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I will not bang my roommate. I will not bang my family’s precious chosen one.
Maybe if I keep repeating those two mantras, they’ll actually stick.
9
AUGUST
Even though I grew up in Hope Crest, I don’t have much experience exploring all its shops, tourist destinations, and local watering holes.
Aside from school and waitressing at the pizzeria, my mother didn’t allow me to go too many places. She needed to constantly be tended to, and most times, it felt like I was put on this earth to be her personal servant.
Case in point, the night of the first softball practice during my eighth-grade year. After years of whining about the entry fees and uniform costs, she finally agreed to let me sign up for a team sport. Silly little me, I should have known that her consent was a shield for ulterior motives.
I naively had gotten my hopes up. The night before, I braided my hair extra tight so it would wave just right for my ponytail as I stood at home plate. I set out my uniform, learned the other girls’ names, studied the league rules, and even did a set of pushups in my naivete.
But the next morning, at five a.m., approximately four hours before my first practice, my mother woke me from a deep sleep with an ear-piercing shriek. She claimed that someone had stolen a family heirloom brooch and that we had to find it right away.
Mind you, I never heard of the existence of this brooch until that very moment. Plus, she woke her sleeping child up for no good reason. But that didn’t matter. Into the car we went, searching pawn shops up and down the Pennsylvania highways until the sky was no longer black and shining with stars.
I tried not to cry as I glimpsed the clock turn nine a.m., and then ten, and then hours later, and I knew the practice had come and gone. I knew, in my heart of hearts, that she would never let me go to another one and never intended for me to go in the first place. Instead, I was dragged to shop after shop, where she expected compliments on every useless purchase she made.
If my mother loved anything, it was shopping for and being congratulated on unnecessary things she didn’t need in the slightest. If her ego was boosted, and she thought you were labeling her a genius for her finds, she was on top of the world.
I held my tears at bay in the back seat until the inside of the car was so dark she could no longer see me. Showing weakness only made her scathing side come out to play, and I learned from an early age that it only got worse the more I showed vulnerability.
That’s how my entire childhood had gone, manipulated by a mad woman who pulled the rug out from under me whenever I thought I was finally standing up straight.
For as long as I can remember, it was just my mother and me. She had no more family, and my father was long gone before I ever became conscious of the fact that I should have a father or at least another parent. Mom loved to scream and cry about him sometimes, on very off days, and blame me for some mumbo jumbo of hysterics that I could barely understand. From what I could gather, he took off when she was four months pregnant and never came back.
With no grandparents or aunts and uncles to step in and save me, I was stuck with her. Trapped in a house where her delusional rules went, and that was as good as law. Like having me clean the baseboards of the basement stairs at midnight in December, two days before the state tests to determine whether I could move up to high school. Another time, she pinched the skin on my upper arm so hard I had a bruise for three weeks. Why did she do that? Because I complimented a different mother at school pickup. Apparently, that was an affront to her.
Over and over, she’d manipulate, emotionally abuse, and occasionally pinch or push me because I wasn’t living up to the expectations in her head. What I didn’t understand for the longest time, since I was just a kid, was that those expectations were ever-changing and completely absurd.
To this day, I have no idea what was clinically wrong with my mother. She never bothered to visit a doctor or therapist to find out because, in her mind, she was perfect. Admitting there was any flaw or defect would have destroyed her entire model of thinking, so it went unchecked. I couldn’t even guess at this point, but there was something wrong with her because mothers didn’t just act like she did toward her child.
The only reason she allowed me to work at Hope Pizza was because it brought in a little extra money for our household, which she said I owed because of how much I cost her. Hiding my wages from her was never really an option, even though I’d had a twenty here or there in my shoe or bra to squirrel away.
So, to say that I haven’t branched out into the Hope Crest community would be an understatement. If anyone in town remembers me, it’s because I worked at the pizzeria. I never had many friends and lost any contact with the few I had when I went to college.
Which is why I have to pull up directions on my phone to get to the office of the lawyer my mother hired to draw up her last will and testament. God knows when that was, and she surely never spoke to me about her wishes.
By the time I close my car door and walk up to the entrance, my hands are sweating and my heart is a lump in my throat. This is the last time I’ll ever have to deal with anything concerning my mother, and I’m thankful for that.
But it’s still another moment of my life dedicated to her when I thought I’d finally be free. Doing this, settling her will, is like ripping the final bandage off a healed wound; I just have to get through the momentary sting of pain to get to the other side.
As I walk into the small-town law office, I’m reminded that these people will have a certain opinion of my mother and, therefore, of me.
“I’m here to see Mr. Malloy,” I say to the mid-fifties receptionist, tapping away at a computer that looks to be from the nineties.
She blinks up at me, a genuine smile on her face. “August Percy?”
“That’s me,” I confirm.
“I’ll let him know you’re here.”
Not two minutes later, she’s leading me back to a wood-paneled office that smells of tobacco and some kind of meat. Marty Malloy sits behind a large oak desk, his round glasses illuminating cloudy blue eyes, and the man can’t be more than a hundred pounds soaking wet.
“August, come on in.” He waves me over, gesturing to a leather chair in front of his desk.
