Author’s note

I’ve finished writing for the month of November, because I’ve got to go do shit, but I’m not finished writing my story. So come back in December and see how far I can get in two months. Maybe three.

Day Fourteen

Then it was Cathy’s turn again. Richard called her up, apoplectic. ‘Come and get your child,” he spat into the phone.

“What’s she done now?”

“She and her hillbilly fuckstain boyfriend absconded to the beach for the weekend, on my money, leaving me here to fix her computer for thirty-six hours straight, and costing me well over $350, and when I asked for a simple favor, they blew me off. I’ve had enough of this blatant disrespect.”

Cathy felt exasperated already. “And what kind of simple favor was this?”

He sighed. “I only asked them to stop on the way into town and pick up a few groceries so that Star would have something to eat the next day. That’s all. Dickhead was apparently all tuckered out from a rough day of self-indulgence, and couldn’t be bothered. Maybe he couldn’t wait to get rid of her.”

Cathy was giving Scootie a flea bath. The little dog stood in the bathroom sink, resigned, waiting for the moment Cathy would let go of her. She gave every indication that she would immediately jump off the counter, but Cathy wasn’t fooled. Scootie couldn’t jump down from that height, and would instead cower at the edge, shivering with the cold, until Cathy grabbed her again and put one body part at a time under the warm running water. She listened, barely, with the phone jammed on her shoulder. Scootie took up most of her attention, and Richard sounded more whiny than incensed. Maybe he’d already medicated himself past caring, and was just spouting a speech prepared when he was more upset. He didn’t sound upset. He sounded weary.

“That ignorant scumbag has proved that he has no interest in being a member of the team. And when I think that he has taken her to zero meetings since she’s been out of rehab, and encouraged her to lie about it.”

Cathy measured out some foul-smelling flea shampoo into her hands sand smeared it over Scootie’s back. The dog looked at her with pleading eyes. “I know, I know,” she soothed. Scootie thought No, you don’t know. You’ve never had that stuff in your eyes. You’ve never had to lick it off your fur. You’re a mean, heartless person, and I don’t like you.

“Add to that the dishonesty of taking money that was given to them for two days at the beach,” Richard continued. “Seeing that there was money left over, they chose to take a third day without asking permission, rather than returning on schedule as agreed, and giving me back the unspent money. Me, the owner of said money.”

“Mmmm, poor baby,” Cathy muttered, wondering if maybe Richard would think she was commiserating with him.

“This proves to me that this fuckface piece of shit hasn’t changed one bit. The moment Star moves off to Meth County with this scumbag, the moment she finishes probation, he’s going to lock in her dependence on him by feeding her lots more addictive drugs, and maybe even finally killing her.”

Scootie finally made a lunge for the edge of the sink. Cathy grabbed her back. She was slippery, and kept struggling. “Oh, come on,” she told the dog. Taking in what Richard was saying, she said, “You don’t think he’s going to get her addicted on purpose just so he can control her. That’s just too malevolent for a kid his age.”

But he did think just that. “I can’t be a part of it. It’s killing me to stand by and watch it happen.”

Cathy began the laborious process of rinsing her dog, sticking each little part under the water and rubbing the soap out of her fur. She resisted strongly any time her head got near the water, and Cathy had to struggle. “Well, what the hell were you thinking when you gave them money to go to the beach?”

She could hear him pull himself up. “I was under the impression that it might be okay for her to date that zit-faced piece of crap, because sometimes it seems like his heart is in the right place. But it has become eminently clear to me that not only is it not okay, but it is rather something to worry about.”

Cathy thought of all the supportive things Spike said when she was in rehab. Scootie continued to struggle, and finally Cathy gently pulled her entire head under the water. The dog acted like she was being drowned, and Cathy had to suppress a giggle. “Silly, you’re okay.” The dog responded, I should report you. Canine abuse! Murder! Oh, the stinging! There’s soap in my eyes! There’s water in my eyes! And up my nose! And you got some in my ears! I’m going to get an infection! She sneezed. “Poor baby,” Cathy responded, washing the soap from her neck fur.

To Richard she said, “Look, I know he’s not the lawyer we imagined her marrying, but he’s snot a bad kid. I think he’s been a good influence on her while she’s been in trouble with the law and in rehab. He’s encouraged her progress. I remember your story about Spike giving Star the drug test and yelling at her about jeopardizing everything they’d been working toward. Doesn’t that count for something?”

“It most certainly does not. That was just a smokescreen, something he did in order to get her back under his control, and out of ours.” Cathy dunked the dog again, and noticed that she’d started shivering. Fright or cold? She barely listened. “His encouragement of her missing meetings in favor of some good time or other is genuinely frightening, because both you and I know that these meetings are all that stand between her and relapse. His lack of support for getting her to these meetings tells me all I need to know about how their life will be together.”

Cathy capped the flea shampoo and reached for the baby shampoo, for that deep clean that leaves you feeling fresh. Any smell is better than flea soap. Scootie disagreed. “You know, that’s not going to be our problem when they get married. They’ll both learn, just like every young couple does, that life is made up of screaming babies and overdue bills, and they’ll just fucking grow up, won’t they?”

He paused to hyperventilate. “Not only do I not approve of her marrying him, but I will not dignify such a ceremony with my presence. I am ashamed to tell my own family about this turn of events. I do not approve of having this baby, and wish with all my heart that she would change her mind about keeping it while there is still time.”

Scootie struggled mightily, hoping that her slippery coat might hasten her escape. Cathy held on tight and soaped her up, winding her tail around her finger as she thought of what to say to Richard. “This is your daughter you’re talking about. I know you wish she could stay your little girl, but she’s going to grow up. And that means she’s going to make mistakes. Maybe you should look at it this way – she’s making all her big mistakes early, and life can only get better from here.”

He laughed dryly. “You have a seemingly endless ability to see the bright side of things. Well, I don’t. But I don’t care as much as it sounds. The child is dead to me. You may care, however, and maybe you can talk some sense into her. I’m done trying.” Cathy zoned out as he continued to rant. He got so stiff and formal when he was upset. He sounded like he was reading from a script. She could only listen so long, no matter how hard she tried to concentrate. “From influencing her to quit school, to the drugs, to the baby, I have seen this man do nothing but limit her options in life, right from the very beginning and continuing to this day. He has worked to alienate her from her family in every possible way. She can no longer avoid being an illiterate minimum wage slave with no future, living in a trailer park unless his family shits him another house.”

“Why do you blame him?” Cathy stuck the dog under the tap and started soothing the soap off her back. “She’s a big girl. She quit school herself, she got into drugs herself, she got pregnant herself. Okay, it takes two, but she’s the one who wasn’t using contraceptives. You should put more of the blame on her. In fact, I think she’s taking after her father more than following orders from her boyfriend.”

He overlooked that statement. He was on a roll. “Who flashed around the coke money to attract a robbery by one of his own customers? Who made sure that his home became a known drug location, and known to the police, not just in his own but in three surrounding towns, which ultimately led to felony charges for them both? Who has worked nonstop to damage her relationship with her family? Huh? And where was he when she was in jail and needed to be bonded out? Was there ever a hint from him that she was doing too many drugs? Or did he get the drugs for her, to increases her dependency on him? Where was he when she needed a ton of money to get help with the problems he created? Was he out raising money to help? Was he planning to help at all?” He was screeching.

“You’re beginning to scare me.” Cathy turned Scootie around and stuck her head under the tap again.

“She’s totally turned her back on us at the word of that pig. We are the only people who were there to love her and pick her up and set things right from her very firsts booboo, all the way up to getting her into a good rehab for help with her coke habit.”

Cathy turned the water off and stepped away to grab a towel. Scootie crept to the edge of the counter and turned to look at her with big, beseeching eyes. Have you had enough fun torturing me now? What do you think you’re going to do with that towel? Noooo! “Every time you have anything to do with her you give her a mixed message. ‘Here, go to the beach on my money, you’ve been a bad girl?’ Actually, Richard, I’m beginning to think that you’re the one who needs therapy.”

“I’m angry because I feel that I spent eighteen years s of my life and God only knows how much money so she can marry someone whose biggest aspiration is to be a bail bondsman and bounty hunter, besides clearly being one of the most dishonest people I know, and his established lack of desire to be a team player. He will relapse, and he’ll take Star with him. I see no good at all in their future together. Her slavish obedience to him reminds me a lot of Charlie Manson and his gang of girls.”

Scootie lunged out of her grasp and sprang to the floor, falling on her face on the wet tiles. “Oh you idiot,” she said, bending down to scoop her up into the towel. “He’s just a kid, for God’s sake. They’re both just kids. They’ll grow up.”

“Don’t you believe it. Beneath that ignorant hillbilly veneer, Spike is the same drug-dealing thug he always was – just without the drugs – for now. If you believe him, since no one has been testing him. I find it hard to believe. Star is marrying her former coke dealer. The boy’s a drug dealer, and a heavy user, and has consistently refused treatment for his coke habit. And this indicates an eighty percent recidivism rate, I’ll remind you. Ninety-three percent for meth, if God forbid they’ve gotten into that.”

Cathy sat on the toilet seat, towel drying Scootie, who continued casting miserable glances at her. “What makes you think they’d be into meth?”

“It’s easier to get. And if we know nothing else about them both, we know that they always take the easy path. The path to hell,” he said bitterly. “They were arrested with thirteen guns, did you know that?”

“No.” Thirteen? Wow.

“A MAC-10 was one of them. It’s a machine gun. And they had an eighth ounce of coke on them. That’s a lot.”

“Star said there was hardly any coke in the bag.”

“Hah. An eighth was a week’s supply back when I was having a problem with it. And expensive? You don’t want to know. Spike happened to have let slip that they used that much every day, and had just sold off the bulk of the coke they had in the house the day before they were arrested. I could go on.”

“Oh, please don’t. Look, I’ve got to go now. Scootie needs attention.”

He went on like he didn’t hear her. “The biggest favor she can do herself and her family is to get that man out of our lives in a clear and convincing way. Then she can get back to rebuilding her options and have a chance at a normal life. If, on the other hand, she insists on destroying her life, please tell her not to look to me for approval of – or financing of – life-choices that I consider remarkably bad judgment at a minimum.”

“As you should.” Scootie was mostly dry on the surface, but was now shivering violently in Cathy’s lap. She put the dog down, and Scootie immediately ran around the room, pawing and leaping as if she’d been kept captive and was suddenly free.

“She turned her back on her family at the word of her ex-coke dealer boyfriend and future wife beater. I find this unforgivable, and while it saddens me, I will not back down like I always do. I have the right to think that all of her plans are a terrible idea, and that her boyfriend is still a scumbag, despite lip service to the contrary, and have the right – indeed the obligation – as a parent to say so.”

Cathy assumed that the unforgivable thing still referred to Spike’s not getting the groceries. How childish her ex could be. “So, do you want me down there this afternoon to get her and her things, then?”

He hesitated. “Well, she’s sleeping. I’d call tomorrow and see if I haven’t decided to give her one more chance.”

Scootie clawed at the door until the latch opened, and ran out of the room, wet pawprints scattering thru the door and into the hall. “Yeah. Okay. Whatever. Just keep me informed.” Tho she didn’t really want to be.

go to tomorrow’s writing

Day Thirteen

Cathy and Star stayed in the women’s center waiting room for an hour. They were the only ones there, and they’d arrived fifteen minutes before Star’s appointment. But still they were made to wait. Star acted as if it were natural, but Cathy chafed under the implied insult – their time wasn’t valuable, even if there was nothing going on back there except gossip and socialization. When they were finally escorted to a room by a woman with a clipboard, Cathy noticed with annoyance that all the examination rooms were empty. But she kept telling herself that this was Star’s show, and swallowed her bitterness.

They’d come for a sonogram, in order to find out how far along Star’s pregnancy was. But the first thing the woman told them was that there were no sonograms done on Tuesdays. She laughed as she told them – you sillies, of course there’re no sonograms.

“First we have to get all the paperwork filled out,” she said. The room they were in wasn’t an examination room, but an office with an empty desk and a computer. The woman sat them down and proceeded to ask for ID and Star’s insurance card, and began the long, boring process of assignment of benefits, whereby Star committed to having her baby at that center, upon delivery of which they would bill the insurance for the procedure. It meant that she could come in for however many appointments they might schedule for her during the course of her pregnancy, and she wouldn’t have to shell out a co-pay every time. Cathy thought this was very sensible. She had been worrying how she could get money out of Richard every few weeks for Star’s medical bills. He seemed less and less likely to want to help her, and she could see trouble down the road. But now they didn’t have to worry about it. Insurance has its uses, she thought.

Instead of a sonogram, a nurse did a manual examination of Star after the paperwork was finished and they’d waited another twenty minutes, forced to watch a soap opera. “Six weeks,” she said when she’d finished poking Star’s abdomen. “Come back in two weeks and we’ll get that sonogram and some blood work.”

Cathy drove star back to rehab mostly in silence. It was early rush hour, and there was traffic the whole way. Star was thinking about how big her baby was, the size of a peanut, and Cathy was thinking about having to stand the medical people’s unthinking rudeness for another seven and a half months.

Richard certainly was having trouble with financing Star’s pregnancy. “I’m really sorry I didn’t cut off her insurance the last time she moved up to stay with you. Then she’d be faced with a little taste of the true cost of having a baby, and maybe then she’d see that an abortion is the only thing that can help her now.”

“Richard, I’m not going to talk to you about this. You’re just making me mad. I don’t want her getting an abortion. And I really resent it that you seem to have wanted me to have had one when I was pregnant with Star.”

“We wouldn’t be having these troubles now if you had.”

Cathy remained silent.

“Do you really think she’s emotionally ready to handle the responsibilities of child-rearing?” he continued. “The reality is that over half of American marriages end in divorce, with financial stress and the stress of raising children the two main reasons given. Whose problem is it if it all fails? Yours? Mine? Hers? She couldn’t even feed or house herself without either crime or charity.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“Why can’t I get sick of singing my warnings into the breeze only to watch every one of them come sickeningly true? I’ve been pissing into the wind trying to warn Star, and I’m tired of having a face full of piss.”

“Yeah, like you listened to your parents’ warnings at that age.”

He ignored it. “One thing is for certain. By my reckoning, she’s costing me close to ten thousand dollars – money that was supposed to lasts until my retirement. I’m going to want that money back, because I can see now that she was just playing me like a fiddle to keep her skinny ass out of jail. I have no confidence that she’s not just playing the people in rehab the same way she was doing me, and she’ll turn her back on sobriety the moment her probation’s over with. I’m sure of it.”

“I don’t know. I don’t get the feeling that she’s bamboozling anyone. I think she’s trying. I think she understands how she got herself to this place.” Cathy was getting into the idea of persuading Richard to go easy on their child. “I see her taking her situation seriously and working out the implications for herself. I think being pregnant is being very good for her. She’s growing up really fast now that she’s got responsibility.”

Richard didn’t agree. “In my opinion, anyone who thinks that the child having a baby with and marrying her former coke dealer is good thing has an imagination that’s far too elastic for me.”

“Well, good thing you won’t have to do anything about it when she gets out. Gray and I are planning to go get her from rehab and deliver her straight down to where Spike’s living. Then they can arrange with his parents and grandparents to get married just as soon as they can, and learn to live with their decisions.”

But it didn’t turn out that way.

After Star had been in rehab for a total of six weeks, the staff decided she’d had enough treatment, and prescribed weekly 12-step meetings and a once-a-week therapy session back at the rehab center. Then they discharged her. Everyone warned her away from going back to her father’s house, because he was a current drug user, and it would be dangerous for her recovery to be around anyone who was on drugs.

But she was unwilling to go back to Cathy and Gray. “Spike says she doesn’t want me to live in the city. It’s too dangerous.” She was on the phone to Cathy from rehab the night before she was due to get out.

“So, are you going to move straight in with Spike, then?”

Star paused. “Well, that’s kind off hard to say right now,” she said finally. Cathy could tell she was trying to decide how much to tell her. “See, Spike’s grandma kind of thinks it was me who got Spike into drugs in the first place, and they kind of don’t want me around.”

“But that’s preposterous!” Cathy fumed. “It was his stuff, wasn’t it? He was selling it, not you, right?”

“Yeah, but I don’t think they believe that. He might have told them the drugs were someone else’s.”

Cathy could see it now. Their innocent baby boy, led astray by that scheming whore, Star. She felt like calling up Grandma and having a talk with her.

“You don’t have to call them up and straighten them out, Mom,” Star continued. “I’m working on fixing everything, and it would really fuck things up if you stuck your nose in.”

She knew her mother too well. “Well, how long do you think it will take before you’re ready to move in with him? And what are you going to do in the meantime?” Cathy noticed that there was no mention of marriage.

“Well, I’ve got some friends I can stay with.”

“That’s not an option, Star. The people in rehab want you in a stable environment, and staying with friends is just asking for trouble. These would be drug friends, wouldn’t they?”

“Yeah, well, they’re not using at the moment. What happened to me and Spike kind of scared them.”

Sure. “Why don’t you come up here, live in the same room you were in before, get a job, and start getting ready to have your baby?”

