Free Bastards: A Memoir by Mary Anna King

here for a while. I had no way of understanding the desolation she must have felt at the blunt knowledge that this family was not enough to convince my father to stay. To my mother, his willful absence was an indictment: She was unlovable. Maybe we all were. It was a thought that was so overwhelming, my mind refused to acknowledge it.
    Then one afternoon, a week into our limbo, there was a knock at the door. I cast around for a place to hide. Unexpected knocks were always bad news. I snuck behind the door as Jacob opened it.
    “Oh, hi!” he said to a woman in a trench coat.
    Rebecca leapt from the back of the sofa and hugged that woman like a lion hugging a piece of steak. The lady had gray hair curled just so, she wore leather driving gloves that coordinated with her coat and sunglasses on top of her head perched behind big rose-petal ears. She saw me staring at her.
    “Hello, Mary.”
    I took her hand when she offered it and felt all the little bones creak inside it.
    “This is Mimi,” Rebecca said.
    “You remember me,” Mimi told me.
    So the woman who had rescued Rebecca in 1983 was here in my living room again. She was as businesslike and unruffled as I had always imagined, though she was less blond and more gray-haired than I remembered from our very brief meeting years ago. It was as if we had conjured her. Mom was pale and strange as a beached jellyfish when Jacob dragged her downstairs. When she saw Mimi, though, the look on her face was unmistakable; it was relief.
    Mimi didn’t dwell on the mess we had ceased to notice; she got things done. She laid her coat and gloves across the arm of the sofa and said, “Let’s clean this place up and get some dinner.”
    The next day, she rustled my father out of whatever hole he’d been hiding in and brought him home for a sit-down.
    I was racing down the stairs that afternoon when I slid around the doorway into the dining room and ran right into the adults’ pow-wow.
    “Hey, come here, Pumpkin!” I heard over my shoulder.
    My father was sitting in the far corner, behind the gray glass table, which had been cleaned of all our sticky handprints. Mimi stood by the window, and Mom hovered in the kitchen. Everyone in the room knew my father was in trouble but him. He reached into his pocket.
    “I almost forgot your allowance.” He waved a dollar bill at me.
    “What’s allowance?”
    “It’s for doing your chores.” He grinned.
    “What’s chores?”
    “You cleaned your room.”
    “When?”
    “Two weeks ago.”
    Did I?
    “No, I didn’t!”
    He threw his head back and laughed up to the ceiling. I had no idea I was so hilarious. But I wasn’t an idiot, so I took the dollar and slipped out of the room.
    On the front porch, Jacob and Rebecca were sitting on the step grabbing fragments of broken concrete and pitching them into the yard.
    “Did he give you a dollar?” Jacob asked me.
    I nodded.
    “Let’s get some candy, then.”
    Normally I would have saved this dollar in the pencil case under my bed where I kept the seven dollars in pennies that I had won at a church picnic, but that would mean going back in the house where my daddy was getting in trouble and laughing about it.
    Today felt like the world could end at any moment, and we had three whole dollars between us, so what was the point of having a savings? We bought butterscotch Krimpets, Dr Pepper, M&M’s, Reese’s Pieces, and Fun Dips, and took our candy haul to the parking lot of the school around the corner from our apartment. Close enough to the house that we could hear anyone yelling for us, but far enough away that we didn’t have to be seen.
    “She’s probably telling him that he’s got to stick around.”
    “She looked mad.”
    “No . . . sad.”
    If it came down to it, the three of us knew the nooks and crannies of this neighborhood better than any grown person, so if the negotiations went the wrong way we had a catalog of abandoned sheds, empty dugouts, and alleyways at our