Redemption (16 page)

Mae

was worried about Grandma Lannert. She hadn’t been as active or talkative for the last few months. I knew she was getting old. I just wished I could’ve kept her young forever. I loved the way she smelled, like Avon, and she still wore rouge and red lipstick. I would sit with her for hours, and our time together was peaceful. She would tell me how much she loved me, and we would daydream about what kind of life I might have in the future. She always said she wanted to live long enough to watch me graduate from Ritenour and then Mizzou.

She used to tell me, “You’d make a great lawyer because you’re so smart. Or maybe you should be a journalist because you write so well. Or I know … You should be a doctor because you take such great care of me.”

I was at her house almost every day. I’d go over in the mornings before school just to make sure she was getting along okay and to drop off those insulin needles. One morning, I headed to Mee Maw’s house as usual when Dad told me to stop—he was going to check on her and drop off the needles.

“Go on to school,” he said, totally confusing me. But my mind was occupied with other things. It was prom night: May 6, 1989.

I got in my car and went to Ritenour like he said. But I didn’t feel right all day. I was very worried about Mee Maw, and I didn’t know why. I had a friend pretend to call the school to say I had a doctor’s appointment so I could get an absence pass. Right before lunch, I walked through the school doors.

I drove home and found Mee Maw’s little Chrysler LeBaron in her driveway like it was supposed to be. She rarely drove it, and I would’ve worried if she had. I thought I was being silly, so I walked into our house. I felt stupid for worrying so much. Dad had said he was going to check on her, so surely he did. I needed to get over myself. I started cleaning up our house.

At 3 p.m., one of my grandmother’s friends called while I was doing dishes. She told me she’d been trying to reach Mae all day. This alarmed me, but I was in the middle of cleaning up a big mess in the kitchen. Dad wasn’t home, so I sent Christy over there.

She came running back. Grandma was passed out on the floor with the TV on, and she had urinated all over herself. I called 911 and bolted out the door to be with her. Christy waited outside until the ambulance came. I called Dad and told him to meet us at the hospital. He said he was coming home first. So I left Christy there to go with Dad, and I followed the ambulance in my car.

When Grandma arrived at the hospital, she seemed much better. She was talking to me and asking for things. She was cussing out the nurses, saying, “I’m cold, damn it!” and “My husband died in this place!”

Her feistiness was one of her best attributes. These were good signs as far as I could tell. The doctor said she had hypoglycemia and needed fluids. He was going to keep her overnight, but she would be fine.

Dad said, “Go ahead and get to the prom. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He’d told me I was allowed to stay out all night.

At that point, I was shaken up, but I wasn’t worried about her anymore. I was looking forward to going to the prom dateless with a girlfriend, but she canceled on me at the last minute. I was dating some guy at the time, but it was nothing serious and I didn’t want to go with him. I decided I didn’t want to go at all. I had a dress, shoes, and everything, and I never wore them. I only went to the after-prom parties.

This was one of the rare nights that I drank. I’d had a rough day, and I pounded my liquor. By pounding, I mean I had one beer and one vodka shot. I was wasted. I waited several hours until I sobered up, then drove home. I felt nauseous, so I went to bed.

At 6 a.m., Dad came into my room. “If you want to see your grandma alive, you better get to the hospital right now.” He was not worried or upset; he was just blank. He seemed annoyed at me for my obvious hangover, and I didn’t understand why. He’d seen me drink before.

I threw on some jeans and a button-down shirt and drove to the hospital. I was shocked to find out that Mee Maw was in intensive care. She was hooked up to several tubes and machines. I wasn’t eighteen yet, and I wasn’t supposed to go in the ICU. But I had to be with her. I couldn’t understand how this had happened. Just like that, she was lying in a bed looking like she was about to die.

I thought,
Did someone do something to her?

I even wondered what could’ve happened the previous morning when Dad had been in charge of her needles. He had been asking her for $20,000 to start a new company, and she’d been telling him no. Ever since we moved to her street, she had wised up about his drinking. She could finally see some of his wrongdoings. As a result, Dad and Grandma had been arguing recently. She was shortening her purse strings, and he knew it. I worried that our house might have to go on the market because Dad couldn’t afford it along with his drinking habit.

All of that aside, I was devastated to see her like that. I busted into her room; I got as close to her as I could. She still smelled nice, like my Mee Maw. Then, in all of my seventeen-year-old wisdom, I started flipping out. The rest of the family was in the waiting room when I yelled, “What happened to you? You can’t leave us! I can’t do this without you! I can’t handle it!”

