my ass and the small of my back. Mama did enough of that for the both of them. I could take that.
What I couldn’t take, what I couldn’t forgive was the punishment that he doled out by slowly consuming the first love of my life. He turned my golden mama, the one with a smile that could dance the darkness away, into the shallow faced, almost toothless, shadowed addict that she was when she died.
I blamed my monster for her going to prison; for the syringes I found in the bathroom after she had been clean for so long; for her dying, alone, in a worn out trailer.
When my mother died, my hatred for my father burned hotter than summer asphalt. He was in prison the day that my grandmother called and said, “Sosh, it’s over, darlin’. Your mom is gone.”
When I got up off of my knees on that crisp, Carolina blue sky day in November, I swallowed my loathing like a shot of cheap liquor and relished the burn that spread throughout my chest.
Between bouts of morning sickness, I made mom’s funeral arrangements. My younger sister called me and said, “I think I can get Dad a furlough to come to the funeral if we can wait until Friday.”
I scheduled the funeral for Thursday.
I may have won the last bitter round, but he had finally killed my mama. I had to admit defeat. He won our 25 year war.
Just as I had the morning I woke in the guest room of mawmaw’s apartment, I wished him dead. I lamented the unfairness of it all – the wretched unfairness that left him still
opening those golden brown eyes every morning while my mama simply was no more.
If my wish wasn’t granted, at the very least, I planned to never see him again.
Part III of “The Dope Letters” will be published on January 22, 2019
Soshally Awkward
Sosha Lewis is a writer whose work has been featured in The Washington Post, Huffington Post, MUTHA Magazine and The Charlotte Observer. She writes about her sometimes wild, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking past filled with free-lunches, a grimy sports bar, a six foot tall Albino woman who tried to save her teenage soul, felonious, drug addicted parents, an imaginary friend named Blueberry and growing up nestled in the coal-dusted mountains of West Virginia.
