the misfit west

Tag: family

  • as for me and my house

    The Oriental Trading catalog comes in the mail with Dad’s stack of Wall Street Journals and by the next morning it’s on the back of the toilet, pages curling from the shower. Temu before Temu. Everything in it comes in bulk. Twenty-four plastic leis for five ninety-nine, a gross of rubber frogs, grass table skirts by the dozen, sticker sheets in quantities nobody on this earth could use, printed for people who have that many people.

    The good issues I take back to my room and go through at night with a ballpoint. Tiki torches. Coconut cups with the bendy straws. Paper lanterns strung on wire. A piñata shaped like a parrot. The order form in the back has twelve blank lines for item number, color, quantity, and I fill in all twelve and never tear it out.

    The party is at dusk on our deck with the torches going down both sides and the parrot hanging off the gutter and the coconuts getting refilled and nobody going home. It never rains on it. Nothing tips over. I have this party in the bathroom, in my bed, out in the dry crusty field behind the house where I’m sure a rattlesnake is waiting for my ankle, and it is a daydream, a wish, a want, a prayer.

    The real deck is where Dad comes out after a twelve hour shift, boots off, and throws Frisbees for the dogs before he’s had dinner. The wind comes across the yard with nothing to slow it down and a tiki torch out there would last about as long as a match. Mom and Dad don’t have people over.

    In my room the sock drawer is the washer and the drawer under it is the dryer, and I draw burners on gray paper with a red marker so I can brown ground beef the way I watch her do it, and I cook for the dolls, and I set the table, and everybody eats.

    The one night anybody comes is Dad’s reunion, and while they’re all inside I back the Comanche into his friend’s car and put the taillight across the gravel in red plastic pieces. I pull forward, kick what I can find under the tire, and go sit at the kitchen table and wait for it. When the two of them come out with their beers they stand there looking at the bumper a long time, and then they start laughing, both of them, and Dad puts his hand flat on his friend’s shoulder and leaves it there. Nobody comes in to get me. I sit on the back step in the dark way past when I should be in bed listening to a sound I can’t place at first because I haven’t heard it much.

    The rest of the summer the phone hangs on the kitchen wall and Mom waits for it. Oil on her legs at the counter while she waits, smelling like Jovan musk. When the call comes we load up and drive out to the park at Foothills and she walks the loop with the other mothers, three times, four times around, while we’re all turned loose. Bible school in June with the paper crowns. Wednesday nights with the verses. The Christian bookstore with the cassettes and the devotionals and a wall of figurines with their big wet eyes. Mountain Dew runs to the Kum and Go, fountain and bottle both, and if we’d done something wrong that day we went for free. The calendar on the refrigerator is filled in through August in her small handwriting, and for two people who don’t have any friends, my parents are forever keeping track of what’s popular.

    The knocker on our door says AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE, WE WILL SERVE THE LORD. Over the stove there’s GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD in cross-stitch with the glass gone soft from the grease. There’s a fish on the back of the van. I learn the verses cold, I could say them in my sleep, and I do sometimes.

    At youth group I say out loud that we don’t seem very on fire for God, and the pastor waits until after and walks me down to the hallway by the coat hooks and talks to me quiet enough that not one person turns around. That night the catalog is right where I left it, swollen from the steam, and I open it to the luau pages and start circling.

    I have a dining table now. Before this I had a room at the Lariat with a mini fridge and a dog, so I want to be clear about what a table is. There are platters in the top cabinet I’ve never taken down, a folding table still in its plastic in the garage, a box of string lights, a case of mason jars I bought for a reason I could explain to you if you asked me to.

    The catalog still comes. Not to that house, that house sold, but here, with my name on it and a customer number I never gave anybody. Same parrot piñata. Same grass skirts by the dozen. They’ve added a cotton candy machine that does forty and a whole separate edition called Fun & Faith.

    Berkshire Hathaway bought the company in 2012. Dad read the Wall Street Journal every day of his life, stacks of them in the spare room, cups and handles and W’s, hours in the green chair working out where the money was going, and he never made a dime. The one thing Buffett wanted was sitting on the back of our toilet the entire time.

