By the time she moved out of her house, where she had been living since she had been born, she was an expert at packing. Though living in the same home all her life, she had been packing her own bag twice a month since she was ten. Back then she cared little for clothes or for hygiene, so she simply stuffed three shirts and three pairs of underwear into a back pack with a book. That’s all she needed for the obligatory weekends at her father’s house.
Though packing for a weekend is a sharp contrast to packing away all your belongings. Not that she took everything; there wasn’t enough time for that. But she tried to take the important things: the collection of drawings from her boyfriend, the figurines and photos, the mementos.
On her 18th birthday she stepped into a new house. Her best friend, Sarah, had told her parents about the poor girl’s predicament. Kicked out of her mother’s house and with a father unable or unwilling to take her in Sarah’s parents offered their home to a stranger. A home that was already filled with two adults and three children.
Her father had a house in the city, but he wasn’t living in it on weekdays anymore. He spent those days in a city three hours away and regularly commuted to spend the weekends in the house with his wife and, every other weekend, with his kids. The rest of the time his wife lived in the big house alone.
When she asked her father if she could live there too he told her, “I don’t want to bother my wife.” Instead he offered to let her live in his apartment out of town with him. She declined because, halfway through her senior year of high school, she didn’t want to switch schools.
She enjoyed herself with Sarah’s family, their easy going affection for one another was refreshing and like nothing she had ever seen before. She wasn’t surprised that a family so easily accepting of a stranger would have such warm hearts. Yet as she compared Sarah’s father’s good nature to that of her own father, who lectured about hard work and making money, she thought it was a good thing he was a bit of an asshole. She could use him and his money for college and then move on with her life without guilt or unnecessary attachment. Unlike her best friend, who she knew would most likely spend her entire life living in the same small town to be near the family she loved.
Very rarely, she would have nightmares of her mother. “GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!” She would hear. “You mean the house you stole?!” She would scream back. “The house you claimed, when we were too young to understand, our father tried to kick us out of? Scaring little kids into crying at court so you could have full custody despite the divorce laws that give your ex-husband half a right to it? It should be my house!”
In the nightmare she is crying and screaming outside the locked gate of her own house, the house she spent 18 years in, and just inside the gate standing in the open doorway was her spiteful mother.
Except these were not nightmares. They were memories.
She lived with her best friend’s family for a little over half a year. After graduating high school she was ready to move and took her father up on his offer for free housing in a new town. Only a half hours commute to an inexpensive university, it was the logical next step.
She knew exactly what she wanted to do with her life. A novelist, she dreamed, I’ll be a novelist. However, she was raised to be a logical girl and knew her chances of being able to live off of her dream were slim. So she had plans, several plans, of careers she could take on as an English major. First she decided to be certified as an English teacher, this would be her safety net. Second, she got a job with the university’s newspaper as Copy Editor. She decided she would aim for a job as an editor at a publishing company that dealt largely with teen fiction. She would be able to work with the books she loved and, one day, possibly publish her very own book with the people she would meet through this job.
She felt no attachment to her hometown or to her family, but she was greatly fond of two people. The best friend whose family took her in and the boyfriend she dated for almost three years. Though she wanted to build a new life for herself in her new city, she continually visited her old town when she could. Her father scolded her for this, telling her she was being irresponsible. “You’re driving that car too much. You’ll run it into the ground. I won’t get you a new one, it has to last you until you graduate.”
Her father was a family man and told her friends were unnecessary. Yet in her mind it was the opposite. She was a girl for friends and told herself family was unnecessary. When she needed them they had let her down. Now all “family” was good for was the obligatory money her father spent on her college education. That’s all she needed him for.
He didn’t know her boyfriend occasionally visited her at the apartment. He took a bus to her town and she picked him up, they would spend the weekend together in the empty apartment, and he would leave in time for her father’s return from their hometown. When he asked her once, in a roundabout way, if she was still a virgin she smiled and lied that she was.
She thought it was laughable that her father scolded her for driving once a month, as it became, to the town he drove to every week. He told her she couldn’t afford to do the same as him, that she didn’t have any money. He reminded her of this constantly. What he didn’t know is, she had one thousand dollars saved in the bank account she opened so that he couldn’t keep track of her money.
When she got her first job with the newspaper she had lied to him when he asked how much it paid. And yet, that false number was double the allowance he had been giving her. The allowance he stopped giving her as soon as she got the job, not that she cared.
However much money she saved it was not enough to live on her own. So she tolerated her father, his lectures and his contempt, and told herself to be patient. In a few years she knew she’d be done with college and no longer need him. She would have an apartment with her boyfriend, or whoever she was with by then, and only see her family twice a year on holidays. She would grant them the obligatory holiday visits as repayment for the obligatory money her father would spend on her. But nothing more.
She steadily took her classes, signing up for summer school as well, and bid her time. Her life was going exactly on track as far as she was concerned. From the day she was kicked out of her own home she knew it would be alright.
One day her mother would want to reconcile. She’d invite the old woman to her house, possibly even serve her a meal, and then calmly say, “Get out of my house.”
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