This week I’ve been patching together a short story, with characters tapping me on the shoulder throughout this past week. The following is my work from this afternoon—an excerpt of the story discussing Len, the lead character’s mom. Again, a first draft, sloppy and unfinished. But something.
//capacity #005 – Lenore (Katherine and Jer’s mom)
When the pain was too much to work, Mom tiptoed around the house in a slurry of pain management meds and the occasional Lyrica hangover, shiny with Nivea Crème and smelling of nail polish remover and A535. Dad’s presence was nil outside of his steady child support payments, and due to the seriousness of Mom’s injury, she was never canned, no matter how many sick days she took.
“It’s all pensionable time,” she would mutter to herself as she headed back to bed on the mornings she called in sick, pallid and droopy from muscle relaxants, and the miracle of a union job’s unflagging tick upward in her pay scale was never denied her.
As such, we weren’t broke. She bought us things. We had the stuff that made our childhoods slide by a little softer. A computer. Gaming systems. New bikes and skateboards. Our running shoes were never too off-brand. Like I said, it could have been worse.
Mom wasn’t cruel or even embarrassing, and no, it hasn’t escaped me that I would feel sympathy toward the same shitty breaks in the lives of other people. But toward her, and her broken bones and bad men, Judith Krantz paperbacks and Robert Palmer CDs, I felt nothing but contempt. What’s worse is I was more embarrassed about living the pissy daughter–single mother cliché than I was about being such an asshole.
-lh (01.14.22)
Lindsay Hutton 