“What do you want me to talk about?”
“W-why did you get taken away from your parents?” It was the question I’d been wondering about since he told me he’d been in foster care.
“I guess I should’ve seen it coming,” he murmured. “I mean, by the time I was five, I knew Bennie being clearly only half-white wasn’t normal.”
I made a surprised noise. “Your mom had an affair?”
“Yup. Don’t know who with though. She never told.” Jack sighed. “Somehow, they still had me two years later. Dad kept driving truck and she kept doing her thing. She started to go out more, leaving whomever was home in charge, you know. Then when I was six, the twins were born.” He shifted to get more comfortable as he settled into the story.
“Do you think…?”
“Well, they sure have different coloring from me, Rhiannon, or Billie.” He chuckled a little. “But who knows. Could be just basic genetics shit. Either way, after they were born, I feel like Dad started to come home even less. I guess he got a base somewhere else. At that point we were still at the old house in the middle of nowhere…” He trailed off as if lost in the memories, so I waited for a while.
“What was it like? The house?”
“Tiny. Two bedrooms. No running water until I was born. Even then it wasn’t…it wasn’t good with the weather conditions. Always cold in the winter. I remember huddling up with my siblings by the old cast iron fireplace. We all would sleep in the living room because it was the only place that was warm.” His hand around my shoulders relaxed even more. “Dad made decent money, and he brought us presents and stuff. Sent money for bills. But it wasn’t much in the long run with how many kids there were. There was no extra to put into college funds or maintaining the house. There were times when we didn’t really eat much because there just wasn’t money to get groceries.”
I hummed. “Was it a small town?”
“The closest shop was ten or so miles away and it was a tiny corner store in an even smaller village. Then, when the weather got bad, it was hard to know what would be left at the store when we got there, you know? Sometimes we didn’t have gas for the car or it broke down, so we had to walk or take a bike if the weather allowed. Sometimes the shop didn’t get stock in weeks.”
“How did you survive?” I asked, feeling like such a fraud for having lived in Brooklyn my whole life.
“We hunted a lot. Had a veggie garden. Dad brought stuff like rice in bulk.”
I opened my eyes finally, looking up at him. “You hunted as kids?”
He chuckled. “Dad taught us all how to use the rifle and the shotgun we had by the time we were ten. I didn’t like it, but Bennie took to it and Billie wasn’t bad with the shotgun. Although it was annoying to get the pellets out of the rabbits she shot sometimes.”
My mind struggled to understand being a kid and having to deal with the carcass of a rabbit, let alone anything bigger. But I’d also been the kid who cried if he didn’t get McDonalds chicken nuggets for dinner every Sunday until I was about ten, so what did I know.
Jack sighed again and he started to pet Bucky. “Rhiannon and Billie left home early. Rhi because she was ambitious and wanted something out of life and Billie because she didn’t want to stay and co-parent with Mom.”
“How old were they?”
“Rhi left when she was sixteen. First to work in town and then for college. I was six, so the twins hadn’t been born yet. Billie left as soon as she turned eighteen. I was nine, so the twins were three. I don’t blame her for running.”
“Me neither. How old was Bennie?”
“At that point, he would’ve been thirteen. He took odd jobs in town and hunted when we needed it. I knew it was only a matter of time before he left, too.”
“Did he?”
“Yeah, but he was seventeen by then. He knocked up a girl and ran because of that.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.” Jack chuckled without humor. “The girl gave the baby up for adoption and that was it.”
“So you have a nephew or niece somewhere?”
“Bennie has at least three kids that we know of, but we don’t even know if they’re girls or boys. Or neither. He’s put distance between us since he left. Rarely calls any of us.”
I did some math in my head, frowning. “So if he’s four years older than you, that means he left what, a few before you guys got taken away?”
Jack squinted, clearly trying to remember. “Something like that.” He shrugged, the heavy arm around me feeling like a comforting weighted blanket. “Mom had started to drink more when the twins were toddlers. It was gradual, so at first we didn’t really think anything of it. But then…yeah. At some point money went to booze, not us, and then one time she smacked Jude across the face and split his lip.”
I gasped.
