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“Why don’t we all go sit in the shade of the veranda where it’s comfortable and a good might cooler.” Mrs. Connors had refreshments on a tray.
“What do you know about social workers, Liddy?” Miss Penelope asked while Mrs. Connors poured us all a glass of lemonade.
I shrugged my shoulders. “All the poor kids know about the workers. They take you away from home. Then they put you in with people who don’t know you, and they all get money for doin’ it. Mrs. Connors told me my daddy ain’t coming back for me, that true?”
This was a quick exchange of looks between Mrs. Connors and Miss Penelope. “Yes, that’s true.”
“You come to take me away and put me in one of those homes?” I could not help the small quiver that shook my little chin. Because really, I was happy just where I was. I narrowed my eyes and looked at Mrs. Connors with accusation.
“Come over here, Liddy.” Mrs. Connors pulled me into her arms and set me on her lap. “Honey, Mr. Connors and I are old folks, and this year I am retiring. Summer vacation starts in two weeks. Shortly after that, we’ll be moving to New Mexico to be closer to our daughter and her family.”
“Can I come with you?” I asked. My eyes pleading and my heart beating hard in my chest.
There was that look passing between those two again.
“Well, Liddy.” Miss Penelope said, “Seems that you have an aunt who would like very much to have you live with her.”
“What’s her name?” I asked warily.
“Her name is Betty. Miss Betty Owens.”
“Never heard of her.” I crossed my arms and glared at them with suspicion.
It turned out that Aunt Betty was my mother’s sister. Since they hadn’t spoken in years, she hadn’t even known about me. However, once Betty Owens had found out that she had a young niece who had been left all alone in this world, she stepped right up. I was happy that she had found me, but when I thought back to the fleas and the lice and my mostly drunk daddy, I wondered what had taken her so long.
My mamma had been gone a while by the time Aunt Betty came into my life. And a part of me had begun to forget some of what mamma had looked like. But the parts of her I did remember looked a whole lot like Aunt Betty. And that made me wonder how long it was going to be before Aunt Betty shoved me out in the rain because the faucet needed fixing.
But I should have saved myself the worry because although on the outside they looked a whole lot alike, on the inside my mamma and her sister were as different as chalk and cheese.
For one thing, Mamma had always had a glass of something in her hand that made her laugh at things that were not even funny. And her voice was mostly used to shriek at me and daddy. I rememberedthe plumberwith letters that I couldn’t read inked into his knuckles and the way he’d only stop by to fix things when daddy wasn’t home. I remembered the way mamma would giggle when he put his hands where he wasn’t supposed to. And the way she would shove me outside when he came to fix things. After the plumber left all the things that were broken were still broken, so I guessed he wasn’t very good at his job.
When I went to live with Aunt Betty she had just finished cosmetology school and worked at a hair salon. She wore false eyelashes, fancy make-up that made her skin look dewy and fresh, and lacey push-up bras. Aunt Betty’s lips were full, her hair was thick and shiny, and her legs were long. She never yelled or used her long nails to scratch anybody’s cheeks. She never drank things that made her giggle for no reason, and she fixed the broken things all by herself. My Aunt Betty was real pretty in a way that mamma could never be. She was pretty from the inside out.
I, on the other hand, had a face full of freckles, orange hair that grew out of my head in corkscrews, a too-small nose, and bright green eyes that were set just a little too close together. I still sucked my thumb sometimes, had that pink patch on my eye, and occasionally, I still wet the bed. The minute I stepped out of that car and saw Aunt Betty waiting for me, my heart sank down to my toes. Because I just didn’t know how someone like her was going to feel about having an ugly duckling, bed wetter, dimwit in her house.
But I shouldn’t have worried, because the moment Aunt Betty saw me, she let out a happy squeal and held her arms out wide while running towards me. I stood there frozen with fear as this crazy woman with too much hair and a too little skirt, scooped me up and held me hard. But when she started to tickle me and spray my face with loud smacking kisses, I was all in.
Our first meal together was from Taco Bell. We ate outside on the tiny, dilapidated front porch of her small trailer. The two of us sat right there on a blanket and ate crunchy tacos, burritos, nachos, and cinnamon twists. We drank bright blue Icees and then stuck our neon-colored tongues out at each other and laughed until our cheeks ached. After our bellies were full of tacos and tickles, Aunt Betty took my hand and strutted me through Paradise Gate Trailer Park. And just as proud as can be, she introduced me to everybody who lived there. I know that most people probably wouldn’t characterize eating Taco Bell and meeting all the residents of a rundown trailer park as something special.
