A two bedroom townhouse with 1.5 baths filled with a half century’s worth of kitsch. Figurines, elaborate crystal dragons. Things with cats. Collections abandoned. An enormous fish tank. The closets are full of sequined calendars, memory, and the walls are stained yellow from nicotine creep that isn’t hers. The year before kindergarten, I will sleep in a nest on the floor between the couch and the bar. I wake up in the middle of the night and my mother and my godmother’s daughter are playing Pac-Man on the Atari or watching MTV. Mom will play as hard as she can until her thumbs crease, to get a million points and pause it to show me before the number scrolls over to zero again. She is barely old enough to drink. She sings, writes music for her band. She reads to me. I love her.
Sometimes they watch music videos. I like the one with the puppets. There’s another with people dancing on a compass. This isn’t quite right, the music does not line up with how old I would be, yet the memory persists.
On Christmas Eve I will dream of shopping for Mom. Downtown I pass storefronts in the snow until I find her the perfect gift: a solid gold bar, wrapped in a plaid ribbon infused with golden thread. I am overjoyed. She will love this. The dream ends and my five year old self cries because my gift is gone.
I understand now he liked her in a lopsided way. He is a drinker, violent, jealous of the attention she must provide for her daughter. He breaks a window and Mom slices her knuckle in the glass in the rain.
Much later he will asphyxiate on vomit, lying on the couch in the nicotine stained apartment. Fish and and ceramic cats watch him die. The finished driftwood coffee table. The bubbling carpet, a shade of green out of Mary Tyler Moore. My godmother finds Mom in a Safeway on Powell and tells her what happened while they stand in the frozen food section. I smile. I decide this does not make me a bad person.
[Note: I do not have regular Internet access. I will reply as I am able. Thank you, as always for reading.]