    I want to open a Pilates studio. I have never said that out loud to anybody who could do anything about it, but I can see it better than the room I’m sitting in. Morning light, mirrors on the long wall, rubber floor. Reformers down both sides with the springs color coded, red and blue and yellow, and the sound of a room full of them is the best sound I know: the click of a spring going on, the carriage running out and coming back, forty pounds of somebody’s body moving on a track and not making much noise about it. Water bottles sweating on the sill. Everybody’s shoes in a pile by the door because nobody wears shoes in there. Reformers run four thousand apiece and the company that sells them mails a catalog too.

    Ten reformers. That’s what fits.

    The roster is on a clipboard by the door with the date at the top and ten lines under it, first name and last, and there’s a pen on a string so nobody walks off with it.

    I start at the top.

  • register of actions

    There’s a website in Colorado where you can buy your family a piece at a time. CoCourts, it’s called. You make a login. I made mine at some hour I’m not proud of, picked a username I won’t repeat here, and put money on the account like it was a vending machine. Fourteen dollars and fifty cents of credit. That’s what it costs to go looking for a man the state has been keeping better track of than any of us ever did.

    I wasn’t looking for the record. I was looking for an address. My brother needs to be served papers in a matter concerning our mother’s estate, and to serve a man you have to know where he is, and I don’t, because the people who would know won’t say, and the one who would have told me is the reason for the paperwork. So I typed his name into the box. And the box gave me back seventeen years.

    People of the State of Colorado v. my brother. Eight counts. One county, mostly. He never left the valley that raised him hard, like a dog that won’t quit the yard it was beaten in.

    2005T318. Driving Under Suspension.

    He drove anyway. Of course he drove anyway. Suspension was a word the state used and the road was a fact, and we were raised to trust facts over words. That’s either the whole story or just the first line of it. He was in his twenties. I was already gone from that town by then, or telling myself I was.

    2008M155. Public Indecency.

    There’s a version of this that’s funny. A bad night, a drunk brother, a small county that files paper on everything down to the weather. I keep that version in my pocket. I take it out when the other versions get too loud, and I hold it, and it never quite holds up, but it’s mine and I keep it anyway.

    2013M419. Theft. / 2013CR58. Menacing.

    Two months apart. October, then December of the same bad year. Whatever went that autumn went all the way. And look at the word they chose. Menacing. Even the charge is a euphemism, a word that stands in the doorway with its hat in its hands so the real word doesn’t have to come inside and sit down at the table with the rest of us.

    2015CR142. Drugs.

    Here is the year I could point at my brother and feel clean by comparison, and I want to be honest that I did point, and I did feel it. I was using too. I just had letters after my name that said I was qualified to understand what I was doing to myself. Around the same stretch my sister was working the only economy that would take her in, and we all had our opinions about that, and none of us had a leg to stand on. Three kids from the same house, each of us finding a separate door out of our own skin. His was the one the county wrote down.

    2017M271. Other.

    Other. That’s the county’s shrug. The file exists and the story inside it is sealed or lost or simply never said out loud. I could request it. I keep not requesting it. Every family has an Other, a case type with no name, and I already know more of ours than I can hold.

    2022C88. Protection Order.

    And here she comes. My mother. The last name to enter the record and the only one of us who never carried a case of her own, walking into the docket at the very end the way she walked into every room, late and unarmed. She is not the defendant. She is the reason. The order said he was not to come near her.

    The order was active the day she died. He was in the house. He left her there a day, maybe more, before anyone came.

    There was no investigation. I want to write that sentence flat, no music under it, because that’s how it sits in me. A woman dies with a protection order active against the man in her house, and the county that filed paper on public indecency and a suspended license and every small stupid thing my brother ever did looked at her and filed nothing. My sister prefers it that way. My sister has always preferred him. So the record simply stops, and the last person in it is the one person in it who never did anything but love us badly and stay.

    Every line above ends the same way in the right-hand column. Status. I used to read that word the way you’re supposed to read it, as resolved, as handled, as a door clicking shut on something finished. Now I read it as a verdict on all of us, entered by a clerk who never met a single member of my family and summed us up better than I can:

    Closed. Closed. Closed. Closed. Closed. Closed. Closed. Closed.

    I still have credit on the account. Fourteen fifty, minus what this cost me. Enough to go looking again. I keep the tab open. I tell myself it’s about the address