Chapter 1
Slam!
The sound of my mom throwing her hair dryer across their room and it crashing through the thin walls of our doublewide jolted me from my deepsleep.
“Why don’t you just leave then, you fucking scumbag?” She was messed up again, slurring her words together as she picked another fight with my father after coming home in the early hours of themorning.
“Don’t you freaking tempt me Helen, I swear to fucking God.” My dad’s raspy voice was low and gravely, probably trying to not wakeme.
Toolate.
This fight wasn’t like every other night that she came home late from the bar; this one soundedworse.
“If you want to leave so badly, then just do me a damn favor and get the hell out, you rat bastard.” I heard their door open and the sound of my dad’s boots stomping down the hallway with the light thudding of my mom trying to run after him inheels.
“Helen, get the hell off me. Enough is enough.” He was right outside my door. I held my breath. I was ready to run away withhim.
“You damn asshole you’re not taking her withyou!”
Slap!
Slap!
Slap!
I could hear her hittinghim.
“You’re not going to raise my daughter, you fucking, no good, whore. I’ll leave her here over my dead body!” That was the first night I ever heard that word: whore. It was the perfect definition for my mother. It was exactly what shewas.
I heard my mother’s sobs getting softer as my dad slowly opened the door to my room. I held my breath, trying to pretend I was still asleep, silently begging him to pick me up in his strong arms and whisk me away from the trailer park and the terrible person that pretended to be a goodmother.
“Yes. Hello.” I heard her meek voice crack as she sniffled into the receiver of our old yellow corded phone in the kitchen. “My boyfriend is trying to kidnap my daughter. Please send someonefast.”
“You damn—you goddamned cunt! She’s my daughtertoo.”
“Fuck you, Rave! If you wanted her to be your daughter so badly, you should have signed the damn birthcertificate!”
The front door swung open and my father’s boots trudged down the metal steps, the sound echoing in my ears as my heart got heavier with each stomp. I ran to the window and watched my hero, my savior, the only person that ever showed me love get in his truck and driveaway.
Taillights. That’s really what I remembered from that night. The glow of the taillights of my father’s rusty, clunking white long-bed. The gravel spit out from under the tires as he ran away to his freedom. Who could blame him? Not me, that’s for damn sure. I was about to follow in his footsteps. It had only taken me seventeen years to grow the metaphorical balls to realize that he was right. He had made the right move. All of the resentment and anger I had displaced onto him for abandoning me was finally falling on the right shoulders: hers, my fucking whore of amother.
I sat outside the trailer I’d grown up in, in the same spot my dad had escaped from, watching the light switch off in my mom’s room from the front seat of my beat up Camaro. She was probably over dramatically faking another orgasm while john-number-five-hundred-and-something believed every grunt and groan. I had to hand it to her: she was damn good at herjob.
I took the worn pages of the letter I had read thousands of times and stuffed them back into the envelope. I read the city name in the return address again:Vilas.That’s where I’d start my new life. That’s where I’d start my search, not for him, but for myself. If it was good enough for my father, it’d be good enough forme.
It had been ten years since I’d gotten my only letter from him. It was my most cherished possession. I knew the whole thing by heart, but the last line stuck with me, like a broken record in mymind:
I have always loved you and I always will, never forget that,Princess.
Getting that handwritten note changed my life. It gave me hope, courage, and a fire under my butt to make something better of myself. In the back of my head I knew that it was only one short letter, that if he truly loved me like he had so dramatically claimed, he would have come back for me, fought for me, even stayed that night, but that was all in the past. It was time to start the future and for fuck’s sake, I was about to take the bull by the horns and be something more than a trailer park critter that stripped to make endsmeet.
The old engine cried to life after the third time I turned the key. I really needed to get it looked at, but I needed to get the hell out of the trailer park first. I had no plan, just a stack of uncashed paychecks from the Pink Kitty, where I had been working for years, and a wad of dollar bills that I had managed to hide from my mother, but it would have to be enough. I had hit the wall and was finally able to see it: I needed to moveon.
I did have to give her some credit where it was due: my mom tried. She loved me in her own way, but she was never loving or motherly. She was either high or fucking to get her next fix for most of my childhood, but that was ok; I was over it. I’d realized long ago that you can’t ask more of someone than they are capable of; she was nothing more than a hooker, and I had to accept it. My mom had no aspiration to make something more of herself and I would have to live with that. There is no saving someone that doesn’t want to be saved, that’s for damnsure.
I glanced back in my rearview mirror as the dusty road took me away from the only home I had everknown.
Hopefully this will be my last look at thathellhole.
