The Daily Write: You can't afford it (August 22, 2013)

Writing Prompt: You can't afford it

My mom was supported by my grandpa, and welfare plus odd jobs. We were on WIC for a long time which to me felt glamorous in the same way of food stamps. To me these were magical talismans representing the golden times with my mom and three brothers in one of her many tiny places. For me it was summer, for her and the twins, it was life all year round. I was a visitor to her world of patchouli and bare feet, wild hair and sprouts growing in jars on the windowsill over the sink.

Going from our dad's cold, undecorated house in California, where we lived fairly simply compared to the rich kids in their giant mansions with pools, from the wealth and superficiality and meanness of those kids all hell bent on conforming, to the world of laughter, dirty feet, unbrushed hair and talk of the revolution yet to come was like going to a magical place. Or maybe it mostly felt that way because I was with her again. On the best nights, the babies would stop crying, my little brother would go to sleep, and she would cuddle with me while singing, the smell of her body like being at home.
 

Bad days and nights were dominated by her boyfriend, who was in and out of the drunk tank, who had bloodshot eyes and long dark hair. He wore a worn leather hippie cowboy hat and shit kicker boots. He put a bottle right in the middle of the midnight birthday cake one year. And he kicked me out in the rain when I was too young to be on my own. I got in his way and he hated me for it. Not my little brothers though. Them, he adored in a cloyingly drunken way that made me so angry. They weren't his kids and he didn't do a damn thing to support them.

His life story was terrible and his looks good. My mom told me he was an artist when he was sober. 

The famous story goes like this:

Little girl and her brother, a year and a half younger, return for the summer to live with her beloved, missed mother and baby brothers.

The neighbor friend tells the girl what happened when she was gone,

"He chased your mom down the street with a butcher knife."

An image I never could get out of my head.

"She ran up the stairs and into my baby's room!"

Something the neighbor friend could never forgive.