But to me…it just didn’t get any better than that.
I loved living in the park. I had lots of friends to play with, and there was an old swing set and a huge slide rusting in the weeds at the end of the property. Tom, the ice cream man, used to come twice a week with his little yellow freezer truck that played happy music and had all of the best kinds of ice cream inside. Buried Treasure with its orange ice cream and pirate ship plastic stick was my favorite. Aunt Betty loved the strawberry shortcake. Sometimes the drum corps band would be practicing on the baseball field close by, and we could hear the majestic sounds of brass horns and beating drums playing loud and proud.
I still had trouble reading, but Aunt Betty told me it was only a matter of time before I caught up to the other kids. On Saturdays, she took me to the Athenaeum. It was quiet as a church in there with deep-cushioned chairs to settle into and read, and long wooden tables that looked like they meant business. The children’s section made my heart sing with the beauty of it. The walls were painted brightly with flowers and butterflies. And there was a little loft that kids could climb up in. Aunt Betty and I would spend precious afternoons looking at all the pretty picture books, and on the third Saturday of every month was story time. When I went to the check-out counter, Mrs. Lyons, the librarian, would look at my choices and make me feel like I had taken out the best books in the whole library.
And after our visit to the Atheneum, things only got better. Because that was when Aunt Betty and I would walk over to Chet’s Dairy Bar. Chet, the owner, was round and jolly and would always wink and joke around with my auntie. I think he asked her out for a date every single Saturday for a whole year. But Aunt Betty always refused with a kind voice and that dimpled smile of hers.You know you’re too good for me Chet Fisher,she would say to him. Eventually, he gave up and got married to a plump, pretty girl named Bobbi-Lee.
I knew that some people had a lot more than we did, but the only comparison that ever mattered to me was that my life was much better than it had ever been before. And by that comparison, it was clear to me that things were headed in the right direction. I never thought about the mother who had deserted me in favor of a plumber who couldn’t fix broken things, but I still thought about my daddy sometimes. And like all children, I remembered mostly the good that came before and in between those times that his love of beer had not superseded his love for his little girl.
I wondered where he was and if he ever thought about me. When I first went to live with Aunt Betty every time that I heard the rumble of a too-loud engine, I would run to the door sure that I would see his old pickup coming down the street. Every birthday and every Christmas for years, I would race to that mailbox hoping that there would be a letter or a postcard from him. I would have been happy with the smallest sign that my father hadn’t forgotten all about me, that I wasn’t forgettable in his eyes. But when year after year after year passed with no word from him, I gave up hope that I would ever see him again. But really, even that was okay because most of the kids at the trailer park didn’t have daddies either, and their moms had to work all the time because of it. When it came right down to it, we were all just a bunch of kids pretty much raising ourselves.
Despite what others might consider hardship, life in the Paradise Gate Trailer Park was moving along just fine. But it’s true what they say…how nothing good lasts forever and when how it rains it pours. The first sign that things were about to go really, really wrong came wrapped up in the arrival of a bunch of butt ugly marsupials. Those nasty,nastycreatures of the night.
It was just after my tenth birthday that a family of opossums decided to move into the shoddy insulation of our trailer. If there was one thing that I learned from those beady-eyed monsters is that the horror of having your daddy taking out his diddley in front of the church ladies was nothing compared to having a family of huge, ugly, rat-like creatures gnawing and crawling around in your walls every single night. It was the absolute worse noise that I had ever heard, and those scratchy sounds led to all kinds of imaginings. It took every penny that Aunt Betty and I had been saving up in the Federal Fiduciary Bank to hire Billy Dean’s Pest and Rodent Control. That money would have gone a long way towards me finally being able to go to summer art camp. But truthfully, Aunt Betty felt a whole lot worse about me missing that opportunity than I did. Because as much as I wanted to go to that camp, I wanted those nasty creatures to be gone a whole lot more. For me, there was nothing worse than hearing those sounds.
I thought I would never hate anything as much as I hated opossums.
And then Kid Harding came to town.