Star sighed. “I told you already, Mom. I just don’t like Gray, and you make me really uncomfortable with all your questions. Beside, you make too much noise when you get up in the morning, and I can never get enough sleep. And there’s the fact that you keep it way too cold in the winter, and too hot in the summer. I’m never comfortable there.”

“Fine.” Arguing with a child. She felt like asking how comfortable she would be back in jail. But what’s the point? “You haven’t made a decision about where you’re going to go tomorrow. I’ll be coming to get you, and you need a proper place to stay.”

“I guess I’ll stay with Dad,” she said at last.

Cathy held her breath. “With your dad,” she repeated. “But everyone has said how bad an idea that is, and I agree. He’s not a good influence. I worry about him, I don’t think you should have anything to do with him. And he doesn’t approve of what you’re going thru right now, and wouldn’t be positive about it. I’m not even sure he’d take you at this point.”

“Yes he would. I talked to him just a few minutes ago. He says I can have my old room back, and he’ll fix my computer, and d he’ll even pay for my probation.”

“You mean he wants you back?” Evidently he wanted her back badly enough to bribe her.

“Yes. He says I’ve suffered enough, being in rehab, and besides, he needs me to make dinner and keep house for him.”

“Well, I won’t argue that he needs someone around to take care of him, but, Sweetie, he’s using, and you’re not supposed to be anywhere around anyone who’s using. What does Spike think of you moving back in with him?”

“He’d prefer it over my staying with you. Mom, I can take care of myself. I’ve figured it all out, and he’s no threat to my sobriety. Really. Trust me.”

So Cathy called up Richard, looking for answers. And came away as confused as ever.

“I can provide her with the stable home life she needs,” he insisted.

“Jesus, Richard, you sound schizophrenic. What were you just telling me the other day about never wanting to see her again?”

“I have decided that I can influence her better to do the right thing by providing the things she needs. That is, of courses, until she crosses me again, and then she’s out in the street.”

“Yeah, that’s stable, all right. And you’re going to continue your surveillance of her?”

Damn straight I am. Don’t think I trust her ass far as I can throw her. But I really think that being in a familiar environment, after jail and rehab, is the best thing that I can do for her.”

“Are you going to make her get a job?”

“Of course. There’s a supermarket not a mile from here. I can drop her off and she can walk home after her shift.”

“And she’ll be coming home to an empty house, won’t she?”

“Well, yes, but she’ll have to call me every hour and check in.”

“That worked so well last time you tried it.”

Star moved back in with her father, and Cathy didn’t hear from either of them for weeks, except when it was time to go to the doctor for the sonogram. Star wouldn’t let Cathy come into the examination room with her, and she had to sit out in the waiting room and watch soap operas again, unable to turn the TV off because other waiting patients were wrapped up in it. The only satisfaction Cathy got out of the visit was hearing Star say that she heard her baby’s heartbeat and almost started to cry. It was something. But even that was ruined by all the slick commercial come-ons they handed out at the end of the visit. Infant formula, life insurance, free subscriptions to magazines filled with ads for crap nobody needed. Cathy dumped them when Star wasn’t looking.

“I hate it that she’s taken the easy path over the challenging one, yet again,” she complained to Gray on their evening dog walk. “I just know it’s the wrong thing to do. She should be facing her situation and working hard to get thru it, and I can see her slipping back into the same patterns of being lazy and sleeping all day and hanging out with her drug friends.” She felt like crying.

Gray struggled to hold Tabasco back. The weather had turned cold, and he was frisky, and frisky meant that he lunged at every bush and wall he passed. “Most people who’ve been thru rehab relapse, remember they told us that in the orientation.”

Scootie didn’t like the cold, and was hanging back. Cathy kept having to turn around and coax her to follow. “Yeah, and I remember the parents of that kid who got drunk after he got out of rehab. I just didn’t think it would happen so soon. To my Star.”

“Well, she hasn’t gone out and done it yet. And she’s still got probation over her head. That should keep her straight.”

“And there’s the baby. She surely knows better than to start using again.”

Tabasco, impatient to go faster, started jumping around at the end of his leash, tugging Gray thru piles of wet leaves. Cathy feared he would slip and break his old bones. She started agitating to take his leash herself, but Gray stubbornly kept it, jerking the dog’s head when he pulled too hard. A couple of months more of this, Cathy thought, and it’s going to be dangerous for him to be handling the dog. Especially when it froze. “Please let me take the leash,” she begged. “You can take Scootie. Look, I can control her with just a finger on her lead.”

Gray laughed. “Now, don’t be silly. What kind of challenge is that? Do you want me to take the easy way? What kind of precedent would that set for Star?”

“Oh, hush. Star isn’t going to be living with us. What does it matter? I just don’t want to see you with a broken hip. It would slow you down in bed.”

“What, don’t I go slow enough for you now? Maybe I should break something. Then we could take all night.” He slipped an arm around her.

“Hon, we already take all night when we make love.”

“Yeah, but just think, we could take days if I broke my leg.”

“Oh, I can just see you trying to get up on your knees with a cast on. Or what about traction?”

“You always said you wanted to tie me up.”

“Yeah. Now I could even spank you and there wouldn’t be anything you could do about it.”

The dogs got as far away as they could get on their leashes, and pretended not to hear.

Things stayed copasetic with Richard and Star for about a week and a half. Richard called her to complain that he was too busy to take Star to probation this time, and besides he’d like Cathy to talk some sense into her. “She’s going out with her friends, against my explicit orders,” he said.

So Cathy drove the 25 miles to her ex house to take her daughter a mile and a half to her probation meeting. She walked into the house, which was open as usual, and found Star still in bed, the TV on loud, clothes all over the floor, food dishes piled up on the desks and tables.

Richard was still in bed, too. He was hard to wake, and when he did wake, it was with a start. He looked at Cathy as if he didn’t recognize her. Then he nodded off sitting at the edge of the bed, until she shook him awake once again. “Mmrmmbmwielbvnvd,” he said.

“Right. I’ll just let you get a little more awake before you try to repeat that,” she said, watching him get up and unsteadily wander to the bathroom closet, where he fumbled with the lock and found himself a handful of pills to jump-start the process. Great influence, she thought sourly.

“Hon, I’m worried about you,” she said when he emerged from his shower. She’d spent the time going from Star’s room, where she was now getting dressed, and looking around Richard’s room, which except for clothes on the floor was in just as bad a state. Maybe more plates with crusty ex food on them. His ashtray was certainly more full, and didn’t look like it had been emptied out in months. There were burn marks in his desk, and a few alarming burns on his rug.

“Why so?” whatever he’d taken had begun to kick in. He was more animated, tho still unsteady. And there was a dead look in his eyes.

“That rug is sure to be flammable. How come you keep missing the ashtray?”

He looked sheepish. “Oh, that. It seems I’ve been programming in my sleep.”

“Huh?”

Richard was getting dressed. He struggled with his pants. Standing on one leg was very difficult, and first he held on to the back of his chair, and then sat on the bed in order to put them on. “Well, it’s kind of like sleepwalking.”

“Sleepwalking?” That sounded ominous. “What are you taking?”

“Well, I’m on Ambien, and usually I take a few valiums thru the day. I guess sometimes they interact, or something. I’ll wake up at my desk sometimes, and I’ll have a bruise in my side from where I was sitting against the arm rest, you know, twisted around in my chair. That’s when I put the cigarettes out on the desk instead of the ashtray. I think I’m dreaming that it’s somewhere else.” He laughed, not noticing Cathy’s stricken face. “Once I was dreaming that I was walking across the room to open the door and go out, and in my dream there wasn’t a chair in the middle of the room. So I woke up to find myself all tangled up in the legs of the chair. I could have broken my leg.”

“You could have broken your neck.”

He grinned to himself. “Yeah, maybe that would be the best alternative.”

“This is insane. You’re doing too many drugs, and you’re experiencing interactions that you can’t control. You’re sleepwalking, for God’s sake. What if you start dreaming that you’ve got to go somewhere and actually try to drive while you’re asleep?”

“I’m under a doctor’s supervision.”

“Yeah, but this isn’t real supervision. He writes prescriptions for whatever you want. Star told me about this guy. He’s not a real doctor.”

“Yes he is. He happens to specialize in addiction, and he’s helping me with my social anxiety disorder.”

“Your what? When did your wanting to be left alone turn into a disorder?”

“When there became pills for it.”

“I see.” Cathy looked around. His life was messy. She wanted to get away before it upset her to the point of tears. “How about the probation check, and I’ll take her over there and drop her back off.”

He searched around for his checkbook, didn’t find it in three or four places, and then remembered it was locked up with his drugs. She looked at it when he handed it to her. His handwriting was palsied, as if he had very little motor control at all. She was really worried now.

go to tomorrow’s writing

Day Twelve

Day Twelve

This rehab was different. Out in the regular wings, patients were locked down on the ward, and visitors were searched. In the D wing, where patients were paying for their own treatment, the surroundings were resort-like, with private bed-and-bathroom suites and a comfortable lounge well stocked with DVDs and games. There were break rooms, a fridge full of food, private offices, nice views out the windows, and the inmates had cheery, positive expressions quite unlike the sour, morose looks on the rest of the population. The only thing the two groups shared was the cafeteria, which served nasty institutional food that looked designed for food fights – battery-acid coffee, syrupy mashed potatoes, gelatinous gravy, spongy cornbread, pale gristly slabs of meat, and flabby jello. But the self-pay patients had the option of skipping dinner in the cafeteria and calling out for food instead, so every evening was a flurry of take-out menus and deliveries. The patients also took field trips to the local Wal-Mart every week, and went out to the movies on Fridays. Treatment seemed like an afterthought.

But every time Cathy stopped by to see Star, there was a meeting going on, and she had to wait outside in a chair on the smoking patio, counting the cigarette butts in the sand containers and admiring the artistic arrangement of bubble gum on the leaves of the doomed shrubs. As the days passed, Star became a little more attentive to her mom. The other patients were adults, and they must have liked Cathy, because Star was acting like there was nothing to be ashamed of when she came to visit, and at the other hospital, in with a bunch of kids her own age, she acted more like she must be adopted.

“The counselors are all wondering why I’m here,” she said one day as she bounded out of the building and bent over to kiss the top of Cathy’s head.

Cathy looked up at her. She was radiant, her skin fresh, her hair glowing. She still didn’t look pregnant, except for the growth of her breasts, but she sure did look happy these days. “How’re you feeling?” she asked, meaning how was she feeling about her treatment.

“I’m still a little queasy in the mornings,” she said, “but I’m not actually getting sick.”

“Not everybody has morning sickness,” Cathy said. “I meant, how are you getting along in here? Are you learning anything?”

Star flipped her hair over her shoulders. “They want you to write an impact letter.”

“Okay. What’s that?”

“You need to write down what impact my drug use has had on your life.”

Cathy thought about it. The impact had been mostly in her damaged expectations, which was part of raising a kid. They never did what grownups wanted them to do. Most of Star’s drug use had been while she was with her dad. “You’d better get your dad to write one, too,” she said. “He had to deal with most of your using.”

Star laughed. “Don’t you believe it. I was high every day while I was living with you, and had to pop a couple of oxycontins before getting out of bed just to get thru the rest of the day.”

This came as a real surprise to Cathy, who’d only seen rudeness and laziness in her behavior, and hadn’t suspected it was chemically induced. “Where you depressed while you were with us?”

Star patted her head. “Mom, I’ve been depressed most of my life.”

Oh. And she seemed such a happy child.

“I mean, who wouldn’t be?” she went on. “You kept telling me how smart I am and how much I could accomplish. With that much pressure, how could I be anything but depressed?”

Cathy had spent a lot of effort supporting her daughter’s abilities. This was partially because her mother had groomed her to be nothing more than somebody’s wife, and actually held down her aspirations by making her feel stupid. So Cathy bent over the other way, but it seems it had had the same result. A daughter too fucked up to get on with the business of following her own agenda. And her own mother had been just as damaged by her mom. Where would it end? She already felt sorry for Star’s kid, whoever it turned out to be. That reminded her. “Oh. I’ve made an appointment to go tour the birth center at the hospital. Can you get them to let you out?”

“Sure. I just have to let them know where I’m going, and I can’t go during any meeting times.”

So Cathy and Star took a trip to the local hospital and a nurse took them around the place where women went to have babies these days. It was very different from Cathy’s experience. When she’d had Star, she spent hours stalking the grimy gray corridors of an old fashioned hospital wing, hoping to boost her labor and get the process over with. Nurses shaved her bald and gave her a soap enema that worked so quickly it was a race for the bathroom before everything exploded. Back then, fetal heart monitors were new; they wheeled them in on a cart, and only hooked them up if there was some problem. You were on your own and could do your labor standing or sitting or walking the halls, and they didn’t make you lie down and mess with you until the end. But then she was to have her baby lying flat on her back on a hospital bed, and they would cut her perineum whether she needed it or not. After the birth, the baby stayed in the nursery, and there was several days of peace and quiet and nasty hospital food before they put the baby into the new mom’s arms and shuffled them out the front door and went back to the pace of everyday living.

In twenty years, the birth experience had changed drastically. Now there was a birthing center, where large private rooms were set up like hotel rooms, with a bed in the center of the room, a big comfy couch under the window, a large TV, internet access, a CD player for your favorite music, soft lighting, pleasant curtains and a soothing color scheme. But each piece of furniture in the room transformed into hospital equipment when the time came. The bed raised up into a dangerous looking birthing couch, stirrups came up to capture the feet, the cabinets swung open to reveal monitors, belly bands, drips, blood pressure cuffs, a sonogram machine, sterile equipment in plastic bags, and various other devices Cathy couldn’t tell anything about. The chest of drawers on the wall became a baby monitoring station, with heat lamps, scales, a rack of little scissors and suction bulbs and tiny blood pressure cuffs and little bitty ear scopes, clothing and towels, basins and bottles. The baby would be staying right there with Mom unless there was a problem.

Even the food had changed. Now patients ordered off a menu and a waitress delivered it with a big smile, and the food wasn’t half bad. And they kicked you out of the hospital the next day, unless you didn’t have the right baby carrier with you, and then you had to go out and buy one before they’d release the baby.

The big comfy couch was the most surprising change to Cathy. When she’d had Star, Richard was just barely allowed in the room, and only after putting on sterile scrubs and a hairnet. But now there could evidently be up to three guests in the room during labor and delivery, and they could sack out on the couch when things were slow, watching TV or just dozing. And there was fresh coffee in the hall kitchen, and goodies in the fridge. More a vacation spot than a hospital, like Star’s new rehab was more like a spa.

The nurse stressed how much comfort and normality there was. “Used to be hospitals treated birth like an emergency,” Cathy remembered. “It seems more like, I don’t know, home, I guess.”

The nurse nodded. “We try to make it as unobtrusive as possible. And we’ve got midwives on the staff, and they do everything but deliver your baby.”

Cathy said, “And sometimes they do that too, I’m sure.”

Star looked uncomfortable. She sat on the edge of the birthing bed and bounced on it, ignoring them while Cathy asked pointed questions about the process. Recalling her short apprenticeship as a midwife, she was intrigued that there were now midwives working in the hospital, for the doctor, as opposed to against them, the way it was in the old days. “Do the midwives mean your C-section rates are lower than average?” The last thing she wanted for Star was the long recovery time after an operation where they rip the baby out of your belly. They’d done that to her, and she’d never quite gotten over it. Or gotten the feeling back on the skin of her belly.

The nurse was proud of their rates. “Among prior sections, the rate is almost 85%, and that tends to raise the average a bit, but with first time mothers, which your daughter will be?” Cathy nodded. “The rate is only 17%.”

“The national rate is around 25%, I believe?” Cathy had a grudge. Her C-section had been avoidable, she was convinced, but for a chain of interventions that just kept getting worse and worse until the only option was the knife. As a trainee midwife, she’d learned that only about 10% of births are abnormal enough to warrant cutting the mother open. But in a hospital, your bill doubles if the doctor cuts you open, and your insurance pays for it, so the rate of C-section just keeps going up and up. If hospitals had their way, every woman would get a section. They’d already perverted modern medicine so much that once you had delivered by cesarean, you were always going to have one for all your other births, and this just pissed her off. When she was training to be a midwife, there was a trend for women with previous C-sections to have a normal vaginal birth the next time, but with all the liability issues nowadays, hospitals wouldn’t allow it, and forced women to undergo major surgery over and over again. And she was damned if she would let this happen to Star.

“I don’t want you to be in the room with me when I have the baby,” Star said as they left the hospital.

“Why not?” Cathy was taken aback. She was planning on it, already mentally packing her kit.

Star squirmed. “I just don’t feel comfortable with the thought of you being there.”

Cathy wondered if it meant she felt uncomfortable with the thought of her mom seeing her naked, or did she hate the thought that Cathy might try to second-guess the medical staff, or maybe did she feel that her mom might try to steal the spotlight. “Fine,” she said, a little huffy. “I’ll bring a book and sit in the waiting room. Or maybe I’ll just stay away and you can call me when you’ve had the baby.”

Star patted her on the back. “Oh, come on, Mom, I want you there. Just, when I need you, not all the time, staring at me and making comments and stressing me out, making me think I’m doing everything all wrong.”

But I would never do that, Cathy wanted to say, but she remembered how Star always thought Cathy was criticizing her, even when she was heaping praise upon her. Kids.