She couldn’t speak to me because she had a tube down her throat, but she was conscious. Her eyes went wide, and her chest rose. My outburst upset her, and her heart rate monitor went berserk. The nurses pulled me out of the room, and I got into trouble. I decided to walk down to the hospital chapel, where I lost it. I cried and cried and cried.

I prayed to God:
It’s selfish for me to want her to stay when she’s suffering so much, but I can’t keep this family together if she leaves
.

I knew something terrible would happen without Grandma Lannert around to talk sense into all of us. She was dependable and reliable. She was the only person who really loved us. She was strong. She was the only consequence I could hold over my dad’s head. In the entire world, he cared only about one person’s opinion: Mae Lannert’s.

I took a deep breath. I thought about right and wrong. I left the chapel and bypassed the nurses and the rest of the family. I grabbed her hand. I had prayed to God about this moment, and I understood that she needed peace. Her comfort was more important than mine. I would have to learn to live with whatever God had planned for us.

It hurt me to say the words to her: “Okay, if you want to go, go.” I kissed her forehead. She sighed deeply with a tear in her eye.

I was holding her hand, and just like that, Grandma Lannert died quietly.

By the time the nurses got there, I was still holding her hand, sobbing. Christy was there, and she cried hard, too. Eventually, we hugged each other. Dad wasn’t there.

I drove home and told him, “You need to go to the hospital. Grandma died.”

He seemed surprised. He wanted to know how I knew.

“I was there.”

Then he panicked, even though he must’ve known this was coming. “What do you mean she’s dead!? How do you know?” He put his hands on my shoulders, and he shook me back and forth hard. “How do you know?!!!”

“Go to the hospital,” I repeated as I walked out our door and went inside Grandma’s house. I needed to be with her there. I wanted to be in the one place in the world where I’d had so many happy memories. I lay on her floor, and I didn’t try to stop my tears.

———

A piece of my heart died with my grandmother, and once again my mom was not there for me. A few months earlier, she had moved halfway around the world to Guam, where John, who was in the air force, had an assignment. We didn’t want to go; being with her was a lonely option. With Dad there was yelling and screaming, but at least there was something. His displays at least showed some level of involvement in our lives. Her silence toward us was nothing, and there wasn’t anything worse than nothing. I couldn’t blame her for wanting to run away from her family. She had two rowdy, troubled teenage girls who didn’t fit into her dreams of happily-ever-after with her new husband. Mom saw leaving as a way to finally find peace and happiness. We saw it as more abandonment. Right before she left, she took Christy and me to a St. Louis Cardinals game and then to lunch. There is a picture of the two of us standing in front of a downtown fountain with our arms outstretched wide. We were showing off, like
nana-nana-boo-boo; we’ll be fine without you
. We were mean to her—ignoring her the whole time, making awful comments, and acting like we didn’t care what she did. We were kids, and we didn’t know how to tell her we needed her. We didn’t know how to beg her to stay and please take better care of us. So we pushed her away. We were nasty to her, but we were going to miss her more than she would ever know.

Mom called me from Guam to tell me how sorry she was that Grandma had died.

I didn’t want to hear from her. I said, “I bet you’re glad she’s dead.” Then I hung up.

Dad was still on and off with Rosa. He’d had a married girlfriend named Deborah Jean for a while and had begged her to marry him, but she wouldn’t leave her husband. Her husband came to Dad’s workplace and created a huge scene, so that relationship ended. Dad always made his way back to Rosa. She was a good person. When he fell apart after Grandma died, Rosa helped him plan her funeral. She took care of Dad during those dark days.

Despite Rosa’s best efforts, Dad’s downward spiral took a nosedive. Without Grandma Lannert in the world, he was volatile. He was never at peace.

I told him that Christy and I needed dresses and shoes for the funeral, and he gave us his credit card. He often gave it to me. He told me to spend only $50 on everything for both of us. He barely looked me in the eye; he was being mean and cheap. I worried myself sick when I spent $75, buying the least expensive outfits I could find anywhere. It turned out he didn’t even notice or care. It was like he enjoyed giving me a hard time.

At the funeral, he was beside himself. He knew I smoked pot, and he asked me if I had any. I didn’t, so he got pissed off. He actually made me leave my grandmother’s funeral to get weed from the dealer I knew. I felt I had to because he acted like he might create a scene. On my way back to the funeral, I stopped at White Castle. I put the weed in the white sack so I could pass the drugs to him discreetly.

Directly in front of the funeral home, I was pulled over by the cops for running a red light. That’s when I lost it emotionally. I was a crying mess, and the cop took pity on me. All I got was a warning, and the officer didn’t even glance at my White Castle bag.

