10.

I called my aunt today. 

She said my mom’s anger has been accumulating since she was a child, born to both poverty and a mother who didn’t want her. 

When she was a toddler, my mom discovered her Uncle Tony blown to pieces in his kitchen from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He’d left a will, scribbled in pencil on a paper sack previously home to a fifth of booze, on the small oak table, before rigging his shotgun to the oven door with a shoelace.

Not long after she found Uncle Tony, her father hit a young Hollywood starlet with one of the cement trucks he’d bought for his burgeoning construction business, which he lost in the accident’s collateral legal damage. Struggling as a secretary, with a husband in traction for almost 3 years in County General Hospital, my Grandma gave my mom and aunt to the state. 

My mom was only 4 years old, her sister only 2. They got passed around from home to abusive foster home, my mom protecting and taking care of her younger sister at each stop. She’d distract my aunt from the horrors with lessons she’d learned that day in kindergarten, every day, all the way through third grade, so my aunt was way ahead of her peers by the time they were sent to the Masonic home. 

Their dad had been ordained a mason, and a couple of spots had opened up for the sisters at their facility that raised children when the parents couldn’t.

Or wouldn’t, which my aunt makes sure I understand. 

Turns out their mother liked her freedom.

I gotta go. I’ve been online, trying to find another place to live near my mom and dad, even though I haven’t been down here by the coast for very long. I think my dad might need help as this thing unfolds with my mom, and my girlfriend is still up there, too. We might actually have a chance at something longer term. Like, maybe a family, that kind of thing. 

I can work from anywhere, so I’m getting on the phone with a real estate agent in a few minutes. He wants to talk about an inexpensive barn apartment on a little land, where my horses and I could spend summers, and maybe once a month in the winter. 

I guess that was kind of the dream I was living a couple of months ago.

But this is more of a plan than a dream.

Reasons are different now.