They got into the car and started back to rehab. But Star was free for the moment and didn’t want to go back. “Let’s go shopping for my wedding dress,” she suggested, and she looked so excited that Cathy gave in, and they went off in search of frills and satin.

The boutique was empty of customers, and several matronly ladies surrounded Star as she walked in and started turning this way and that looking at all the dresses. Cathy stood back and let them introduce her to the world of expensive things that are only used once, and tried not to look at the price tags as Star went into fits of Ahhs and Ooohs. She busied herself instead looking at the way the dresses were put together, thinking I can do this myself, while Star went from one dress to another on the rack, putting them up to her still in the bag and rushing to the mirror to see what they looked like.

Wedding dresses. White, cream, snow white, off white, ecru, satin, silk, polyester, sequined, pearled, jeweled, lacey, strapless, backless, demure, a-lined, ruffled, sacked, long-trained. There were dozens of types of dresses, and they all reminded Cathy of Barbie clothes.

Her tastes ran to simple and elegant, with a minimum of fuss and frill. Star’s tastes were strictly fairy-tale. She wanted to look like Cinderella at the ball. Cathy wanted to sit her down and talk sense into her. She was pregnant, she wouldn’t be able to wear any of these dresses without serious refitting if they took as much as another two weeks to get married. But Star was obviously living a dream at the moment, so Cathy let her play with the saleswomen, and continued to leaf thru the racks, turning her attention to the price tags. Polyester, and they still wanted almost a thousand dollars. She pulled the dresses open and looked at the construction. Nothing fancy about how they were made, except that the fitted ones used whalebones (plastic) sewn into the bodice, and the skirts had various hidden buttons and clasps so the bride could hitch the train up and avoid tripping over everything. $750 for an overdone thing with fake pearls sewn on everywhere. $995 for a ghastly Gone With the Wind dress with 4 petticoats and machined lace edging. Yuck. She saw nothing she liked in the entire store.

Except for one dress. As simple as possible, no frills, no tucks, no gathers, no excess fabric, no adornment other than a simple red ribbon around the top and bottom. “Hey, Star, look at this,” she said, pulling the bag away from the rack.

Star came over and examined it. “I like it,” she said, and walked off to the mirror with it.

Cathy looked at her cellphone to see the time. She needed to get her back to rehab. “Honey, it’s time we go. Why don’t you get them to write down the ones you like, and we’ll come back again soon.”

Star looked stricken. “Oh, Mom, can’t I try this one on? Please? We’ve got time.” Star’s saleswoman Star looked anxiously at Cathy. She gave in.

There was suddenly activity all around. The dress got bundled off to a fitting room, a pair of shoes was snatched off the wall, a strapless bra was fetched off a shelf, a slip was taken out of a closet, and Star was the center of a procession of salesladies, holding her street clothes while she stood in front of the mirror with her arms over her head, letting them slip things over her head.

Then she stood out in the middle of the store, turning this way and that in front of a mirror, and Cathy was amazed. She looked like a model. She looked like a fairy princess. Cinderella had nothing on Star. The dress fitted beautifully, and the smooth lines enhanced Star’s beauty.

Star was entranced. “Mom, it’s perfect. I want this one,” she turned to the saleslady. “What do we have to do next?”

The saleswoman launched into details of availability and wait times and deposits and fitting sessions, and Starr looked at Cathy to make sure she was taking it all in. Cathy shook her head at her daughter, who didn’t notice. Finally she had to say, “Well, please write that all down for us so we don’t forget the details, but we really must be getting to our next appointment. Flowers,” she lied, having decided that it wouldn’t do to announce that they were just in there on a lark. Star didn’t think it was a lark, and neither did the salesladies, but their attitude would change if they knew she was pregnant, and the wedding wasn’t actually real yet, even tho Star had made up a date to tell the saleslady when she asked her when the wedding was going to be.

“So, when is the wedding going to be?” Cathy asked as they got back into the car. She and Gray had discussed this by themselves. Star had pushed for a big fancy wedding, but given the circumstances, Cathy and Gray thought it’d be okay if they got married in the meeting room in rehab.

Star looked out of the window. “Oh, we’re thinking about having it after the baby is born.”

Cathy stared at her. “Wait a minute. When did this happen? You said just a couple of weeks ago that you were going to get married as soon as possible. Who changed whose mind?”

Star shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. We’re still getting married,” she hastened to add, because Cathy was looking worried. “We just don’t know when. Lots of people I know wait until the baby is old enough to participate before getting married.”

Cathy was confused, but what did she know about how kids did things these days? “But why aren’t you going to go ahead and get married as soon as possible? Is something wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Star said quickly. “Spike loves me. We want the baby. He was going to marry me even if I hadn’t gotten pregnant.”

“Well, I want to be sure that neither of you will be forced to testify against each other because you’re married.” Cathy was looking for reasons for getting married as soon as possible. “And if you’re still single when the baby comes you’ll have to use your own last name for his or hers.” Star didn’t argue, but stared out of the window, waiting for Cathy to stop talking.

Cathy drove back to rehab feeling upset. There was Star, pregnant, still dreaming about a fantasy wedding in the face of rehab and jail and a guy who for some unknown reason had apparently backed away from making an honest woman of her and doing his duty to raise his child. There was Spike a couple of weeks ago, making all the right noises about how it was inconceivable that he would not want to raise his own child, that he would not want to do all the right things. He’d been very positive about it; he’d impressed Cathy with his determination to get married and settle down with her daughter and their child. And now there was Star talking about how they might wait until the baby was, what? A year old, two years? Old enough to act as ring bearer? She wished, not for the first time, that she knew what the hell was going on. She thought of calling Spike’s parents and asking them, but somehow didn’t feel brave enough. What if they hadn’t been consulted about their getting married? What if they disapproved and Cathy’s questions blew some secret the kids had decided to keep?

She tried a different line of questioning as they got close to rehab and Cathy realized she was losing her opportunity. “Are you planning on moving in with Spike when you get out of rehab?”

Star fidgeted. “Oh, yes,” she said brightly. “His family are keeping him almost a prisoner. He can’t wait until I get out. He’s looking for a house to rent right now, and it’ll have a room for the baby, and I’ll get to have Stumbles with me, and Spike’ll take care of everything.”

“Why don’t you come up and live close to me in the city? You could get a job and not be so dependent on Spike for all the money.”

Star looked at Cathy as if she were crazy. “No way would either of us live in that crime-infested ghetto, Mom. It’s bad enough that you moved away from me to go live in that horrible mixed neighborhood, with destroyed roads and sirens all the time. I like where I was raised. I like suburbs, and air conditioning, and frozen meals and the crickets at night.”

Cathy rolled her eyes. As if the suburbs were golden and the city a slum. Maybe thirty years ago, but now the houses in Cathy’s neighborhood were worth twice what Star’s suburban house had cost her and Richard. “Yeah, there’re no microwaves in the city. And you can’t hear the crickets for the gunshots. You’re right.”

Then she thought how easily she’d been sidetracked. “So,” she began again, “Spike’s parents are okay with him finding another place and moving you in?”

“Sure. He’s been good the whole time he’s been with them. He’s even been working bail bonds with his grandma again. He can’t go bounty hunting, because until this stuff is cleared up he can’t carry, but they can work around that.”

“He can’t carry a gun until the trial’s over?”

“Or whatever. If he’s got a felony or is even just accused he can’t work the way he was doing. But Grandma has a permit. She’s got enough guns for the both of them.”

The thought of a gun-toting little old lady made Cathy giggle. The thought of a gun-toting grandma having more guns than Spike must have had laying about the house made her feel sick.

“So you’re not having morning sickness still?” she asked, changing the subject once more before dropping Star off and losing any chance for questions until the next time.

“I told you. But oh yeah, I’ve got a doctor’s appointment on Tuesday, and I need you to drive me there.” They were at rehab. Star jumped out of the car and stuck her head back in the window. “I need to be there at 1:30.”

Cathy thought a moment, suppressing irritation. “I guess I’ll be here at 12:30 to pick you up,” she said.

“Okay. Bye, Mom,” Star waved, and ran off toward the back entrance, the private way into the hospital for those who didn’t need guards. She was already thinking about what to order for dinner – Mexican or Chinese. It was good to be away from her mom and her worries. And her damned pointed questions. Why couldn’t she just leave her to make her own decisions and her own mistakes?

Cathy returned home slightly bothered by Star’s inconstancy. One minute she was starting to act like an adult, the next minute she was parading around in a wedding dress, the next minute acting like she didn’t care about getting married and making Spike be responsible. She didn’t care about being responsible herself. Cathy could see why Richard got so upset about it. Two kids pretending to be adults, but making silly decisions that would leave them all, him and her and the baby, poor and hopeless down the road. Star, as her dad predicted, functionally illiterate, working at a convenience store, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and watching TV all day and doing absolutely nothing with her life but passing on her unfortunate decisions to another generation of losers.

Except that maybe they’d be okay. Maybe he’d continue making a mint hauling escaped criminals back to jail, maybe she’d be okay staying home watching the baby all day and getting him to pay for everything. Maybe they wouldn’t go to jail. Maybe they’d grow up. Maybe Spike would be a great dad. Maybe Star would go to college and become something. An architect. A doctor. President.

Cathy developed a headache. By the time she got home she had weighed so many options and fantasized so many alternative lives and pictured so many different outcomes that her head ached.

So of courses her mom called just as she got in the door. No. She signaled frantically to Gray, who’d answered the phone, the moment she realized that it must be her mom. But he didn’t notice, and announced that she’d just come in, and handed the phone to Cathy with a grin.

“Hi, Mom.”

“You sound winded. Where’ve you been?”

Oh, I’ve been to rehab and a bridal shop and the birthing center at the hospital. But she couldn’t say that. She couldn’t say any of that. None of these things was not a big secret that she’d been keeping from her mom. So Cathy thought for a minute. “I’ve just gotten in, with a headache,” she announced, and went to get a glass of water and fumble for an aspirin. “How’s your health?”

This gave her a few minutes, as her mom detailed the latest disease she thought she must be suffering from. “It’s my pancreas. I know I’m diabetic. I saw a show on it just last night, and I match all the symptoms. Getting up at night to go to the bathroom, feeling tired all the time, and my eyesight’s failing and I know that’s why, and…”

Cathy wasn’t listening. She’d decided. “Well, Mom, I’ve got some news for you.”

“You’re pregnant.”

“Mom! I’m 51 years old. What are you thinking of?”

“It’s just the way you said you had news. Well, what is it?”

That intro made it easier. “I’m not pregnant. Star’s pregnant.”

Mom was silent.

“She’s just told me,” she lied, “and I’m happy for her. I know she’s young, but they’re getting married, and I have a good feeling about it.”

“They’re getting married?” Mom sounded dubious. Cathy thought she was going to ask her what kind of father Spike would make. She thought Mom was going to talk about just how young she was, and just what kind of lifelong choice she was making, and about college. Cathy thought Mom would repeat all the objections she’d had when Cathy had told her she was pregnant, all those years ago. She still stung from some of the things her mom had objected to – chiefly Richard – but also the fact that they lived like students, and with a baby she would probably never finish college and go on to be the doctor or lawyer – or doctor or lawyer’s wife – that she could have been if she hadn’t taken up with that idiot Richard.

“Yes, they’re getting married.” Cathy heard her mother heave a sigh of relief. The sound made her angry.

“Thank God,” she breathed. “She’s not going to have an abortion.” Then she started to mutter in tongues, praying. She must be really happy.

Cathy’s headache suddenly pounded. “Okay, Mom, glad you’re happy. But I’ve got to go now. Gray left something on the stove and it’s burning.”

“Okay, sweetie,” Mom said, and continued to offer thanks that her grandbaby wasn’t going to be a child killer.

All these different reactions. Richard had only wanted her to have an abortion, as quickly as possible, and then get rid of Spike and get back on track and get herself a normal college degree and a normal career and only then think about having a baby and getting married. Her mom was only concerned that Star not have an abortion, and didn’t care whether Spike was going to be a good dad, or whether they’d be happy, or if it was the right thing to do at her age and with her prospects. Star seemed to be blissfully happy and totally trusting that everything would work out for the bests, and Cathy was trying to weigh all the dangers and advantages and possible outcomes, and worry about everything in a rational manner. She felt that only she was aware of all the options and possibilities, and was the only one who wasn’t running off into the deep end.

But she was wrong. Only Gray was being rational about it all. Girls have babies. Babies grow up. Shit happens. And he had better things to do about it than sit and worry and fantasize. He had projects that needed tending to in the basement.

go to tomorrow’s writing

Author’s note

With this eleventh day of writing, I have officially “won” NaNoWriMo, with almost 52,000 words. I credit my ability to set aside four or five hours at a time to write, and two or three hours to edit.

Unfortunately, it being Xgiving week, and family due at my house for all sorts of cooking that has yet to be done, I won’t be back at the keyboard until Friday. Which means that by the end of November, when NaNoWriMo officially closes, I’ll have probably less than 75,000 words, and will be somewhere around halfway thru my story.

In the near future, my excuse for sitting and writing all day will dry up, and that means i’m going to have to invent a way to be away from distraction for most of each day. This may be difficult, since Xmas is coming, and I’ve got to make all those presents.

But I will do my best to continue, because I love to write. And I don’t want the momentum to disappear, because I want to see all the good guys get theirs, and the bad guys, too.

And Cathy and Gray need more sex. Sorry, Star.

Day Eleven

The days passed peacefully. With Star in rehab, there was no reason for Greane and Saphyr to show up at the house with upsetting tales, no angry communications from Richard about the latest insult to his fatherhood. Cathy and Gray sat in bed drinking coffee in the morning without interruptions, and went back to having sex every chance they could get, unhampered by suddenly-remembered worries and suppositions. Visions of a daughter in jail didn’t occur to Cathy just as she was reaching climax, and things she wished she’d said to Richard didn’t occur to her just as Gray was getting close himself.

It was getting near Halloween, one of their most-enjoyed holidays. Cathy got to dress up as a witch and cast spells on everyone who came up the steps, and Gray got to try out his homemade candy on all the little kids in the neighborhood. This year they were using a zombie theme, with stuffed dead bodies sitting on the porch glider and hung from the ceiling inside the front door, body parts among the leaves along the front walk, and nasty rotting flesh smells that Gray cooked up in his basement lab with chemicals and set out in pots in the yard on the night.

He’d been working for months on the details. Cathy had noticed noxious smells for a very long time, and sometimes wondered whether he wasn’t doing experiments on various neighborhood cat-killing dogs or homeless people. But he protested his innocence, and showed her the vials of stinky liquids he’d ordered from chemical houses, and let her try out the candy razor blades (peppermint), and fleshy bones (liquorice), and all-natural prosthetic eyeballs (lychee), and jellied blood (cinnamon), and candied brains (vanilla) that he’d perfected. The basement smelled like an odd mixture of slaughterhouse and chocolate factory. She burned incense upstairs to counter it, and baked pumpkin pies with extra spices.

They walked the dogs in the falling leaves. Scootie was turning out to be a hunting dog, and ran frantically after every leaf that blew by, reaching the end of her lead and turning flips as she continued running past its end. Tabasco ignored her as too small to concern himself with, and took to finding large sticks he could taunt her with. I’m the alpha male, he would say to her, and she would reply, The hell you are, just come over here and let me bite your ankles, I’m the big dog.

Cathy and Gray walked along, hand in hand, enjoying the cool weather. This time of year, they loved to talk about how hot it had been just a few months ago, and how they loved snuggling up in bed to get warm. Anyone overhearing their conversations would have rolled their eyes, but they loved getting lewd with one another.

“I should let my feet get really cold one night and stick them under your legs,” Cathy said.

“No, I’d have to tie them down with those silk scarves you gave me, and keep you from getting me all cold.”

“And then you could warm me up with your tongue,” she said, and moved closer to him, letting her hand run down over the seat of his jeans, and squeezing his soft, flabby butt. “But I might try to fight you off.”

“Maybe.” He reached around her back and caught hold of a pendulous breast. “Maybe I could manage to pin your hands down, too.”

“But then I could wriggle away.” She slipped her hand into the front of his jeans and tickled his sparse gray pubic hair, reaching for his shrunken penis.

He deftly moved out of the way. “Not if I lay on top of you and kept you from moving.” He smiled slyly. “I might be able to stop your mouth up with something so you couldn’t yell for help.”

“Yeah, but I might try to bite anything you put into my mouth.”

“I’m not worried. All I have to do is take your teeth out and put them in the glass by the bed.”

“Let’s go have sex,” she said, and stopped in the middle of the road to kiss him. The dogs sat and wagged their tails impatiently. A neighbor in her living room watched them pass and thought how brazen they were, making out in public like that. She had her hand on the phone to call the cops, but the couple walked on, their hands all over each other in the most provocative way.

After lunch, they never minded with the silk scarves and the dentures, but got out their favorite sex toys instead.

“It’s been so long since we’ve felt like making love,” Cathy wondered, oiling up a state-of-the-art prostate stimulator for Gray.

