Joy was the mother of my sisters friend.
Joy seemed like a sane, normal person. A good person. She was a single mother of three and seemed to have a reasonably happy family. When my dad and Joy got together, it seemed to me that we would maybe become a reasonably normal, happy family too.
I was so very wrong.
It was just a few short months ago that Dawn had broke her hand on my face. Joy liked me in the beginning. My dad could be found most of the time, though he still didn't come home to our house. My brother and sister and I were together again. Everyone was reasonably happy on the surface. It seemed like things were improving. In hind sight it was a brief pause in the grand finale that would be the end of my family.
Connie and her friend introduced Joy and my dad shortly after the start of school year. By mid fall we were all floating back and forth between our house and Joy's apartment, just a few blocks away. We were all together for Thanksgiving and it was the first whole family holiday since my mom had passed.
Christmas came and for the first time since the onset of my mother's illness I felt genuine excitement and anticipation for Christmas beyond hope for a present. I felt sort of normal for the first time in a long time.
Christmas morning there were many presents under the tree, more than I had personally ever seen under a tree that I had a connection to. It was wonderful. But as the presents were unwrapped is was evident that there was a bit of a let-down for me. They were not bad presents. I wasn't rude. It's just that I had outgrown an interest in the things that had been given to me. I made an effort to be polite but it was clear. As I remember it, I was not the only one who was not adequately overjoyed with the presents because Joy lost her shit. It started with snide remarks but quickly escalated to full on yelling. Then screaming back and forth from various people besides joy. Then the Christmas tree took flight across the room, smashing into the window. Play time was apparently over.
Joy's eruptions had occurred, but not ever anything like that. Like so many other situations, this became the new normal. My father was not one to let a train wreck get in the way of romance and in a short time we had moved into a house together. We moved again a few months later a few blocks over and then other members of her family and their friends all moved in with us. Then some time later her ex husband moved in with us.
There were many traumatic events in this house that stay with me to this day. On this occasion the youngest of her two sons was jealous of me for stealing his older brothers attention. I had irked Joy and like an old familiar tune, that boy played his mother. Among the many atrocities he lamented was smoking. I was just about to turn 11 years old. I had lit a cigarette once, puffed, choked and put it out. It happened long before any of them had come around but I had told the brother about it. According to them I was stealing them from the gas station and smoking about a pack a day. Also, according to their story, I was harassing them to join me in smoking.
I was summoned to the living room where everyone sat staring at me. I learned of the accusations as I learned of my conviction. My punishment was that I was to smoke a pack of cigars. I tried to smoke one but couldn't. So then I had to eat them. The whole pack. Then I had to eat a pack of cigarettes. I got sick. It took two days to recover.
Joy and my dad were having problems. He was the only adult in the house working. One day we came home to find that Joy had left. I was overjoyed. My dad was crushed. I thought everything would be okay. But then my brother stopped coming home. Connie had gone to my grandmother's. It was just me and my dad. But mentally he was in another universe. About a week later I came home mid afternoon and everything that had been in the house was now in the front yard. Everything. The Pinto was loaded to maximum capacity. There was only enough room for my dad and I to get in. When my dad saw me he told me to go into the house and get anything that I wanted to take. Anything left would be gone forever. We were leaving and not coming back.
My father told me that we were moving to my grandmother's house. When we arrived at my grandmother's house he told me to go ahead and go in, he was going to go get the car looked at and would be back later.
I rang the doorbell and greeted my surprised grandmother. She was happy to see me but wasn't expecting me. She asked what I was doing there, where was my dad? As I answered here question I could see her face fall but didn't understand.
It took months for me to accept the truth.
It would be five years before I saw my father again.
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