Mary’s room was small and musty. The old iron bed frame had once been painted white, but now the peeling and flaking showed as much brown rust spots as old white paint. The tattered quilt was the source of most of the musty smell, along with a few forgotten shirts hanging in the closet. All of the drawers in the chest of drawers stuck. The bottom of one drawer was hanging down, and one of the glass knobs was missing. It had been replaced with a screw.
The paint on the wooden window frame was chipped and peeling like the rest of the house. Mary sat on the bed and stared out of the window across the barren brown field. The tree line was several hundred yards away, across what used to be a cotton field.
Against her will, her thoughts turned to home. The last screeching, blistering, screaming, spitting, name-calling battle with her mother. After that, she couldn’t take it any more. She had left and never looked back. That had been five years ago.
Suddenly, Mary starting sobbing. She couldn’t stop. A lifetime of disappointment, deprivation and disorder spilled out. She couldn’t remember a time when she had felt loved and protected. She had never known a sense of continuity, rules or harmony. Life was one broken, high-pitched cataclysm after another. Her father was a hopeless drunk and drunk because he was hopeless. He was a failure and took it out on his wife and daughter. He couldn’t stand it, either, and deserted them both when Mary was only three. No one had heard from him since. Her mother blamed Mary. “He couldn’t stand you always being underfoot, and so he left me,” her mother scolded. Then it was her mother’s turn to turn to alcohol for comfort. Although Mary was still very young, she was bright enough to see that her mother was heading down the same path as her father. That despair led to rebellion in her pre-teen and early teen years. A teen-ager’s natural rebellion was magnified a thousandfold. Even when her mother’s reprimands, demands and commands were justified, Mary saw them as willful tyranny. It became a vicious cycle. Her mother would give an order, Mary would disobey, her mother would scold and punish and issue more commands for Mary to disobey.
She had left home. Life on the road is not merciful to homeless teens. Then she had found Joe. Now, even that small, faint glimmer of humanity was taken away.
And so she sobbed.