“I’m not surprised,” he replied, getting to his knees and straddling her right leg, ready to fit it into place. “You’ve been so distracted with your daughter and her father, and it’s been very difficult on you, having to go all these places and do all these things for other people.” He winced as the probe went in, then relaxed and smiled at her. “You haven’t even had time for all the things you normally like to do, never mind taking time to play with me.” He reached over to the bedside table and grabbed a thumb-sized carved piece of jade and put it under her leg to warm it up.

“I haven’t written my food blog for ages. I’ve spent all my time dong rehab things for Star, or calming down that asshole Richard.” Cathy lay on her back, looking up at her husband’s sagging chest and belly, and rubbed his soft penis gently with an oil-covered hand. “I’m so glad it’s stopped.”

“It’s stopped for the moment.” His face wrinkled up with every stroke. He pursed his lips and rolled his eyes, tilting his head back and pushing his hips forward.

Scootie lay at the foot of the bed, watching with interest as they fondled one another. There were great smells coming from their bodies, and they were making aggressive noises at each other. She felt sharply jealous, but at least she was up on the bed. Tabasco had to lie under the bed and listen, and couldn’t even see what they were doing. All he had was the smells and the noises. I’m the big dog, she thought.

Gray’s cock slowly stiffened. It never got as hard now as when he was younger, but that didn’t matter, because it still felt just as good, and Cathy had a way with a penis. It came from forty years of practice and a good sense of touch. It was one of the things that kept them acting like newlyweds. Gray rubbed her leg and let his hand creep toward her pubic mound, which she had pressed against his thigh and was rubbing up and down on him. He scrabbled in her thinning hair and wished she would open her legs and let him play around between them. But she was concentrated on rubbing him, and it felt overwhelming, especially with the pressure on his prostate from the probe.

Cathy started to twist the handle of the device as she pulled on his cock and squeezed his balls. She wished that she had three hands, to do it properly. But she prided herself on her dexterity. A pity she was getting a touch of arthritis these days. It made it so much more difficult to play with him the way she liked, especially first thing in the morning. But after lunch was just great.

The sun came in the window and made interesting patterns on the bed. Scootie slept in the warm sunshine and ignored the increasing pace of her humans’ actions.

Gray swayed above Cathy, holding onto the head of the bed. He was none too steady when he started getting into it, and soon he started to shake and shudder, and blow air out of his rounded lips as he experienced a particularly intense plateau. Cathy looked at his heaving body, his red face, his distorted lips, and wondered for the thousandth time if he were having a heart attack.

She slowed her rhythm and stopped, and he caught his breath, and turned his attention to her, lying on his side and spreading her legs apart. Scootie was attracted by the aroma, and stuck her head over his shoulder to investigate. But he was in the way, and she couldn’t really see what was going on. So she licked the top of his bald skull.

Cathy got into the rhythm of Gray’s tongue moving over and around her sensitive parts. She really enjoyed it when he went down on her. And she anticipated the moment when he would remember the little jade stone and start working it inside of her.

She kept an oiled hand on his cock and balls, and twisted her other hand across her body to grasp the handle of the probe and adjust it for maximum pressure on his prostate gland. For some reason he never got as hard when they used the plug, but he reacted so much stronger when it gently milked his prostate.

Now they were in a race to make the other lose track. Cathy felt close to coming, but not there yet, and she diverted as much of her concentration to Gray as she could. But he outmaneuvered her, sliding the stone into her vagina and moving it in and out. Her groans got loud and her movements insistent, and her hand faltered on his anal plug.

Scootie became very concerned, and darted around Gray’s back and jumped over his hip to be in the center of things. Cathy had her eyes closed, and was only spasmodically rubbing Gray. She could feel the energy of his penis pulsing in her hand, but her mind was on the sweet sensations he was giving her with his tongue and the stone. She could feel another feeling, another source of movement across her flesh that helped to take her mind far away from thought, but she couldn’t identify it. She wished he could kiss her, because then she would explode in orgasm. But the moment passed, he lifted his head and looked at her with love in his eyes. Scootie also looked up, from where she was licking Cathy’s left nipple.

He laughed at the dog, and picked her up to put her back at the foot of the bed. Then he went back to what he was doing to Cathy, which was a sort of modified tango step between his hand and his tongue, with a little break to scratch her thigh lightly every few movements. She seemed to love it.

Gray resumed his rhythm, and Cathy forgot the momentary embarrassment of the dog participating in their lovemaking. Every time they stopped and started again, it felt better. They’d learned this years ago, and now sex took hours. This time, however, she was on her guard for the dog’s attention, and found the sensation just enough abated that she could work on getting Gray’s energy to a peak. It was his turn. He slackened off of his rhythm and began moaning with every breath as she stroked his penis, twisted his scrotum, moved his balls inside his groin, and alternately put pressure on his perineum and his prostate, building up an agonizing pressure inside him.

Suddenly his moans grew louder and his body began to stiffen. It’s either a stroke or he’s about to come, she thought. Scootie’s head poked up over his shoulder again, an intense look in her eyes. Is she worried about him? Cathy wondered. Scootie was thinking that they really needed her help, and joined in, scratching Gray’s neck with her paws and licking his armpit excitedly. Neither of them noticed.

As Gray licked at Cathy’s vulva with less organization and more enthusiasm, she felt a warmth spreading from him to her, and dove into the energy, moaning along with him, feeling him poised at the brink of climax. She watched his flabby legs shudder, and saw the wrinkled skin of his arm shaking with tension. He gave a loud grunt, then another, and came, the thin, yellow, watery semen flowing out of the tip of his penis with only a mild pressure, unlike the squirt that would have hit the headboard when he’d been younger.

Then they curled up together under the covers and took a long, sticky nap, Scootie snoozing satisfied between their legs, Tabasco happy that they had finally finished their exercise and were quiet. Nobody called, nobody rang the front doorbell. They spent a blissful afternoon lumped together, and then they took a walk with the dogs.

When they got back, there was a message on the answering machine. Star had called from rehab to say that there was a problem with the insurance. Cathy screamed bloody murder. Gray distracted her with scarves, and the dogs spent the night in the spare room.

The next day, Cathy called out to the rehab center and was told by the finance person that Star’s insurance company had just contacted them to say they thought a two week stay was good enough, and weren’t going to continue paying for it.

“However,” the woman said on the phone, “Star’s doctor here at the center has said that she has not made enough progress to leave.”

“Okay,” Cathy said, “What does that mean?”

“Well,” the woman said, as if the answer was obvious, “families in this situation find that they come up with the money to continue treatment.”

Cathy sputtered. Altho the numbers seemed to be a secret between the center and the insurance company, she knew the fee was something like $30,000 for the six-week program. “We can’t afford to pay out of pocket,” she said.

The woman was smooth. She handled this kind of protest every day. “It’s only about $300 a day. Some families take out a loan,” she said. “Do you have savings, or stocks you can sell?”

“Absolutely not,” Cathy said. “We’re poor as church mice. Do you want me to ask her father to write you a check?” She was joking.

“That would be fine,” the woman said, not hearing it. “Self-pay is $2,700 a week, and we take checks and credit cards.”

“Well, I was just kidding, actually. He’ll go thru the roof when I ask him for money for this.”

“Doesn’t he care about the welfare of his child?” the woman asked indignantly.

“Not if it means he has to spend more money on her,” Cathy said. “Can’t you appeal this to the insurance agency?”

“We’re already appealing it,” she said. “It might go thru, but we thought you should be preparing other sources of financial assistance if they decline it.”

“I see,” Cathy said. “I guess we’ll probably have to take her out of rehab. What provisions do I have to make to come get her?”

“Oh, you can’t take her out. We don’t advise removing her from the program. It would definitely be AMA, against medical advice, and we’d have to put that in her record.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Her doctor doesn’t think she’s made enough progress to leave,” she repeated.

“But there’s no private money to keep her there, and you won’t let her stay for free, will you?”

“No, I’m sorry to say we can’t do that.” She wasn’t sorry at all.

“Then we’ll have to come get her.”

“That’s against medical advice, and we would have to take appropriate action.”

“Catch-22, then.”

“What?” What age was this woman that she didn’t catch the reference? Cathy wondered, feeling old.

“Well, just keep in touch about how the appeal turns out. I’m going to need as much advance notice as possible.”

“That’s why we contacted you.”

“I appreciate your kindness.” The note of irony in her voice apparently went undetected by the finance woman. Else that or she was used to getting abuse from families who didn’t want to cough up the money.

But there was no money. Gray and Cathy had his Social Security and no savings past what they absolutely needed. They couldn’t possibly suck their bank account dry to keep Star in rehab. Their truck was worthless, and there was no way they were going to take out an equity loan on the house. That left Richard. And that was a real laugh riot.

“That would be funny if I hadn’t suspected something just like that from them. They get all they can from the insurance, then they hold the kid hostage and strong-arm the family until they cough up every penny they have. It’s just a big racket.”

He had a point. “I don’t know what to do about it,” she said.

“I do. Go get her and fuck them and their AMA bullshit.”

“But the judge said that she had to do whatever they told her to do in rehab, and that includes finishing the program. He’ll put her back in jail if he finds out she hasn’t completed treatment.”

“I don’t care at this point,” he said, sounding weary. “I’ve spent well over $10,000 on her out of my own pocket in the last several months. I’m looking at having to cancel my cable TV – and other things – as a cost cutting measure because of all she’s taken out of my mouth already. I can’t afford to keep feeding her thru a hole in my vein. She’ll take all I have and never look back. That child has taken years of my life, shovelsful of money for daycare, private school, soccer, and now lawyers and fines. What more does she want from me?” He was yelling.

“I hardly think it’s all about you,” Cathy tried to reason with him.

He blew up. “Why do I get the impression that you look on my refusal to pour more money down the drain so my daughter can continue doing things I don’t approve of as a sign that that I’m the devil incarnate? How come my feelings are automatically invalid and nobody cares how much damage this unfeeling creature has done to me? Am I supposed to spend myself broke to protect her from her own bad decisions?”

“No, but if you don’t help now she’s going to go back to jail and have the baby there.”

“Not if she has an abortion, like I keep telling her is the only way out of her current slow suicide.”

Cathy was running out of sympathy. “She’s not going to have an abortion. She wants to keep the baby, and be a mom.” She kept hoping he’d think back on when they were new parents, and how miraculous and wonderful it was to have a new life to be responsible for. She didn’t realize that he had always looked on those days with horror, and had really wished she’d had an abortion as soon as she realized she was pregnant. It was something she didn’t want to realize.

“I get sick when I think of the sheer irresponsibility of those two children thinking they can bring another child into the world without the means to fend for themselves. Not without resorting to either living off their own parents, or doing crime to get the money. I don’t mean to be insulting, but it boggles my mind to think that you can wrap yourself around this and think that she could possibly be doing something good.”

“She’s growing up. This is how she’s choosing to grow up.”

“She’s committing suicide. Her chances of going to college are now zero. Her chances of ever earning more than minimum wage are now zero. Her chances of making anything of herself are now zero. She’s hooked up with a hillbilly fuckwad and now her life will be spent being a criminal or worse.”

“Wow. You know, when you’re like this, I can’t talk to you.”

“And if you continue to back her criminally negligent decisions, I can’t talk to you either.”

Well, that didn’t work out very well, Cathy thought. She’s going to go back to jail because her dad can’t bring himself to help her. She sat down and cried. But within a couple of days, after talking to Star’s lawyer and being told the consequences, he worked himself around to being willing to pay for it. Cathy contacted the rehab center to tell them, but it was too late. She was being discharged that day, and Cathy was expected to pick her up in less than an hour. Thanks for telling me in advance, she thought, unimpressed with their efficiency now that she was on the other side of the admitting office.

She drove up there in a hurry and walked in wanting answers. “Isn’t there a partial day program that she can go into, didn’t you say something about that in the beginning, where she can stay at home with me and just come in for treatment every day?” She was furious.

The woman didn’t meet her eyes. “Yes, we have a day program. But they won’t be interested in taking her because she’s checking out AMA.”

Cathy smiled ruefully. “I’d like to talk to the doctor in charge of her case.”

“I’m sorry, he’s not available.”

“Right.”

So she took her baby and all her things back to the house, where Star disappeared into her old room, turned on the TV, and got on the phone.

Cathy found another rehab. Every one she called said the same thing. Yes, we take your insurance. No, we can’t tell in advance whether they’re going to take it once they’ve exhausted the benefits at another rehab; usually they offer a limited yearly benefit. We can check once you begin the intake process.

One place insisted that since Star was pregnant, she be enrolled in their mothers-at-risk program, and remain with them for the whole term of her pregnancy regardless of her or her family’s wishes. They insisted they were acting for the safety of the baby, but after the bloodthirsty way the first rehab had demanded that her family come up with money when the insurance lapsed, Cathy suspected that they had other motives uppermost in their minds. And of course Richard agreed.

“I’m not subjecting myself to an open-ended program,” he insisted. “I don’t care what the excuse. I can see it coming. They’d bleed me dry and I’d end up bankrupt while they screamed for more exorbitant weekly payments. Did they even say how much it would cost per week or per month or however they want their blood money?”

“No, they won’t tell me that until we’ve gone thru intake and she’s ready to be admitted.”

“See? I’m not going to do it. Find some place where they’ll take my money but they won’t keep her involuntarily until they decide I’m broke.”

So Cathy kept calling, and finally found a place close to where Richard lived, where they had a private ward for self-paying patients. She and Star made an appointment and they went down there to fill out the papers and interview with the intake counselor.

A woman who wouldn’t listen saw them. Cathy had to repeat everything twice or three times in different words, and had to talk slowly, because the woman sized up Star and delivered memorized words that Cathy had heard over and over at other rehabs.

Star repeated the same history she had told the intake guy at the first rehab, and the woman didn’t listen to her, either. She fiddled with her paperwork and read a magazine article she had with her. She commented, “Well, the insurance will cover your program at 100%,” and Cathy explained to her yet again that the insurance hadn’t covered it at the other place, and that’s why they were there, to explore the possibility of paying for treatment themselves. “A preliminary check of your insurance shows that they’ll cover it 100%,” she insisted with a tight smile. Cathy started to argue with her, but realized that the woman would just consider her aggressive. The woman left the room with the insurance card.

“Mom, can’t you be nice?” Star said resentfully. She was lounging in the armchair, one leg over the arm, dangling and kicking. Cathy repressed the desire to tell her to sit straight.

“I don’t know why she’s being so rude,” Cathy said.

“You’re acting like Dad,” Star said. “Saying everything slowly and repeating yourself. She’s not an idiot, you know.”

Cathy shut up. She was too an idiot. It was obvious that she’d gotten into counseling so she could feel superior to everyone around her. Cathy found herself wishing the woman would find herself with a meth habit.

The woman came back in. “You could have mentioned that your insurance benefits ran out at another hospital,” she said accusingly.

Cathy nearly lost her temper at the woman. I did mention it, she thought. You had your head so far up your ass that you missed it, that’s all. “Perhaps we could go over the details once more,” she said with icy calm.

This time the woman focused on the self-pay aspect, and things went a little smoother. “You’ll need to fill out these papers, and come back in tomorrow for a blood test. We’ll admit her then. And you’ll need to bring a check for the first week of treatment.” She waited to be asked how much it would cost per week. “Forty-nine hundred dollars,” she said with satisfaction.

Cathy blanched.

As they were leaving, paperwork in hand, Cathy and Star passed a patient talking to a counselor in the hall. “Why did they only tell you this morning that my insurance was running out?” he complained pitifully. “What am I supposed to do now that you’re booting me out onto the street? How am I going to get treatment? I’m not ready to leave.” The counselor looked sympathetic but powerless. This happens all the time, Cathy decided. Fucking insurance companies.

go to tomorrow’s writing

Day Ten

There was instant pressure from Star’s lawyer to get her into rehab. She’d tested positive for coke the last two times she’d gone to probation, and with any more slip-ups the judge would stick her back in jail for the duration. Cathy was determined to help, and so renewed her search for rehabs.

Finding a drug rehab center on the internet is very difficult. There’s no real information out there. There’s a lot of verbiage, a lot of ad copy, but they don’t tell you much about anything, and certainly nothing at all about what it’s going to cost or what the insurance is going to cover. She had to call a bunch of them, and then call Star’s insurance company, over and over, to find out what she needed to know. And every time she asked a question, she could sense there was volumes she wasn’t being told, but she didn’t know enough to see thru the crap.

Richard was having fits about it, of course. It was his insurance, and after he got over the fear that his employers were going to find out that one of his dependents was a drug user, and fire him, he became afraid that it was going to end up costing him money. Cathy had no patience at all with his fears.  His mother had died the year before, and he had money and property coming out of his ears. Most of the antique furniture that had filled her house up in tony Westchester, New York was sitting in his basement, with drapes over them to protect the surface from the animals. He could sell any of the antiques, or sell some of the stocks he’d just bought, or dig into his bank account for spare change. Yet he was talking about bankruptcy, and Star still hadn’t even interviewed at a rehab center yet.

Cathy finally settled on one half an hour north of her house. It had a fancy website, and from what she could see of it, the place was nestled in the woods and made everyone do a lot of walking and exercise. It looked good. She called up and got someone who had nothing but good things to say about getting Star in and getting her fixed up. But it all sounded like a sales pitch, with no real details until you were ready to sign. There must be really good money in rehab, she thought. Come on down, we’ll treat you right.

