Chapter 17
Seventeen
As much as I hated moving back to El Dorado, there had been a time when I had been desperate to move back.
I must have been five or six. No, it was the summer before second grade, so I think that would have made me seven.
Either way, when Mom and I moved back, I swore to myself that I’d never leave again.
Even at the beginning of high school, while most of my classmates dreamed about moving away and living in a big city, I always wanted to stay in my hometown, even though a part of me longed to escape my life.
I couldn’t imagine being away from Donnie and Della.
We moved at the beginning of summer and were back again before school started.
As far as time spent away from home, it barely would qualify as a blip on the screen.
That period was the only time I acted like a “normal” kid.
Most of the time, I focused on being perfect.
At that point, I was still doing my best to please Mom and make her happy, make sure I never drew negative attention to myself in school.
I somehow already knew that was important.
Mom had been dating Vic for over a year.
He pretty much lived with us. I don’t remember ever being at his house.
I’m not sure where they met or how. In fact, I don’t really even remember a time before Vic.
I’m sure there were others after my birth before Vic came along, but I can’t picture them.
Once in a while, I really liked Vic. He had a dog (to me it was our dog) Roscoe.
He was huge, a mutt of some sort. Vic would take me along with him and Roscoe and walk through the woods behind our house or on a drive into the country.
Most of the time, though, he scared me. He often would make fun of me for being fat or yell at me for being too loud.
Mom would never let him go on for too long.
She would always step between us and start yelling back.
I don’t remember him ever hitting me, but some of my most vivid memories are of him beating her.
Anytime she would step between us to stop his yelling at me, she was guaranteed to get hit.
Their fights weren’t all over me, though, I am sure.
There were many times I would come back in from playing with Roscoe and walk in on him beating on her or find her crying in her bedroom, her face swollen and bleeding, with Vic nowhere to be seen.
I wish my memory were better so I could remember more of the details during this time. Actually, maybe I don’t. What I do remember is enough.
I remember clearly coming back home, probably from playing with the dog or being dropped off from Donnie and Della’s.
Mom was waiting for me in the living room.
She started yelling the minute I walked in, demanding to know where I had been and what had taken me so long.
Come to think of it, I must have been out with the dog.
Anytime Sue would bring me back, she would come in and talk to Mom, and, unless Mom was drunk, she never yelled at me in front of Sue.
A man came out of the kitchen. At first I thought it was Vic.
He told Mom to quit screaming and to hurry up and get in the truck, he would take care of me.
It wasn’t until that moment I realized it wasn’t Vic.
He bent down. He looked a lot younger than Vic, better looking—cleaner, no scars.
He told me his name was Adam and he was very glad to meet me.
Without asking, he picked me up and said he was sorry there wasn’t more time, but we had to leave.
Mom was already in the truck and was waiting with the door open.
He placed me on her lap and went around to the driver’s seat.
We had been driving for two hours. I remember being in Kansas City.
I loved Kansas City. Sue and Chuck had brought me there for my birthday that year, and we had gone to this huge toy store shaped like a castle, Children’s Place.
They told me I could pick out anything in the store I wanted.
Donnie, Della, and I must have spent three hours hunting through every part of that store.
We had so much fun. I finally decided on a Lego set and a My Little Pony unicorn.
I asked Sue if I could pick two things. Chuck told me yes, but I would have to leave the unicorn at their house.
Della had several My Little Ponies of her own in the car.
The three of us played with them in the back of their van the whole way home.
The entire time Adam drove, Mom constantly looked over her shoulder out the rear window and told him to go faster.
I kept asking what we were doing. I was hoping we were going back to Children’s Place, but I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be anything so fun.
Every time I asked, Mom would growl for me to shut up.
After a few times of this, she and Adam got in a fight because he thought she was being mean to me and she should tell me where we were going.
She told him to mind his own fucking business.
Finally, somewhere just outside Kansas City, she put me between her and Adam on the truck seat. She had held me tightly in her lap the entire drive until then. Adam never stopped driving, except for somewhere on the highway to get gas and for us to use the bathroom.
She finally told me that we were leaving, moving away.
We were never going to go back to El Dorado, and we were going to build a new life with Adam, a better life.
I didn’t quite understand until I asked about Roscoe and when I could see Donnie.
She told me the dog wasn’t ours and I would never see Donnie again, at least until I was a lot older.
It was then I threw my first fit. I screamed and cried and bellowed at the top of my lungs. Mom smacked my face several times, but even that didn’t stop me. In my memory, the entire ride was chaos. I was crying and pleading to go home, and Mom and Adam were screaming at each other.
We drove most of the day. After dark, we pulled into a trailer park.
We unloaded and moved in. To this day, I am not sure if Adam owned the trailer or if it belonged to friends or if Mom bought it.
The trailer was in Ransom, Kansas—just a little south of I-70 off of Highway 283.
There were fewer than five hundred people in the town.
When I moved to Colorado, I took a small detour and drove back through it.
It looked even smaller than when I had been a kid.
Not a day passed in our couple of months in Ransom that I didn’t beg to move back to El Dorado.
There was rarely a day I wouldn’t fight with Mom, at least at the beginning.
That wouldn’t happen again until I was in high school.
I really did like Adam, though. He was a lot of fun; he would always play with me.
We would make ice cream sundaes together, and he never got mad at me for being too loud.
He never even got upset when I begged to move back home.
He was also good to Mom. I had never seen her so happy, before or since.
After a couple of weeks, she started to treat me differently as well.
She started to follow Adam’s example and didn’t even yell at me when I would slip into one of my tantrums about moving back.
This time period, although hated because I was away from Donnie, is my favorite time with Mom.
She was so beautiful. She took better care of herself than she had in the past. Adam told her constantly how gorgeous she was.
I don’t think I had ever really thought about how my mom looked. Most little kids don’t, I suppose.
For the most part, those few precious weeks were the best of my life.
I felt like I had a family, a real family, for the first time.
It would have been perfect if the Durkes had been there as well.
I even quit missing Roscoe after a while.
Plus, Adam kept hinting that maybe he and Mom would get me a puppy for my next birthday or Christmas or something.
I’m sure I won’t get all the details of what follows completely correct, but much of it is seared in my mind. There are nights I still wake up screaming, scaring Jed to death. He learned quickly what they were about and figured out how to calm me down.
It was the night we had gone to the school to enroll me in classes and to meet my new teacher.
It was starting to sink in that we weren’t moving back to Missouri, and I wasn’t going to be with Donnie and Della any longer, but I was excited about meeting the other kids when school started in a few days.
My mom’s screams were what finally woke me up. I didn’t hear the bang or whatever sound it made. I didn’t hear a door kicked through. I didn’t hear the cursing and startled cries. It was my mom’s screams of rage that woke me.
For a second, I wasn’t startled. This wasn’t unusual; she and Vic often woke me up in the middle of the night with their fights. I suddenly remembered we weren’t in El Dorado any longer. Vic wasn’t there for Mom to fight with.
Fear washed through me. It took me a few moments to crawl out from under the covers. It was my need to be with Mom that finally won out. No matter what was going on, I was sure I was safer if I was with Mom.
I quietly snuck out of my bedroom and tiptoed down the narrow hall. Mom was still screaming and crying now. I didn’t need to see it to know that Mom’s face had just gotten backhanded. I knew that sound implicitly. It was then that I realized it was Vic’s voice yelling at Mom. I was beyond scared.
The scene I saw when I stepped into the main room of the trailer is one that is permanently painted in my mind. It is probably more vivid than any other. Sadly, I can see it even clearer than I can recall my own wedding.