Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 76456 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 382(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76456 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 382(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
Love like that.
I couldn’t imagine.
I’d never known any love at all.
“He went out to go get the paper one morning and… he never came home,” I said.
“I’m sorry. Were you close?”
“I’d only been there a few months at that point,” I admitted. “But I cared for him. My grandmother, though, she fell apart.”
“I can understand that,” Cesare said, nodding, and giving my leg a reassuring squeeze.
Like he knew we were getting to the meat and bones of it.
Sure, my mom was a nightmare. But I was safe from her. And, objectively, I spent a lot more time with my grandmother than my mother.
“The can’t-get-out-of-bed stage kind of… never ended,” I told him.
I remembered going into her room before school, seeking that maternal care she used to show me. Making me oatmeal or eggs. Helping me brush my hair. Packing my lunch. Telling me to have a good day.
But she was just curled up in the dark in a room that smelled like sweat and misery.
When I got home from school in the afternoons, she would still be there, but there was evidence that she’d been up when I was gone.
Clothes on the bathroom floor.
Dishes in the sink.
I tried to help, to be the good kid I had always needed to be. But I was little. And didn’t have all the life skills I would need to run a house.
It wasn’t long before the bathroom was dirty, the dishes were stinking and moldy.
“Then, eventually, she was a little more mobile. But all she did was collect junk. Bringing home stuff she found on the side of the road, cramming it into the once carefully furnished house.”
It wasn’t long before the living room was so packed that there was only a narrow path to walk through.
Then, not long after, not even that. Just old boxes to trip over and piles of someone else’s clothes, still smelling like mothballs or cedar chests, nothing that would ever fit either of us. But stuff she refused to get rid of.
“By the end of that year, it wasn’t just cluttered. It was filthy. The flies came. Then the cockroaches. The rats. I used to lie in bed at night listening to them chewing on the outside of my door.”
I kept things shoved in the gap under the door both when I was in the room and when I left, terrified of waking up to bugs crawling all over me, or rats scurrying around my bed.
I had this one particularly gruesome nightmare about bugs climbing in my nose, ears, and mouth while I was sleeping, reproducing inside of me, and eating me from the inside out until there was nothing left.
“Soon, it wasn’t just the living room. It was the dining, kitchen, bathroom, spare rooms. The house was bursting at the seams. But the stuff never stopped coming in. I couldn’t even get to the washing machines eventually.”
I had to learn how to wash my clothes in a bucket in the backyard because the bathtub was growing mold and the kitchen sink was teeming with insects.
“How did Vega get placed with your grandma if the living situation was so bad?” Cesare asked, pulling me out of some of those bad memories.
Like the way some of the neighborhood kids would catch me cleaning my clothes in the backyard, or sometimes even washing my own hair in a bucket because I didn’t want the mold touching me in the tub.
The names they would call me at school because of how I lived.
“They never really did an inspection. I think it was all so sudden and so temporary. They were just glad to have somewhere to stick the unruly, opinionated girl who was upset about her parents and angry about having to be pulled away from them.”
I remembered meeting them outside when my grandmother pulled into the driveway, her backseat jam-packed with more crap.
She’d been magnetic even then. Red-haired with lots of makeup, and a tall, thin body that sported barely a trace of womanhood yet.
I’d rushed out, grabbing her by the hand, and dragging her through the mess and into my room, insisting she stay in there with me so she didn’t get covered in bugs and rodents.
“She was really… sure of herself for a young girl. Very comfortable speaking her mind. She gave my grandma a lot of lip about the house, about the filth, about how she was forcing me to live.
“And for a short period of time, the blissful months when Vega was staying there with us, and I had a single friend in the whole world, the filth went away. And with it, some of the bugs and rats.”
“But then Vega’s parents were well again…” Cesare prompted.
“They scooped her up and took her on a cruise so they could all reconnect. She promised me she would try to talk to them about taking me in. I’m sure she did. But my aunt and uncle are…” I trailed off, trying to find a kind way of putting it. “Very concerned with their own interests.”