All Richard wanted to know was when she would be by to pick Star up, who had gone back to her father’s house right after Cathy blew up at her for staying out half the night and not giving any information about where she’d been or with whom. This time, at her father’s, she didn’t have use of her car, having a suspended license, and didn’t have the keys to lend to any of her friends, and wasn’t allowed to have anyone visit her, or IM anyone or talk on the phone. So Richard said, backing it up with hidden cameras and recording devices. Cathy didn’t know whether to believe him, but evidently Star did, because there was no trouble from her. But Richard was out every day for work, and couldn’t watch over her. And Cathy knew he kept a stash of drugs in his closet, and also knew that Star had long ago figured out all the passwords he used, so she was anxious to get her into rehab and away from temptation.

The lawyer’s plan was for them to walk into the next probation meeting with papers for rehab in their hands, and slap her in there right after she’d done her drug test. So Cathy had to scramble, because probation was in two days. She went down and got Star from her dad’s and then went north to the rehab center. It was in the woods, as the website had promised. It seemed to have been built in the ‘70s, because the style was all cedar siding and shed rooflines and A-frames. There were a dozen buildings or so, and the younger patients were kept in a dormitory by themselves, with a soccer field and a baseball diamond behind it. The sidewalks outside the front door were covered with cigarette butts. The place was clean, but a little ratty, as if the furniture was subject to the prying fingers and fidgety hands of thousands of junkies with nothing to do with themselves.

They sat in an orange-painted waiting room for awhile, waiting. Cathy wondered about the psychological significance of the color orange. Red overexcites, blue calms, yellow makes you psychotic, green is healing (except that nasty gray green they use in hospitals. That color encourages infections). She decided that orange was meant to remind you of home, of a refrigerator stocked with orange juice for you to drink right out of the bottle before your mom noticed and yelled at you.

Then a guy with a facial tic came in to interview her. He was taken with her beauty, which Cathy thought a bit unprofessional, and got her to tell him all about her problems. Cathy was surprised to hear a lot of it, because it was all the stuff she had been keeping secret. Her drug friends, the fact that Spike was selling drugs out of the house, the full, gory story of the home invasion and beating and robbery, the drugs she would mix together and down every chance she got without any concern about drug interactions, the fact that she really liked cocaine. What was most interesting to the guy doing the interview was the fact that she couldn’t sleep at night. Did that indicate something special going on with her brain chemistry, Cathy wondered. The guy ignored her. He wasn’t telling her anything; it was as if he and Star were having a conversation in another room where she could only see their lips moving.

In the end, it was all business. He took her insurance card and left the room, and came back in a few minutes saying it’s all settled, and Cathy should plan to drop her off right after probation was over, gave Star a list of things they were allowed to bring with them, and sent them off. Cathy’s head swam a little. She hadn’t had a chance to ask any questions, or to get a sense of what was going to happen. She hated when things were settled so quickly, because it didn’t give her time enough to adapt. She was always being expected to just hop right into the program, and couldn’t. It was a source of irritation to Star, who was always anxious for change. Cathy just supposed it was the difference between a kid and someone on the verge of getting old. On the other hand, she’d always been like that, so never mind.

They went shopping. The guy had told her that there was going to be lots of exercise, and suggested she get some outdoor gear. And somehow, among all those clothes Cathy had picked up off the floor at Spike’s house, there were no sweatclothes among them. At least, Cathy didn’t remember any, and Star swore that none of those clothes fit her anymore. It was because of all the coke she’d been doing. Her muscles had wasted away over the last month or two, and the flesh hung off her bones. It was painful for Cathy to notice. She’d always been so athletic.

So they went off and bought her some clothes, some new cosmetics, mainly to make her feel better, and some fresh sheets and blankets so she could bring her bed with her, which was a very important thing to Star. She never slept in someone else’s bed if she could help it, even if it meant stuffing the car full of pillows and comforters. A strange obsession, perhaps, but Cathy’s younger brother used to take great pains to select just the right towel from the linen closet every night so he could rub it against his face and smell it as he sucked his thumb to put himself to sleep. How much stranger was that?

Star stayed with Cathy and Gray that night, and failed to complain about the small TV or the light coming thru the curtainless windows. Cathy figured she must be really freaked out about going into rehab, or about going back to jail if rehab didn’t work. At dawn they were up. Cathy insisted on some breakfast, and Star chose the sweetest cereal they had and still added sugar to it with a sour look at Cathy for her food choices.

On the way to rehab, the back seat crammed with suitcases and garbage bags, the two women were almost relaxed, almost friendly to each other. It was a whole different atmosphere than the stiff, hostile one that was now usual between them. Star played word games with Cathy, just like they’d done when she was a little kid. They made jokes and guessed what began with different letters, and misread signs to get funny phrases out of them, and Cathy actually enjoyed herself. She felt very warm toward her child, and very grateful. It was as if she had her real girl back, instead of the vicious bitch that had mistreated both Cathy and Gray as long as she could remember.

Intake was a pain, with all sorts of papers to sign and all sorts of rules that they didn’t mention during the assessment, and Cathy found herself going home with several of the items Star had packed: mouthwash, anything sharp, all her DVDs, her razor and her electric hair tools.

She came back several days later, with a load of junk food for Star, who’d called and said she was starving, but only had a microwave. The food was horrible, she’d assured Cathy. Not as bad as prison food, they had more than peanut butter and jelly, but it wasn’t what she was used to, and she wasn’t eating.

Cathy caught Star coming out of a meeting. It was in a different building than the dorm, and crowded with people milling about, drinking coffee out of styrofoam cups, eating candy like it was a requirement for being a recovering addict. Star seemed embarrassed to see her mom, and quickly walked her around the corner to an empty section of the corridor.

“I brought you some goodies,” Cathy announced. She noticed that Star was all pimply and hormonal-looking. Maybe she was getting ready to have her period, or maybe coming off all those drugs made her look puffy and redfaced. Perhaps she’d been crying.

“Shhh, Mom. They don’t approve.”

“But it said in the paper they handed you,” she objected.

“The paper means nothing. It was just for show. They’re much different inside than they were at assessment.” Star looked around furtively. Cathy wondered if she were trying to avoid being seen with her mother, or letting her mom see the people she was with. Then the returned to the main hall, Star steering her toward the exit. A woman who looked like she was in charge came up to Star and gave her a big hug, which Star returned. Cathy was astonished. Star didn’t like being touched, especially by her mom. Why was she letting strangers hug her?

“We think your daughter is wonderful,” the woman said. She seemed genuinely fond of Star. Could she be behaving in here? Cathy thought. “Are you going to join us for lunch?” she continued. “We’re all just going over there. It’s really great food,” she said, smiling.

Cathy looked at Star, who had stiffened. Could she be hiding something from me, still, or is she really just embarrassed? “Um, no, I guess I should get home. I just came to see Star for a moment.”

“Yeah, Mom can’t eat anything unless she makes it herself,” Star added, explaining when the counselor looked suspicious, “Food sensitivities.”

“I’m sensitive to a whole range of flavorings and colorings,” Cathy put in. The counselor nodded – not just neurotic – and turned her attention to someone else from the meeting who had questions. Star backed Cathy away and took her out to the car, where she was anxious to see the bag of groceries Cathy had brought.

So Cathy drove Star around to the dorm, where she gave a reluctant hug and got out, bag in hand, and disappeared into the building, explaining that family weren’t allowed inside. So Cathy made her way home again, feeling vaguely dissatisfied.

Star had told her that it wasn’t necessary for her to come to family night, so she and Gray got there early.

Families filtered in, and stood as far as they could from other families, standing around stiffly or laughing and joking softly among themselves. Some of them were finishing take-out dinners, some had stopped for coffee. When the time came, they all piled into a large room that was empty in the center, with chairs lining all four walls. The families all sat down as far from each other as possible, and after awhile the patients filed in and went to sit with their family members, some glad to see them, some looking pissed off. Star came in last, and dragged herself over to sit next to Cathy, pointedly ignoring Gray.

Cathy had been to twelve-step meetings before, when Star was just a baby and Richard was having trouble with various substances. After blowing his entire Christmas bonus on coke, and Cathy finding him slumped in the bathtub at four in the morning, knocked out, with a yard-long stream of snot flowing from his nose, he’d checked himself into the hospital upon seeing her face the next day, and Cathy got a full dose of Al-Anon while he sorted himself out. The meetings she’d gone to had been lively, emotional, full of conflict and resolution. She’d thrived on the support.

When Richard got out, he avoided cocaine, but started drinking, and it was only after she’d left him that he stopped doing that. There had been several numb years before she left where the only time they’d talk was when he had finished one of those boxes of cheap rose wine. But the talk was stupid, pedantic and repetitive, and he forgot everything he said the next morning. So Cathy saw the end coming and made preparations.

But now she was in a meeting with her daughter, who was still being rude and rebellious, but was also feeling insecure, because she kept leaning against Cathy while others were introducing themselves and telling their stories. Hi, I’m Name, and I’m an addict. (Hi, Name.) Her closeness was all the indication Cathy had, but since Star usually went out of her way to avoid contact, it was significant, and Cathy wondered what it meant.

After everyone introduced themselves, the counselor narrowed in on a guy who was evidently here for a second try at rehabilitation. He was young, his parents were young. They were college educated, well dressed, uncomfortable to be there. He was dressed like a rapper. They’d worked very hard to raise themselves the level of their own parents, and were in the process of making very good lives for themselves and their kids. But here was Junior, throwing it all away. The parents looked like they were always angry at him, and humiliated to be here in front of other people who deserved to be here, and obviously had problems. They didn’t feel they were on the same plane.

The kid’s name was Sam. “Yeah,” he started, with his head down, mumbling. “I’m four days clean.” Everyone clapped. It’s what you do at a meeting.

The counselor interrupted to ask the parents how they were. The dad scowled. “We’re aggravated,” he said.

So the meeting focused on them. “This is my second time in rehab,” Sam said, looking around at all the kids who’d been there with him and hadn’t yet graduated. “I got out of here with 63 days clean, and then went and had a beer on Friday after work. And then I got drunk.” He looked around. “I don’t even like being drunk. My drug of choice is coke. I been doing coke since I was thirteen.” His dad stiffened and rolled his eyes. His mom looked shocked. “But if I can’t have coke, I’ll have booze. Sorry, Mom, Dad,” he muttered, having seen their expressions out of the corner of his eyes. “I told them about it the next day,” he continued, “and they brought me right back here. Man, were they pissed.”

The counselor turned to the parents. “How did you feel when he told you he’d gotten drunk?”

The father spoke reluctantly. “You can imagine how we felt,” he said, and many of the parents around the room nodded. “We told him that we had expected much more from him, and that we couldn’t understand how he could act like he lived in a ghetto when we’d done so much for him all his life.” It was Sam’s turn to roll his eyes. He turned to his dad and started to say something, but the father shut him up with a wave of his hand. “We sent him to a good college, and he dropped out. All he does all day is sleep, and he works at a night club.” He turned to his son. “You wanted to be a lawyer.” It was apparent how much his dad had hoped for it. “And now you’ll never be approved, because lawyers are expected to be morally upright, and here you are a drug addict, wearing ghetto clothing, working at minimum wage, with no future. The only thing you don’ have at this point is a police record. Thank God.”

Sam hung his head, but there was a defiant glint to his eye. His dad was really mad, and his mom sat there with the icy calm of someone trying to hold it together without screaming.

“And how do you feel about that?” the counselor asked his mom.

She started to cry softly, dabbing her eyes with a tissue, and said nothing.

“I wanted to ask you why you’re here,” the counselor continued, to the dad.

“For my son, of course,” he answered quickly. Cathy looked around the room and saw that all of the patients and half the parents were shaking their heads. It was exactly the wrong thing to say, as anyone who’d been thru a twelve-step meeting would know.

The counselor turned comments over to the floor, and one by one the kids and their parents turned on Sam’s parents and explained how they needed meetings as much if not more than Sam did.

Sam’s parents sat stiff and purse-mouthed thru this, obviously thinking they were being blamed for Sam’s problems. Cathy could see that they stayed awake nights, wondering where they’d gone wrong, and misread it every time a parent told them their story

“I thought it was my fault for months,” a housewifely woman spoke up. “It was only after coming in here and hearing other people’s stories that I understood that it’s Andrea’s life,” she indicated her daughter beside here, “Andrea’s choices, and Andrea’s addiction, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Other parents nodded, smiling at Sam’s parents, who didn’t acknowledge any of it. Cathy spoke up when it was her turn. “I went to twelve-step meetings a lot when Star’s father was in rehab. It helped immensely. Not just because I had people who knew what I was going thru, but because I learned a whole lot of tricks for coping, and getting thru the crisis. And also because I was being told by the people at rehab that he was probably going to die, and was scared out of my mind. It was worse than his drug problem. I needed to hear from other people who’d been thru the same thing, that their family members hadn’t died, and they’d gotten better. I needed that,” she finished. The dad was sitting stony-faced, and the mother was looking at the ceiling.

Star started to talk, but it was to Cathy. The counselor had warned them against cross-talking. “Was Dad really that bad?” she asked eagerly.

“Shhh.” Cathy leaned over and whispered, “He was worse. He spent thousands of dollars when we had nothing, and he kept staying out all night and coming in right before I had to go to work. I had to leave you with him, and you were a tiny baby, and I’m certain he slept all day long while you were left all by yourself in your crib.”

Star looked a little uncomfortable, and leaned against Cathy again. She loved the feeling of her daughter’s leg against hers. “I need to talk to you. Afterwards,” She whispered. She must have been feeling uncomfortable with all the confessions going on, because she turned her head and started talking again. “They said I was too on top of my problems today in group,” she said. Maybe she was comparing herself to the poor dad on the grill at the other end of the room. Cathy wondered if she realized he needed to know that he needed help as much his son did, or if she thought everyone in the room was just picking on him. “I’m way beyond everyone else here. I know as much as the counselors know,” she continued. “And they can see it. My head counselor, Betty, told me I should be a social worker because I understand so much.” She seemed proud of herself.

Cathy patted her hand and didn’t mention that it seemed like she was in denial. She hoped that Star’s competent veneer would crack with a little more pressure from the counselors. Maybe being above it all was one of the stages they helped each other thru. It felt disloyal, but Cathy could see that she was going to have to expose Star’s attitude while she was here, make sure everyone knew that she was just doing rehab to avoid jail, and was trying to skate thru the process without making any real changes inside of herself. Maybe that’s why everyone liked her here. She had them all snowed, even the counselors, and they didn’t see the seething hatred she carried inside of her. But maybe, Cathy thought, that hatred was only for her mom, and everyone else saw the Star that Cathy only remembered.

When they got out, Star was still being clingy. “What’s going on, baby?” Cathy asked her, hoping that maybe she really was working her program and trying to come to grips with her problems. But she wasn’t ready for what was really going on with Star.

“I’m pregnant.” Star looked at her mom with anxiety in her eyes.

Cathy stopped in the hall and thought for a moment. “Pregnant. That’s why your face is so spotty. It’s hormones.”

Star was impatient for her reaction. “That’s all you’re going to say? I’ve got zits?”

Cathy hugged her. “No, baby. I’m delighted. Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because I just found out. They did all sorts of blood tests when they admitted me, and they did this one twice to make sure. They think I’m about a month pregnant.”

Cathy asked, “How do you feel?” She wasn’t really sure how she felt herself.

“I’m cramping a little bit, and my ovaries are hurting.”

Cathy rubbed her lower back. “Well, ovary pain is normal in early pregnancy. The cramping isn’t a very good sign, tho. I need to warn you that you might start bleeding, and if you do, you just have to realize that your body isn’t ready to have a baby, but at least you can get pregnant, so you can try again when your life is more under control.”

“But I wanted to get pregnant,” she said. “And my life is very much under control. I’m going to be a great mother, and I’ll never do anything wrong again.” She was so innocent. “But don’t tell Dad, okay? I want to tell him myself, when I’m ready.”

“He won’t understand.”

“But how do you feel about it?” Star was still anxious.

“I’m delighted. I don’t care that you’re really young, and haven’t gone to college, and the father of your baby is a drug dealer. It’ll all work out.” She gave her daughter a reassuring hug. But the words sounded ominous to her ears as she was saying them, and she knew that Richard would have an entirely different opinion. She didn’t want to be the one to tell him, either. Too bad they couldn’t hide it from him.

“What does Spike think?”

“He’s very happy. We’ve been trying to get pregnant. We’re getting married as soon as I’m out of rehab.” Well, that’s interesting, Cathy thought. “Will you help me shop for a wedding dress? I want to get married at the botanic garden.” Cathy didn’t mention that it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to get married anywhere special. She didn’t mention that after jail and rehab, they should be glad to be married in a registry office. Star had her hopes set on a traditional wedding, and why shouldn’t she have one, just because she’d thrown away everything traditional about growing up, like college and a job? She could hear Richard’s angry protestations in her head. She looked at Gray, who was taking it all calmly. She realized that she had a few problems with Star’s being pregnant. It was perhaps not the most mature thing to do in the light of rehab and a possible jail sentence.

“Don’t you think you might have waited until all this legal stuff was out of the way?”

She was blithe. “The judge won’t sentence me if I’m pregnant.” Cathy kept her mouth shut. Hopefully the judge would never find out about it.

There was a hearing the following week, her speeding ticket and driving on a suspended license. Because she’d been arrested on drug charges, her pending traffic violation now took on a more sinister aspect. Star’s lawyer was waiting for them when they arrived from rehab. Rehab had let Star out for the court appearance, and Cathy had also arranged for her to go see the maternity center at the hospital.

Star and the lawyer stood before the judge, Cathy trying hard to look like a good mom, sitting in the benches. The lawyer handed the judge a letter from the people at rehab, stating that she’d been clean since she’d gotten there, and was a model patient. Star said she was doing everything she was being asked to, and more, and she wanted to be a counselor when she got out of college. The judge looked over his glasses at her, one side of his mouth raised in a sneer.

“You know, young lady,” he said, “with one stroke of my pen I can put you behind bars for 321 days.” Star didn’t appear struck by it, but Cathy did the math. Almost eleven months. It scared the shit out of her. Star could have her baby in jail. What would happen then? The state would take it? “Do you even know the penalty for possession of cocaine? Fifteen years.” Cathy gulped.

Star admitted that she hadn’t really thought about it.

“Well, I want you to think about it.” He took up his pen and started writing. “Forty-eight hours in jail, starting immediately. After that, you go back to rehab.” He looked at her again. “And you be sure to do everything they tell you.”

She nodded, and Cathy felt defeated as she turned and followed the bailiff thru the door back to the jail. Cathy started to cry. She wondered if Star would be shedding any tears. She seemed so stiff necked.

Star’s lawyer thought she got off easy. “He’s put people in jail for their entire probation period,” she said as they walked out to their cars. “He wants her to know he’s serious about this.”

“Did she tell you she’s pregnant?”

“Yes. Are you happy about it?”

“I am, but Star’s dad won’t be.”

The lawyer grinned. “He doesn’t know, huh?” Cathy shook her head. “He won’t like it.” The lawyer had met Star’s dad, and had a good sense of how he would feel.

Richard, as predicted, was furious.

Star called her the next morning from the jail, and said she was out already. Two for one. Cathy immediately offered to come to the jail to get her, but Star said she was going to walk to her dad’s house because it was close by. It was at least five miles, but Cathy thought maybe she wanted the exercise, the breath of freedom. So she got dressed and headed down to Richard’s house. He’d told her before that she should call before coming down, so she called, and he didn’t answer because he was dead asleep and wouldn’t hear a bomb if it went off under him.

She walked into the house when she arrived, and Star was upstairs in her room, sorting thru clothes on the floor and putting them into a bag to take back to rehab. She seemed angry that Cathy had just come on into the house without permission. Cathy ignored it and went into Richard’s room. He was sitting at his desk in his underwear, smoking a cigarette and furiously typing on his keyboard. An email to somebody. Cathy sat on the edge of his bed and waited for him to finish.

“I am stunned by this latest evidence that Star has lost touch with reality. Did you know that she’s gone and done the unthinkable?” Cathy stared at him, waiting for him to run down. “First she’s been warned about the importance of an education and ignored it, and now she’s a functional illiterate who is barely qualified to make change at a convenience store.”

Cathy objected to calling her functionally illiterate. True, she couldn’t spell, but neither could Cathy’s brother, who’d been editor-in-chief of his college newspaper. “I spent a lifetime warning her about the dangers of habit-forming drugs,” he continued, referring to his days as a crackhead. “She ignored it. And now she’s in and out of jail with yet more jail waiting for her when she gets out of rehab.”

“When she became sexually active, she was warned about the consequences of that, and ignored it. Now she has locked herself into a life of underachievement.” He had turned to look at Cathy, glaring at her as if it were her fault.

Cathy hoped that Star wasn’t listening on the other side of the door. He was making her angry by constantly referring to their daughter as a loser, when it wasn’t anything like as bad as he was making out. Of course, it wasn’t good, but Cathy always preferred to hope that people would use their mistakes as opportunities to learn, to make course corrections. And Richard obviously saw each mistake as a necessary preliminary for making the next, worse mistake.

He was going on, this time about himself. “These things have come at an ever increasing cost – medical, emotional and monetary cost – to me. I have suddenly discovered that I do indeed have limits.” He drew himself up, sucking in his gut. “I am no longer able to bear these costs, even if I were willing, which I am not, now that she’s stuck the dagger in and twisted.”

By getting pregnant? Cathy wondered.

“You and she will have to work out some other living arrangements once she leaves rehab,” he continued, wiping his face with a greasy hand. “I am well past the breaking point and need to put an end to my own suffering irrespective of the consequences in terms of relationships with either you or Star. As much as I love her, someone else will need to shoulder her burdens from now on.”

Cathy thought about how formal he was being. As if he’d just written all this down in an email and was reciting from memory.

“All of the people who matter most to me are saying, ‘Run, don’t walk, to the nearest exit.’ I fear that this is what is at hand, irrespective of what people think.” He sighed melodramatically. “I cannot and will not continue to watch my child commit slow-motion suicide. I’m finished. Used up.”

“Why don’t you come to one of the family meetings at rehab and say that?” she asked.

He gave her a look of contempt, and continued his speech. “I no longer want to be seen in public with that creature,” he said, spitting the words. “If she ever turns her life around, I’d love to hear from her.” He shook his finger at her. “But after the turnaround. Not in the midst of promises or good intentions and more bullshit plans.”

Cathy sighed and looked around at his room, which was more filthy than ever. Maybe he had enough to worry about just keeping himself straight, such as it was, she thought. “Okay, then, she’ll come stay with us again. I’m looking forward to having her.”

He looked at her as if she hadn’t understood anything he’d said. He seemed shocked that she hadn’t agreed with him that the best reaction from her parents would be to immediately disown her and kick her out on the streets. “Very well,” he said, turning back to his computer and starting another email message. “I’ll be boxing up her things over the next few days and sticking them in the basement. If you want to come and get them, fine, or I’ll drop them all off with that damned dog of hers when I’m done. Or she can pick them up en route to wherever she thinks she’s going. Maybe she and Spike will be successful in turning this into his grandma’s problem, and she’ll shit him a free house. Anyway, if my experience is any guide, you’re going to need all the luck you can get, so I’ll wish you good luck. And now, if you don’t mind, I need to take a shower and get the fuck to work, where I know you probably don’t care, but they’re going to fire me any day now, another reason why I must jettison my unfortunate offspring before she sinks me.” He looked at her, accusingly. “If you’d only listened when I asked you to get an abortion, none of this heartache would have happened.”

Cathy left in a hurry, and slammed the door. Dick.

go to tomorrow’s writing

Day Nine

After a sleepless night, Cathy drove down to the jail to see her baby girl. It was like a nightmare. The waiting room was full of people who obviously deserved to have family members in jail. They all wore mismatched thrift-store clothing and were sitting around with monster cups of coke, reading trashy paperbacks or watching slack-jawed as Jerry Springer entrapped another guest. Cathy sat as far from them as she could, put her trashy paperback back into her mismatching thrift-store bag, and carefully avoided looking at the TV.

When her number was called, she went up front and asked tearfully to see her daughter. There was a moment of panic when the lady told her that she wasn’t on the visitor list, but after thinking for a minute, Cathy asked her to try looking her up under her married name. Star must really hate the fact that she had remarried, because sure enough, she was listed under Richard’s last name.

She made a note to yell at her daughter later about being rude to Gray, but it seemed so trivial a point, and she forgot about after they looked thru her bag and frisked her and finally let her thru the door down a long, dirty, puke-yellow corridor that echoed back every step she took, large pipes running along the ceiling as if the corridor was built for them, and any human use was secondary. It reminded her of the entrance hall to the Wizard of Oz’s throne room, intimidating, beyond human scale, designed to make you sorry you’d come. She idly wondered about the manpower needed to keep the floor as shiny and polished as it was, and imagined a jail population who would fight for the chance to do something, even just using a polisher to keep the corridor gleaming its sick dirty ochre color. The corridor cut thru the bowels of the jail and ended at a door marked visitors. She went thru it, and it clanged behind her. She was in a gray room of little gray booths, hard gray stools, gray phones, and bulletproof windows. She paced behind the window, trying to see down into the middle of the jail where they were keeping her baby. It looked nasty. It was all painted cinderblock, painted ducts and pipes, and windows. She didn’t see any bars. She was looking down one floor into the middle of what looked like a holding pen, with rooms arranged all around it, and a control booth looking room in the middle with monitors and computers and blinking lights. Nobody was moving down there. It was very clean. There was no furniture, and no windows, and lots of fluorescent light flickering spasmodically from every other fixture.

Finally she sat down at a chair in the middle of the visitor room. As if by signal, a door opened at the far end of the holding cell and her daughter came scuttling out, peering into the control room as if asking permission to cross the room and climb the stairs.

Star looked haggard. Her hair was unbrushed, her eyes were tired. Her normally beautiful face was stressed by a frown as she slumped into her chair and picked up the telephone to talk to her mom.

“I don’t understand why I’m still in here,” she whined. “Why doesn’t Dad go ahead and pay my bail?”

Cathy so didn’t want to tell her that it was for her own good, or that they were hoping she’d learn a lesson, but Star beat her to it.

“I’ve learned my lesson,” she said. “I’ll do anything to keep from coming back to jail. It’s cold in here, all the time. And all I’ve had for days has been peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”

Cathy knew how much she hated peanut butter and jelly. “What happened before you got arrested?” she asked.

Star looked stricken. “It was awful,” she said into the phone, running a hand thru her tousled hair. Her fingers caught tangles. “They tied up everyone but me, because I was upstairs. And when I came downstairs, they put a gun to my head, and I told them to get it the fuck out of my face.”

“You were very brave. Who were they?”

“Some guys. One of them was someone who used to come over to the house. He recognized me. They hit Spike with a gun, and gave him a concussion. And then the guy, he told me to go collect the stuff, because he knew I would know where everything was. They took Spike’s money and his guns, and they pulled the phone from the wall and took that, and his cellphone, and then they left. I followed them to the front hall and got their license plate number.”

“What were you doing upstairs?”

“I was changing Jennifer’s baby?”

“Jennifer?”

“Yes. She and Allen. Their baby. They live there, too.”

Too many people to sort out. Cathy began to feel dizzy. “And then what?”

“Then Spike’s damn grandma came in and called the cops. He begged her not to, because we wanted to handle it ourselves, but she took one look at the blood on the wall and the duct tape, and panicked.” She seemed to think that it was silly to panic when you find your kin tied up and beaten. Cathy nodded. It seemed unlikely that they would have called the cops themselves, with drugs and guns in the house. She could understand if it had been grandma calling the cops.

“Why was he charged with having a gun if they took them all?”

She laughed. “They couldn’t possibly have taken them all. Besides, they threw a bunch of stuff out of their car window as they left. I saw them, and told the cops. Maybe they tossed the guns, too.” She shrugged, looking vulnerable. Cathy felt sorry for her.

“I wish there was something I could do to get you out of here,” she said softly. “But we don’t have any money.”

Star stared at her. “You could get a job,” she said.

Cathy ignored the suggestion. “I talked to Spike’s grandma,” she said. Star reacted as if she’d been talking to the cops.

“Why did you do that? You shouldn’t be talking to her,” she said, her eyes wide with some emotion. Fear?

“Why not?” Star didn’t answer. “We had a nice conversation. She’s a nice person. And she told me a lot of things I didn’t know.”

“Like what,” Star challenged.

“Like how they found cocaine.”

“It wasn’t ours. It’s Allen’s.”

“Who’s Allen?”

“Allen? And Jennifer? He lives there?” Like, Mom, you’re such an idiot.

Cathy was puzzled. “If he lives there, why didn’t the cops pick him up, too?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Was he there and they didn’t arrest him, or he wasn’t there at the time?”

“Well, he was there, and then he left once the cops got there. Granny showed up and called the cops, and then Spike’s mom came in later. They were going to arrest them, too.”

“Why did they arrest you? Did you giggle at the cops again?”

“Well, they were so Hollywood about it, and they threatened me and stuff, and I can’t stand bullies.”

Cathy nervously imagined Star showing attitude to a cop. “You didn’t do anything that they might have interpreted as resistance, did you?”

“No, but I did go to the bathroom and flush some of the stuff down the toilet,” she said, proud of herself.

Cathy groaned.

When she left the jail she sat in her car and cried for a few minutes. It was very hard for her to keep calm inside the jail, seeing her pretty, innocent daughter transformed into a hardened criminal in a jumpsuit. Star had hinted that she wasn’t getting along with the other women in the pod she was in. She said there’d been a fight the night before and they’d all been locked down. Cathy had searched fearfully for bruises, but Star looked okay, physically. The damage to her emotions was evident, tho. She wasn’t getting any sleep, they weren’t feeding her well, and she was bored out of her mind and unable to understand why people who said they loved her wouldn’t get her out of there.

Cathy returned home, feeling depressed. Richard was still insisting that she stay in jail until an unspecified time in the future, altho she could tell he was beginning to work himself around to where he would want her out soon. When she called him he said something about how when inmates fight, the guards shoot them full of so many quiet drugs that they lie in bed twitching, and how he didn’t want his little girl to be in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Perhaps in a few more days he’d be worried enough about her that he would bail her out. Cathy assured him that Star was suffering, and told him that she’d asked for him to come visit her. But he was still too mad. Cathy wanted to say mean things to him and hang up. She wanted to scream. She wanted to go over and knock some sense into him. She went to bed, instead, depressed.

She tried to get back to a normal life, but with Star in jail, all she could think of was her poor baby and her hopeless future. Most of the dog walks with Gray and the puppies were silent stalks thru the neighborhood. The couple walked apart down the sidewalks, Cathy staring at the ground, Gray busy with his own thoughts. He was absorbed by his several projects, and she was thinking of her little girl. The dogs were looking for smells and places to pee.

As they arrived back home one afternoon, they heard a noise in the alleyway between houses, a scuffling in the leaves. Cathy and Gray started toward the noise, and Gray handed her Tabasco’s leash and took off down the stairs as he saw what was going on. A pair of neighborhood dogs had cornered one of their cats. One of them had grabbed her in its mouth and was shaking her back and forth violently. The cat yelped piteously. Cathy looked for something to throw at the dog, but as Gray got to the bottom of the stairs the dog dropped the cat and sauntered off, wagging its tail. Gray disappeared into the basement and reemerged half a second later with a shotgun he kept behind the door for just such an emergency. He disappeared around the back of the house.

Cathy put Tabasco and Scootie into the basement and shut the door, then went to see about the poor cat. Her name was Isis and she was old, but she’d lived in Gray’s workshop for longer than Cathy had been there. She spent as much of her time as she was allowed curled up sleeping in Gray’s lap, and if he was too busy, she spent her time curled up sleeping on the futon couch, her customary space, coated with shed fur.

Now she was lying in the leaves, not moving, breathing with effort, her eyes open and staring panicky as Cathy knelt over her and tried to decide what to do with her. Her neck seemed to be broken. It was at a funny angle. Her breathing was getting harder and more uneven. Cathy knew she was dying. She scooped her up gently and brought her into the workshop, laying her on her favorite spot on the futon, hoping Gray would get back in time to pet her before she died.

Cathy had never watched anything die before. It was as fascinating as it was gruesome. There was no blood on the cat, no sign that she was irreparably damaged, but her head was still at a strange angle, and she didn’t move any of her legs or her tail, only her chest rising and falling with her breaths. And then she started making noises with every breath. Little raspy noises. And as Cathy sat by here, stroking her fur in an attempt to calm her down, the cat began hesitating between breaths. Each pause was longer than the last, and finally she didn’t take another breath. Cathy waited, holding her own breath. The cat lay under Cathy’s hand, still, her eyes open.

Cathy wondered. Was the difference between life and death movement in general, or was it pumping lungs? Was stopping breathing the simple trick to dying? Was a creature that was still breathing but paralyzed alive? Was a human who was still breathing but had no mind left alive? She thought of herself and Gray getting old and incapacitated, finally ending up breathing laboriously in a strange bed, alone, with the same panicky look in their eyes as the cat had.

She felt sick. This could have happened to her Star. Some guy had a gun to her head. Drug deals went wrong all the time. They could have come in and shot everyone there so nobody could identify them. She could have been found with a panicky look in her eyes, not moving, not breathing, her blood all over the floor, cooling and congealing, with nobody to find them until the rats had eaten all the juicy bits and the ants had started in on them.

Cathy sat next to the dead cat and cried for everybody who’d lost someone they love. She cried for all the wasted lives, she cried for all the people stuck in jail whether they deserved it or not, she cried for kids whose parents hadn’t raised them right, she cried for parents who despite all their good intentions were too fucked up to be good parents. She cried for herself. She cried for Star. She cried for Isis.

Gray found her curled into a ball beside the dead cat, also curled into a ball.

They buried the cat out back, next to a growing number of cats that had been killed by that pair of dogs or some other. Gray was determined to put a stop to it. He’d been unable to track the dogs far enough to get a good shot at them, and Cathy had reminded him several times in the past that being caught using a gun would get him an automatic prison sentence, no matter what his excuse. But he was full of options. There were other ways to stop murderers.

The next day, he concocted a powerful dog poison, ready for the next stage of his plan.

A few days later, Cathy and Gray went down to the house where Star and Spike had been robbed, a box of garbage bags in the back of the truck, ready to retrieve as much of her belongings as they could. Spike’s parents were already there; his grandma had called her to tell her they were going to empty the house. There was a dumpster in the driveway. A middle aged couple were toting full garbage bags and wheeling barrows full of stuff to the dumpster and tossing them in.

Cathy was tempted to go thru what they’d already tossed to see if any of Star’s stuff was in the bags, but decided to go ahead and collect what was still in the house.

The formerly messy house was now a shambles. The cops had undoubtedly gone over the place, not with a fine toothed comb; more like with shovels and a fire hose. There was trash everywhere. All the cabinets had been opened and everything dashed aside, all the drawers were out and upside down. There was junk all over the floor. Trash. Clothes. DVD cases. Empty coke and beer cans. Gun cartridges, shotgun shells, all kinds of ammunition. Boxes of them. Everywhere she looked, there were bullets. This is not how the house had looked when she stopped by a few weeks before. Where did all the ammo come from?

She looked at Spike’s parents. They were both thin, in their forties, looking grim and determined, shoveling everything they could find into bags to be hauled out to the trash and buried in the dump. She tried to make a joke. “I always used to fuss at Star about picking up her stuff. I guess she never learned.”

Spike’s dad grinned, but his mom frowned. “He never learned to clean up after himself,” she said, glaring at his dad as if he’d gotten the habit from him.

“At least they have that in common,” Cathy said, meaning that they were both alike in that way, but Spike’s mom took it differently.

“They’ve got jail and all those charges in common,” she said angrily. “It’s all their fault. They been warned a million times, not to keep on the way they were.”

Cathy wondered if the whole family knew they were in here doing drugs.

She started to stuff things she recognized into garbage bags. She went into Spike and Star’s bedroom, where the cops had overturned the mattress and spilled everything out of the drawers onto the floor. “This room looks just like I would have imagined it, given Star’s housekeeping skills,” she said to Gray, and he chuckled, but she abandoned any more attempts at lightheartedness.

She could picture Star in absolute panic, running around the room trying to get at everything a cop would find interesting, trying to flush it all down the toilet. What’s the penalty for getting caught trying to dispose of evidence? Shoes, dirty socks, underwear, inside-out t-shirts, scrunched up jeans, all of it went into the bags. Cathy felt confusion. It was as if they’d just left the house to go out to dinner, and here she was trying to clear her stuff out while she was gone. But Star was sitting in jail.

She came out with a full bag and headed toward the truck with it. And then stopped, as she glanced at the dining room wall and noticed that it was covered with dried blood. She put the bag down and walked over to examine it. Big splatters of blood. Streaks of blood where Spike must have been slammed up against the wall. Blood all over the carpet and the dining room table. It showed up very clearly against the white of the wall. She was horrified. She could see Spike being hit in the head with a gun, then picked up and flung against the wall while the gun was pressed to his mouth, big strong rival drug fiends threatening his life and then putting a gun to poor Star’s he had while she held a baby in her arms.

“What happened to the people with the baby?” she asked Spike’s mom, who was piling computer equipment into the wheelbarrow. She noticed that they weren’t saving anything, just junking it all.

Spike’s mom scowled. “They let them leave. Jennifer told me that Star and Allen took the baby to Jennifer’s mom’s house while the cops were searching the house.”

Cathy was puzzled. She never got the full story from anyone. “Star and Allen? Jennifer wasn’t around?”

“No, she was out getting McDonald’s.”

“But then why did Star get arrested, if she was allowed to leave?”

Spike’s mom looked irritated. “Because she came back.”

“To be with Spike,” his dad explained. “He was hurt, and she was worried.”

“Oh.” Cathy wished Star had had more sense. You never return to the scene of a crime.

“Then she went around trying to flush the coke, and they caught her.”

“Oh, no.” Caught her how, she wondered. With it in her hand? Swirling down the drain? Residues on the bathroom floor? “Where was the coke?”

“Upstairs. In an overnight bag. They might not charge them with it, because they might not be able to prove it’s theirs. A lot of people come in and out and stay here. I guess they’ll run the fingerprints and then decide.”

“Well, there’s something we can hope for,” Cathy said, tho she didn’t feel very hopeful.

More stuff into plastic bags. Cathy went into the walk-in closet and was appalled by how many gun belts, gun cartridges, boxes of bullets, gun lover magazines, gun bags, holsters, clips, shotgun shells and satchels of cleaning equipment there were everywhere. There was more gun paraphernalia in the closet than there were clothes. And of course, most of Star’s clothes were on the floor anyway, so there wasn’t much to be retrieved from the room. Cathy moved into the bathroom. Here was a place that was mostly Star’s. Enough cosmetics and hair things to sink a ship. Thirty kinds of shampoo and conditioner, curling irons, straightening irons, blow dryers, brushes, scissors and clippers, hair ties, sprays, all the girly stuff. There was almost no evidence of Spike in the bathroom. And all of Star’s stereo equipment was in the bathroom, which Cathy thought was strange until she recalled the plasma TV in the living room, and then it didn’t seem so strange anymore. She had a hell of a time getting the speakers down off the wall. A giant, probably Spike, had put them up there, and he could get to places Cathy could only just barely see.

She filled Star’s soccer bag, a game she’d given up when she got into drugs. She’d showed such promise as a soccer player. Cathy started sniffling. She filled Star’s laundry hamper with her pillows. They smelled of Star. Cathy started crying. She folded Star’s feather bed and comforter into quarters and crammed it into a bag, feeling as if her heart were being crammed into plastic. She couldn’t wait to get away from there and have a good cry on Gray’s shoulder.

Gray was out in the living room, talking to Spike’s dad, lightening the atmosphere because he’d come out of the bedroom to find them going on to each other about how it was all Spike’s grandma’s fault. Now they were talking about dogs. Gray was angling for information on how to destroy killer dogs, and Spike’s dad was explaining that he had taken Spike’s pitbull to his house to avoid it being confiscated, because pitbulls weren’t allowed in houses with children. The thought of a pitbull going nuts on a kid made Cathy mad, and she was about to start fussing at Spike’s dad, when Spike’s grandma walked in. Spike’s dad was long and thin, like Spike, graying at the temples. Spike’s mom was short and thin, with a careworn face. Spike’s grandma was a steely-eyed businesswoman with a hard edge about her. But she looked beaten when she walked in. Cathy remembered that the three of them were at odds about what to do about Spike being in jail.

They stopped work, and called out for delivery. Then they sat around the dining room table, which had never been used for eating at before, and dug into chinese food. Cathy and Gray kept filling bags and hauling them out to the truck. Cathy wasn’t hungry, and wanted to leave, and didn’t want to sit down and make idle chitchat. They were talking about TV shows and car races.

When Spike’s grandma asked if she’d like a bite to eat, Cathy said her stomach was in knots and she couldn’t eat. “I know what you mean,” she said. “I couldn’t eat for days. But life goes on.” She took a mouthful. “I feel that it’s all my fault,” she said, and Cathy could see Spike’s mom nodding agreement. “I never said no to the boy, I let him lay around all day watching TV and doing drugs, and never made him work for a living. I bought him this house, I paid for everything. And this is my reward. To see him in jail, his life ruined. I had such hopes for him.”

Spike’s mom nodded with every word. Spike’s dad just ate, keeping his head down. Cathy wondered at the family dynamic and kept her mouth shut. “But he’s going to stay in there until his trial,” Grandma promised, turning her attention to a spring roll. Spike’s mom looked daggers at her and went back to her chicken leg. Cathy took a bag to the truck and decided that they had about all they could fit in the back of the truck, and about all they could take from the family. She was exhausted, and went to bed early, too depressed to have sex.

Two days later, Richard came by the house and sat at the counter drinking tea and moaning about how Star had let him down, and how much she was costing him. Cathy felt like screaming at him about how he loved money more than his daughter, but she didn’t bother, because he would have agreed with her at that point.

She could see that he was trying to talk himself into getting her out of jail sooner rather than later, so she let him, feeding him encouraging noises every time he seemed to need approval.

“I just can’t stand the thought of my baby being contaminated by those hardened criminals,” he complained, even tho he hadn’t been to the jail to visit her. “It’s dangerous in there. She could be raped by a guard, or made into some hag’s bitch.” His face was all contorted with worry.

“Then maybe you should consider bailing her out.”

“Not a chance. She isn’t showing any remorse. And she seems to have no idea what this is costing me, or what she’s putting me thru.”

Cathy knew what was coming. Within a day or two he would get her out of jail; having worked himself into hysterics, he would go and rescue her, and Cathy would be the only one holding the hard line, and would have to play the badguy for sticking to her principals when Daddy was buying her love. Again. She was tired of it.

Sure enough, Star called collect the very next day to gloat that she was getting out of jail tomorrow. “I asked Dad why you couldn’t bring the money over and get me out today, but he said that you wouldn’t want to bail me out. He said you think I need to learn a lesson,” she accused, as if that was a horrible thing for a mother to want.

That spineless bastard. “We both sat down when you got arrested,” she responded heatedly, “and we both discussed what was going on, and talked about just what kind of lesson you needed to learn.” His resolve had lasted until the moment he visited her and she turned on the waterworks. Thanks, Richard.

“Well, I’d like you to come and get me out today, because it’s dangerous in here.”

Cathy could hear the echo of Richard’s voice.

“You don’t care how it is for me in here,” she whined. “You’re just picking on me, and trying to make life harder than it has to be, to satisfy some sick jealousy you feel.”

Cathy bit her tongue. She sounded just like her dad. “I’m not the one who put you in jail, and it’s the state that’s trying to make life hard for you. You need to concentrate on why you’re in jail and what you should have done to stay out of there.”

“The reason I’m here is because Dad threw me out of the house. He hit me, and I left home.”

He hit her. Hmm. “The reason you’re there is because you and Spike were living in a house with drugs and guns and some gang rivalry thing going on, and the state is going to punish you for it.” Cathy felt like a character in Star’s favorite TV show, Law and Order. Where did she get these snappy comebacks?

“I just want to get out so I can do the right thing,” she said, sounding like she was going to cry. Cathy suddenly felt like crying herself. “Dad says that when I get out I’m going to start going to church, and he’s going to go with me.”

Odd, Richard had mentioned something about church, but had hinted that it was Star’s idea. Cathy had laughed it off, because Richard hadn’t been near a church since his first communion.

“Star, you have to face the fact that you have a jail sentence hanging over your head.”

“You have no idea what I’m going thru,” she said angrily.

“That’s because you always keep everything secret.”

“You know, when I get out I’m not going to come and see you.”

That was mean. Cathy lost it. “Fuck you.”

“Fuck you!” Star answered, sounding much more like she meant it than Cathy had. “Fuck you, bitch!” she shouted, and as she hung up on her mom, Cathy could hear the sound echoing off the walls of the jail.

Cathy called Richard and yelled at him for making her the badguy.

Then Star called back, collect, and apologized for being so mean.

Then Richard called and said he was escaping early from work and did she want to go to the jail and visit Star together.

So Cathy got in the truck and went down to see her loving daughter.

Who complained that she wanted to get out of jail today, and talked exclusively to her father, and made faces at her mom.

Richard bailed her out of jail that evening, and dropped her of at Cathy’s on his way to work the next morning. “Someone’s got to watch her every move,” he insisted, looking apologetic as he handed over a bag of Star’s things. Star flounced into the house, already acting rebellious and abusive, made up her bed with sheets from the bag, screamed at Cathy about having stolen the big TV, turned the little TV’s volume way up, slammed the door, and stayed in the room all day. That evening she slammed out of the house to cruise around the neighborhood and didn’t come back until after Cathy and Gray were in bed. When Cathy asked where she’d been, she said, “I’m still mad at you,” and slammed off to her bedroom.

go to tomorrow’s writing

Day Eight

Cathy’s patient waiting by the phone was rewarded at ten the next evening, when it rang with a collect call from the county jail. Star’s recorded voice said, “Mama,” and Cathy anxiously pushed a button to accept the call. But she pushed the wrong button, and the call cut off. She called the jail back to explain her error and beg them to put her thru to her daughter, but when she pushed 0 to speak to the operator, a recording came on to say that she’d reached an invalid extension, and hung up on her. She was panicky. How was she going to get thru to Star? She’d sounded miserable. She would assume her mom was mad at her and didn’t want to speak to her, when she’d been frantic to talk to her for days. Cathy spent the rest of the day feeling like the worst mother in the world.

The most difficult thing about being a mom is when you have to sit by helplessly and wonder what’s going on. No information, nothing you can do to help. Anything you actually do may be entirely the wrong thing, and you don’t know for sure about that, either. So paralysis sets in. And depression. You’re angry, but there’s no outlet, and anyway anger doesn’t feel appropriate, so you suppress that and become even more depressed. And you can’t think about anything else, so you’re useless for the things that would normally occupy you. Your work suffers, your sleep suffers, your health suffers. You age ten years in a week. And your kid, the center of all your concern and worry and suffering, doesn’t want to know, won’t thank you, and will only accuse you of interfering and being a drama queen. Only your husband and best friend will ever know how you suffer.

Poor Gray. Poor Miranda. They had to hold Cathy’s hand for days. The only things she could talk about was what was happening to Star, and what was going to happen to Star, and what might could happen to Star. Every time she thought of something else, she would get on the phone to Miranda, or if she wasn’t available, she’d troop down to the basement to tell it to Gray. And as people who love you will do, they listened patiently, offered suggestions, and tried to lighten her mood. But they might as well have offered to slit her wrists for her, because nothing short of death was likely to make her feel any better.

The only person she didn’t tell was Mom, who called in the middle of Cathy’s not knowing. It drove her mad to have to spend time on the phone when it might ring at any moment with another collect call from the jail.

“Hi, Mom, I’m real busy right now.”

“You sound awful. What’s wrong?”

Cathy almost screamed. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m just…” she paused, unable to think of anything she could tell her. “Busy.”

“Oh. Well, I won’t stay on long. I was just watching the 700 Club and they were doing a special about the dangers of monosodium glutamate.”

“I know. It’s actually one of the larger pieces of work out there, never mind what I think of them in general.”

Mom ignored the implied criticism. “I think you need to get a copy of this. I know you’re almost as sensitive as I am.” Mom was notoriously sensitive to MSG. She collapsed in a near-faint and remained comatose for hours every time she ate a piece of contaminated food. Her joints swelled, her face got puffy, she got migraines and her thinking got fuzzy. She was a textbook case. But she never learned to avoid the stuff. While Cathy went to great pains to make all her own food, Mom thought nothing of stopping for a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken, claiming that the original style didn’t have any MSG in it, and then coming down with the full range of symptoms within twenty minutes.

“Mom, it’s available online. I talk about it in my blog.” She was frantic to get off the phone. “I hate to be rude, but I really am busy. Was there anything else you called about?”

“Oh, just that it’s been so long since I’ve seen you. I was thinking about driving down there and staying for a few days. We could cook up a batch of my famous meat loaf and try to recreate your dad’s barbeque sauce.”

But then she would find out all about Star’s troubles. And with no preparation, it would be devastating. If not to Mom, then to Cathy, when Mom exploded with righteous indignation that someone of her line would be so stupid as to get thrown in jail. “Um, that sounds good,” she said, knowing that Mom almost never followed thru on her threats to come visit. “Let me know when you finalize your plans.” There, she thought. Approving of something Mom wanted to do was a sure discouragement to its ever happening.

Then it came. “How’s Star?”

Shit, Cathy thought. What can I tell her? Her voice shook. “Oh, I guess she’s fine. I don’t see much of her these days.”

“Is she in any trouble?”

How does she do it? Cathy wondered. “No, she’s living with her dad again.”

“Oh.” Mom’s voice was flat. “I’d much rather she was living with you.”

“Well, personally, I find it much more restful when she’s down with him. She kind of wears me out, being a rebellious teenager and all.”

“Now you know how I felt, all those years ago.”

“Have I told you lately how sorry I am to have caused you and Dad all that trouble?”

“Too bad you can’t tell your father.”

He’d died before Cathy ever had Star, or met Richard. He would have liked Richard, she thought. “Yeah. I miss him. I dream about him sometimes.”

“Nobody misses him like I do. I dream of him every night, and think about him every day.” She sounded sad, also a bit dramatic.

“Well, I love you. But I’ve got to go now, really.”

“Well, okay then. I’ll talk to you soon. Love you.”

Finally tired of waiting for Star to call, Cathy got on the phone to the sheriff’s department to find out what she had been charged with and when her arraignment would be. What she learned made her wish she hadn’t eaten anything recently. Star was being charged with possession of under an ounce of marijuana, which was a misdemeanor. But she was also being charged with violation of the state’s controlled substance act, and with being in possession of a weapon in commission of a crime. She didn’t understand either the meaning or the severity of the last two charges. Being caught with pot was a fine. But what were controlled substances, and which one was she caught with, and where did weapons enter into it? The only thing she understood well was that her arraignment was going to be at 1:30 that afternoon, which gave her just over an hour to get down to county court.

She broke several laws getting there on time, including speeding, lane change violations, and being on a cellphone while driving. She called Star’s dad, who was still waking up from a late night and chemical sedation. He was coherent only by the slimmest of definitions. But she found out that Star had spoken to him several times from jail, and he’d called her DUI lawyer, who would be there at the hearing, so when she got into court, Cathy looked for the little woman who’d gotten her off her DUI drugs charge. Maybe she could work more miracles for her baby.

However, she never got to talk to the lawyer, or to her daughter. She was the first spectator in the courtroom, and the bailiffs were control freaks, so they made her sit in the back, and piled people beside her as they showed up in the courtroom. Cathy found herself squeezed between the edge of the bench and a 300 pound guy with body odor and some kind of respiratory problem. She could hardly hear for his wheezing and coughing. Maybe he’s got tuberculosis, she thought fretfully.

There were four cops in the courtroom, watching suspiciously to see that spectators didn’t become violent, and while they would turn baleful eyes on the people waiting to see what was going to happen to their loved ones, they also took time to laugh and joke among themselves. It was quite the little clique, Cathy thought. The guy next to her became wiggly, and then farted. Cathy leaned over the arm rail of the bench and turned her head, gasping.

Then the prisoners filed in. There were an awful lot of them. The women came first, and there was her baby, in a kelly green prison jumpsuit, chains on her feet. Cathy started crying. Star ignored her completely, as if she hadn’t seen her when she raked her eyes around the courtroom. She had an I’m-above-it-all look on her face. Almost defiant. Star waved anyway, hoping to convince her that she hadn’t hung up on her the other day.

Then men came in next, in orange. Among them was Spike. He was the tallest by far, and his crewcut and sticky-out ears made him look like a little kid. Or a young wild-west outlaw. Star stared at him and mouthed something, and he nodded and mouthed something back. And then the judge entered and all eyes turned to the front.

The judge spoke quickly, with a dry tone, as if he’d recited what he was about to say for twenty years. About a pad of paper on the podium so the accused could write things down, about reading them their charges, and about setting bail. He explained that there were three ways to make bail – either cash, which they’d get back after trial, or a bail bondsman, who would take fifteen percent that they would not get back, or post a property bond to twice the value of the bail. He said it so fast that Cathy could tell half the prisoners didn’t understand him.

The first guy up was a big man, in shackles and handcuffs. He had a lawyer. He was a fugitive, and they caught him in New York, and he was here to be charged with having dangerous drugs. What those drugs were the judge didn’t say. No bail. He tried to sit back down on the benches when the judge was finished, and the cops descended on him to make him go back behind the bar and out into whatever holding pen he was going to be brought to next.

Next up was a grizzled old guy in handcuffs. He wrote everything the judge said down on the pad, very slowly, his elbows at a funny angle because of the cuffs. He asked the judge to repeat the charge. Forgery, multiple counts. His bail was set at a thousand dollars.

Then the judge called Star. She flipped her hair back from her face with a motion of her head, stood up, and sauntered to the podium next to her lawyer, where she took up the pencil and posed dramatically while the judge read her charges, set her bail, and gave her the next court date.

Bail was ten thousand for whatever controlled substance it was, another ten thousand for the weapons, and a mere fifteen hundred for the pot. Where was Star’s dad going to come up with that? If it were up to Cathy, Star would have to stay in jail, because she and Gray didn’t even have fifteen percent of that to give to a bondsman. She felt stunned. Star acted like she didn’t care, but the numbers must have shocked her, too.

Next they called Spike, whose name turned out to be Curtis Andrew Jackson. He got up and swaggered to the podium. What is it with these kids, Cathy wondered. Don’t they know that a judge likes to see contrition, whether you’re guilty or not? He listened, and didn’t write down, when the judge said the exact same things to him as he’d said to Star. Cathy wanted to object that any weapons couldn’t possibly have been Star’s no matter what else was found. But she bit her tongue, something she was doing so much these days she was getting scar tissue.

Cathy had no interest in the rest of the criminals in jumpsuits, so she left the court and went to call Richard, who was just out of the shower. “Working at home, I see,” she greeted him. He grunted in reply, having, she supposed, not had his wake-up pill down long enough for it to have made any difference.

She told him what the bail was. “I don’t suppose,” he said, “that you’ve considered that we might be pouring money down the drain, getting her out of jail.”

“Well, we can’t just leave her in there until her trial. Her next hearing is over a month away.”

“I can too leave her in jail.” Cathy started to object, but he continued. “Just think about it. She can’t go around doing drugs and violating her probation if she’s in jail. And you’ve seen how ungrateful she is whenever we do something for her. I don’t think she’ll realize how serious her position is unless she spends some time in jail.”

“But it’s so cold. And dangerous. And she’ll think we don’t love her. Besides, we’re still responsible for her. We can’t just let her languish in jail.”

“I’m saying we can, and I’m the one with the money to get her out.”

Cathy argued with him about this for awhile, but in the end the only promise she could get out of him was that he wouldn’t let it go on for more than a few days. “This will be the last time I do anything for her.”

“You said that last time.”

“I told her this was coming. Her lifestyle promised this would happen. She should have seen it coming. Now she’ll learn. The hard way.”

She went home and buried her head on Gray’s chest, and cried herself to sleep right there on the front porch glider.

When she got up, she decided she needed to go down to the scene of the crime and see if there was anything she could do. She didn’t really know why she was going, because the place was locked and empty, but she needed to see for herself something of the situation. She hated the sight of the pretentious rooflines and stodgy landscaping of the neighborhood, and it almost gave her a sense of satisfaction to think that the snobby middle-class neighborhood was harboring a drug den.

In the driveway she found a bottle of Star’s hand lotion, and a rumpled picture of Spike smoking a blunt, and picked them up to give to Star whenever she was able to see her again. After leaving a note with her phone number scribbled on it, in case anyone came to the house who could tell her what happened, she pulled out her cellphone to call Gray and get the number of the sheriff’s department. She wanted to get a copy of the police report.

The sheriff told her to call the narcotics division. The narcotics division told her to call the district attorney. The district attorney told her that they wouldn’t have anything on her until after the preliminary hearing, and that she wouldn’t be able to get a copy of it without filing discovery on it, and advised her to get the lawyer to do it.

A call to the jail told her that she couldn’t see her baby until the next day, after orientation. As if she was in college, thought Cathy bitterly. County School For the Criminal Arts.

Then she called a bonding company, to find out if maybe she could get Star out of jail herself. She was describing the circumstances to the woman who answered, and had a strange feeling that it wasn’t news to her. So she asked, “Are you familiar with the case, or is it something that happens all the time?” and to her surprise, the woman said she was Spike’s grandmother, and had noticed Cathy sitting in the courtroom when they were arraigned.

This was a stroke of luck. Cathy finally was in contact with someone who knew a lot more than she did. She wished she’d looked around at the spectators more carefully, because she would have loved to know who she was talking to, but she got a sense of her on the phone. The grandmother was a no-nonsense woman who’d seen it all. After all, she worked as a bail bondsman and dealt with all sorts of people, from desperate criminals to innocents caught up in the system. She sounded as if nothing surprised her.

But she didn’t sound as if she was past anger. “I’m not throwing Spike’s bail,” she said flatly when Cathy asked about getting Star out. “And I’d recommend you just let her sit there, too.” Cathy didn’t get a chance to tell her that Richard was bent on it. “I told that boy a thousand times that this was how he was going to end up. That he had a real future being a bondsman and bounty hunter with me, and he was riding the fence with those drugs. But he wouldn’t listen to me, and now the choice has been made for him. I told him he would come to a bad end.”

Cathy listened to her with growing fear. “Yep, I used to go to that house and chase off the bad guys, whenever I’d find them there. ‘You can’t come round to this house,’ I’d tell them, and ‘don’t come back here if you want to stay out of jail.’ They were afraid of me.”

“Do you know what happened?”

“Yeah, I know.” She sounded bitter. “Four or five of Spike’s customers burst in on them while they were sitting there watching the Nascar race, and tied up everyone with duct tape, and hit Spike with a gun and threatened to kill him. Then they took all his money and his guns and his phones, and left. I got there right after that, and called the police. Spike had a concussion and couldn’t walk. They had a good look around and found all sorts of things they shouldn’t have. And then they wrapped up his head and took him in to the hospital for stitches, and then carted them both off to the county jail.”

Cathy gulped. “Do you think the cops had it in for him because he’s a bounty hunter? He told me once that they didn’t like him because he got scumbags out of jail.”

She laughed dismissively. “Nah, the cops respect us. They know me very well, and they know my grandson, and they like him. Hell, they didn’t charge him with at least three other violations that they could have, one being the pit bull he keeps in the house.”

“Oh.” Cathy was overwhelmed with all the things she hadn’t known, and was almost afraid to ask about any more.

“My boy’s never been in trouble with the law. He just has a few tickets for not wearing his seat belt and speeding, but nothing serious. They’ve got no reason to treat him worse than he deserves. And I’ve been telling him it was going to come to this. I say he deserves it, just for lying to me. He’s been swearing he wasn’t doing no drugs, and lying to me about having his drug friends around there, and I can’t stand a liar.”

Cathy made a note not to tell any fibs to grandma.

“I would do anything for that boy, but he’s been taking advantage of me. I got him a good lawyer, but I’m going to let him rot in jail until his trial, even tho his mama is screaming for me to get him out of there right now. It’ll do him good to leave him in there.”

“Maybe so,” Cathy mused. “Star’s dad and I have decided to do the same thing.”

“I’m just glad he’s not in for homicide,” she continued, and Cathy blanched. “He’s had trouble with this low-life friend before, a year ago or so, when he tried to steal his four-wheeler. And if the cops hadn’t shown up and stopped him, he would have gone after them and shot them all when his head healed up, and I’d be getting him a lawyer on multiple charges of first degree murder.”

Cathy agreed it would have been much worse, but it didn’t really feel like it to her. It didn’t feel like it could get any worse. “What are they looking at as it is?”

“Thirty-six years, if they get the maximum. A year for the marijuana, five years for the cocaine, and five years for each of the guns that they found.”

“Cocaine?” Oh, that controlled substance. “Six guns?”

“That’s not including the ones the robbers took off him,” Grandma said, sounding happy about it.

Cathy pictured an arsenal. “But they won’t get all that when they go to court?”

“Not likely. I’m hoping they throw out the other charges and just give him the misdemeanor marijuana, because I still wanting him helping me with the bounty hunting. He’s real good at that.”

“Yeah. I saw him dressed up once. Very intimidating.”

“He’s taller than most of the criminals we’re trying to apprehend, and that helps a lot.”

“I’ll bet. I hope they tell Star she’s got to go to rehab as part of her sentence.”

“I noticed that she seemed very fond of the cocaine.” Cathy wondered how she could tell, and exactly how familiar she was with her grandson’s drug use.

“It’s your house, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Yes. I’ve given the boy everything, and see how he repays me. He swears on a stack of Bibles that there are no drugs, that he’s leading an upright life, and then he goes and does exactly what he feels like. Drugs, high living, thinking he’s smarter than everyone else.”

“But won’t they confiscate it because they found drugs there?” She was a little fuzzy on the legalities.

“No. I’ve already had a word with the police. I wasn’t on the premises, and won’t be held responsible for what he was doing by himself. I’ve got important contacts in the police department. That won’t be a problem.”

Cathy felt dispirited. She got off the phone and drove slowly home, her head filled with thoughts of just how long thirty-six years was, just how long five years behind bars would be. She thought of that Michelle Pfeiffer movie where she was convicted of murder and spent all of her daughter’s youth behind bars, getting a visit every now and then, growing old in jail.

When she got home, the phone rang. It was Star, calling from jail. She was angry. “Why am I still in here?” she demanded.

Cathy ignored the question. “I’m so glad you called me. I hung up on you by mistake the other day, and I was so afraid you wouldn’t understand and would never want to talk to me again.”

“I talk to Dad every day,” she spat. “Why am I still in jail? Why hasn’t he paid my bail?”

“We don’t have enough money together to get you out right now,” she lied. “We’re working on it, but Dad’s got to cash some investments in.” She figured Star wouldn’t know anything about his finances, but that didn’t prevent her from arguing that they surely could get enough money together to get her out of that place.

“What’s it like there? Are they treating you well?”

“I need you to call Josh, and Stephanie.”

“Honey, I don’t have any of your friends’ numbers. You go to great lengths to see that I don’t.”

Star ignored the criticism. “Write down this number. I think it’s Stephanie’s. I can’t think too clearly in here. The whole block’s been in lockdown because we were talking when we weren’t supposed to, but I just got out by pretending to be one of the other girls. I’m stealing her phone call right now.”

“Are the other girls causing you trouble? Are they beating up on you?” Star made a little whimpering sound and Cathy interpreted it as a yes. They’re fighting with my baby. Cathy had visions of bitch fights in jail, with Star the loser. Of course, as well as she knew Star these days, she could already be queen of the prisoners. “Are you making friends?”

Star gave a baby-like “No.” Cathy was encouraged to try other questions. “Are there any girls from high school in there with you?” Star laughed. It was an ugly laugh. “Are you going to be alright?”

She complained again and again about how horrible it was that she had to be in jail, how she got nothing to eat, and could get no sleep, and how cold she was. She kept wanting to know why she was in there, and Cathy bit her tongue once again to avoid saying it was because she was a cokehead.

Star came up with several more names of people she wanted Cathy to contact, but could remember none of the phone numbers, so Cathy was left at the end of the phone call having a reasonable hope that Star would call her back soon. She hung up, relatively content.

And then she called Richard. “I spoke with Spike’s grandma,” she said. “She says the controlled substance charge is for cocaine.”

“Well, that explains why she has gotten so skinny lately.”

“It does?” Cathy knew nothing about drugs. Coke makes you skinny?

“If it’s coke, then she’s definitely a flight risk.” What would Cathy know about that? “So she’s staying right where she is until the trial.”

Cathy felt worn down, and didn’t argue with him. After a few days of being furious, he might grow tender hearted again. It was his pattern. Cathy had learned to live with it, but it made every night Star spent in jail a sleepless night for her mom.

go to tomorrow’s writing

Day Seven

Star got out of jail and disappeared into her father’s house, and never called her mom to let her know she was okay. Cathy was free to think whatever she wanted about her time in the slammer, so she imagined her in international safety orange prison-issue clothes, huddled in the corner of a small gray cell, freezing and shivering thru the night, eating bread and water, avoiding the eyes of the other, brutally vicious women with bad teeth and ragged hair.

The saga continued. Cathy lived a relatively normal life, doing her gardening and researching her blog, making elaborate meals for two, taking long dog walks with Gray and the two doggies, sitting reading books with Scootie dozing in her lap, all while things were falling apart back at the ex ranch.

She got a call from Star one night after they’d been asleep for awhile. Cathy noticed it was past eleven.

“I had a fight with Greane,” she said.

Cathy didn’t know what to say. “Okay.” She looked at Gray, who was sleeping beside her, unaware.

“She got real mad and took my car and left us here, and hit a car backing out of the parking space, and my phone’s in the car and I can’t call Dad to let him know where I am. Can you call him for me?”

“Sure, sure,” she said. “But where are you?”

“Oh, we’re staying with Ben. He lives not very far from you.”

Who’s Ben? she wondered, but decided to go with something closer to her heart. “You’re in town and you haven’t come to see me? But I wanted to find out how you were in jail.”

“I can’t talk about that. It’s too horrible.” She didn’t sound horrified. She sounded distracted. “Anyway, can you call Dad and tell him what happened so I don’t get into trouble? I’m really worried how he’ll react. He’s so unreasonable these days.”

“Maybe because you’re off running around with people he doesn’t know,” Cathy suggested.

Star didn’t answer. “Will you call him?” She sounded impatient.

“Yes, I’ll call him.” And she did. And Richard didn’t answer. He’d undoubtedly gone to sleep. So Cathy shrugged and burrowed under the covers, cuddling up next to Gray’s warmth and trying to get back into the dream she’d been yanked out of.

And had almost succeeded when the phone rang again. It was Richard. “I’ve been dealing with Greane,” he said, wearily. “What’s up?”

There was the slightest trace of annoyance in his voice. This annoyed her. “Oh, I just called to tell you that Star just called me and asked me to call you because she just had a fight with Greane who left in her car with her cellphone inside, so she couldn’t call you.”

“But she could call you, eh?”

“Oh, yeah. I wonder why she didn’t call you.”

“Because she didn’t want me to yell at her, as I most certainly would have.” He sounded stressed, and whatever was causing him to slur hadn’t gone away.

“Not to worry,” he said, making Cathy instantly worried. “She called me just a minute ago to warn me that Greane was on her way to my house and I should take the keys away from her.”

“What’s going on?” There was so much that wasn’t being said.

“I told her to leave me out of it. It’s her car. But then Greane arrived…”

“Why did she come to your house?”

He sighed. “She’s been staying on the couch downstairs for the past few days. Something about not being able to live with her mother.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, she was all speedy, like she’d been doing amphetamines. I asked her, of course, and she denied it, but she gave every sign – her eyes were dilated and she was sweating. And talking a mile a minute.”

“But she’s pregnant.” