Free I Swear I'll Make It Up to You by Mishka Shubaly

was in the nostalgic sweetness of my childhood, our life together, perfect in the rearview mirror. And now the whole town parading through the detritus of our life? Our condescending neighbors who had sneered at us because we were “from away,” because Tashina and Chuong were brown, leaving muddy footprints on my mother’s carpet, haggling us down to the last dime on everything, a death of nickels, of pennies. First the hyenas, then the vultures, then the maggots. Fifty cents was forty cents too much for my mother’s old Neil Diamond tape that she had played in the car on the way to the grocery store for how many years now? I couldn’t remember a time in my life before I knew the words to “Brother Love’s Traveling Show.”
    Only once did I see my mother lose it. During spring break, while other collegians were pouring Smirnoff vodka into bottles of Sprite in Daytona Beach, grinding, flashing, and sunburning under the blue Florida skies, while my more affluent fellow Simon’sRockers were in Europe or Mexico or South America, I nursed lukewarm Budweisers with my mom while people trickled into our driveway, poking through our crap. I didn’t bother to hide my beer. Fuck what they thought. We were never coming back.
    Finally, the rain came. My mother and I, groggy from the shitty beer, scrambled to drag everything back into the garage, out of the drizzling rain. Then it started to pour. We were fucked. The couches, the carpets, the books, the jigsaw puzzles turning slowly into gray mush . . . my mother started to curse on the front drive.
    â€œShit, shit, shit! God damn it! God damn it! I . . . why? Oh, God, why ?”
    Tears filled her eyes, and the words hung up in her throat. Her knees went, but I caught her before she hit the ground and carried her into the front room, the same place where she had had to scrape me off the floor only months earlier, when I had collapsed after reading about the divorce. I got her up to her bed, sobbing so hard she couldn’t speak. “Shit” was pretty common for her, elicited by a banged thumb or a parking ticket. “God damn” was a much bigger deal for our mother, raised Catholic. She cried so infrequently that it was still traumatic to witness. None of us had ever seen her break down like this, even when her father died.
    I moved what I could and covered what I couldn’t move. Then I walked out to the mailbox in the rain and opened it. There was nothing inside. I closed it and sat down where I had when I’d gotten my acceptance letter from Simon’s Rock almost exactly a year before. How optimistic I’d been, how eager to leave this place behind. I’d hated my father, hated my family, hated this house.
    Suddenly, it didn’t seem so bad. I had loved my mother. And Tashina. I had loved Tatyana too, listening to the Doors and playing cards together in the camper. And my dad, especially my dad. More than any one of us, I had loved all of us, our family, the thing we became when we were all together.
    I looked back at the house, at the big dining room bay window. The lights were off inside—to save money—and I couldn’tsee in, but I remembered that window glowing. Every night, we had gathered there in the dining room. It was my job to set the table and Tatyana’s job to clear it. Dad sat at the head. We all sat down together, each of us in our specific spots. No hats at the table, no books at the table, and certainly no TV. We ate together and laughed together and talked about the day we’d had. And now this, an abrupt betrayal, and then the slow, cold, public humiliation. I wished we had just burst into flames, sitting there around the family dinner table, hiding our broccoli under the chicken bones on our plates, sneaking scraps to the dogs. At least in death, we would have been together.
    I walked into the garage and fell into my father’s La-Z-Boy, the chair Princess had died in.