After a short visit when my mother-in-law drove drunk through the neighborhood with my two-year-old daughter sitting in the backseat, no car seat, no seat belt, I was done. I told my wife who was just as appalled and angry as me: “She can kill herself for all I care, but she’s not taking our daughter out with her.”
A pathological liar, alcoholic, prescription drug addict who abandoned her children with their father after a romp with the local butcher, Fran had been married eight times that we were actually aware of, though she only confessed four. Each conversation on her visits ended before sun down because she was tired. She’d close the door to the spare bedroom and make multiple trips to the refrigerator to refill her 7-11 plastic mug with one-fourth Lemonade, Sprite, or whatever was available, and three-fourths vodka (I had faked need for a Tums and watched her out of the corner of my eyes).
Years of abuse had taken toll. She had gone from slim and high energy, tanned and hair consistently dyed to bloated, slow and unkempt, at one time with a skunk hair look, partly black and partly white. The more she drank, the more she droned on about how she’d been wronged in her first marriage, how hard she’d work to support her four children, how hard she’d worked as a nurse her entire career, how she attended church, and how she believed in Jesus. Most times, my wife left the room to check on children and never returned, me sitting and watching television and trying to avoid, an occasional uh-huh coming out just to play nice. I knew the only times she went to church was when she passed out in front of the television and woke up to a sermon, and I had heard how she’d supported her children, using them to manipulate their father into money for needs that she ended up spending on herself.
In all her conversations, she never admitted to bad choices, didn’t admit she had any sort of problems with alcohol or drugs, and refused to accept that she’d abandoned her children, citing her trips at holidays with gifts galore as if store-bought plastic toys made up for rejection by a mother. She never admitted she was on the phone when her second daughter nearly drowned in the tub and suffered permanent hearing loss or that she was carrying on in her dramatic fashion when one of her sons took an overdose of an aunt’s medication that had been left on the counter because he thought the pills were candy.
Now, “retired” because she has no license to work as a nurse, she sucks in nicotine all day on the back porch of her other daughter’s condo where she lives rent free. I’m convinced if her daughter could hear, Fran would be homeless. Her Social Security check ought to be enough with no monthly bills, particularly when Medicare and Medicaid should cover her health issues, some of which are mysterious back pain that multiple physicians prescribe addictive pain killers because she convinces them in their own language it’s the only thing that helps. She obeys the rule of waiting until after lunch to down the vodka because she believes drinking it before lunch would indicate a problem. She makes calls to each of her children, her siblings, and a handful of others, and lies and pits them against each other, except that they understand. She tries to get them to send money to help with medical expenses, and she plays the tragic role of the victim, of one who is entitled, never quite seeing an accurate reflection of her life in the rear view mirror.
Niles Reddick is author of the novel, two collections, and a novella. His work has been featured in fourteen anthologies, twenty-one countries, and in over three hundred publications including The Saturday Evening Post, PIF, New Reader Magazine, Forth Magazine, The Boston Literary Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Citron Review, and Storgy.
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