When I pulled into the parking lot, a crowd of people stood there watching.

Dad marched up to me and said, “How dare you get in trouble like that at your grandmother’s funeral!”

I couldn’t believe him. I never would have been on the road if he hadn’t made me buy him weed. I said, “How dare you ask for this.” I shoved the white paper bag into his hands.

Christy

wo days later, Dad took off on a fishing trip. He would be gone for my seventeenth birthday, so he gave me my present early—my grandma’s Chrysler LeBaron. I wasn’t sorry to see him go, but I was terrified of what he’d be like when he returned. It would be just the two of us living in St. John—Christy had told me she had to get away. She was moving back to Aunt Deanna’s.

I hated to lose Christy, too. I didn’t want to be alone. But as awful as Aunt Deanna was, she was better than Dad. I encouraged her to go. Shortly after Christy moved, I wouldn’t even speak to my aunt. She had a husband named Randy at the time, and she was cheating on him. Randy had come home one day and found a used condom on the floor. Randy thought that was strange because he’d had a vasectomy. So Aunt Deanna used me as her scapegoat.

She called me and said, “Stacey, I’m putting Randy on the phone so you can tell him that this condom is yours.” She breathed heavily, clearly in the middle of a fight.

I covered for her skankiness. I told Randy that I had been over there with my boyfriend. I lied and said the condom must’ve been mine. Then I asked to speak to Deanna.

“Don’t you ever do that to me again,” I said, fuming. “I like Randy, and what you’re doing is wrong.”

I hung up and took a deep breath. I wasn’t surprised, really. I had so much to worry about that I told myself to leave this one alone. Aunt Deanna wasn’t worth getting worked up over.

———

Aunt Deanna was hardly the good influence that Christy needed. Not that I expected her to be. Christy was already skipping school when she lived at Dad’s house, but at least he’d give her a hard time about it—and sometimes a smack in the head. Deanna, on the other hand, encouraged Christy to become a delinquent. Christy was smart. Like me, she was capable of higher-than-average grades. But by age fourteen, she no longer cared. We were lucky if she brought home Cs. Aunt Deanna had three kids when Christy lived there. She would ask my sister to stay home all day and babysit while she went out and had affairs behind Randy’s back.

When Christy blossomed into a teenager, she became only more beautiful. She had thick blond hair with gold and red highlights. Aunt Deanna taught Christy all about makeup, and Christy’s blue eyes just seemed to glow. She was gorgeous. Christy—taking after Deanna—was aware of how boys and men stared at her, and she flaunted it sometimes. Other times, she seemed self-conscious and almost ashamed about her perfectly shaped body. In that way, she was just like me. We’d heard our dad call us worthless enough times to believe it. And anytime he called our mother plain or ugly, he might as well have said those words to us.

With Deanna, though, Christy could be completely self-absorbed. Deanna cared only about herself, and her attitude rubbed off on Christy. My sister turned into an out-of-control fourteen-year-old; she didn’t need much prodding to go over the edge. Still, I tried to do what I could for her, and I visited Christy often. Once, she called me begging me to see her. I thought something was wrong—maybe she was feeling bad about Grandma or maybe Aunt Deanna had done something.

I dropped my homework and drove over, thinking I was going to take her to the pizza parlor for some one-on-one time. But on the way to the restaurant, she had me pick up one of her friends. Then she had me pick up another. Once we arrived, the girls huddled together and ignored me the whole time. I was huffy, but I tried to give her some slack. Christy didn’t have it easy.

A few days later, she called and asked me to take her to the pizza parlor again. As much as I loved her, I wasn’t a sucker. I told her no.

She didn’t fault me for it. I knew that no matter what, she still had my back. And if I ever needed someone to defend me, I could call on my strong, courageous little sister. I remembered when we lived on the square in Highland with Mom; Christy once came home with a big bruise on her tanned face. She seemed kind of proud of how she got it: an older girl’s boyfriend had been hanging out with my boyfriend. One day for no reason this girl—who was twenty-one—assumed her man was after me. She had the audacity to come knocking on our front door. Christy was home when the girl told her, “You tell your bitch of a sister I’m looking for her.”

Christy stood up straighter and stuck her chest out. She looked this stranger in the eye and said, “Tell her yourself, you fat bitch.”

The woman clocked Christy in the face, and Christy clocked her back. Luckily, neither of them got hurt too badly. Mom was livid about the situation and pressed charges against the twenty-one-year-old. Then she blamed me for the whole mess. I got yelled at because Christy got punched for me. Mom was mad because I had put Christy in a dangerous situation.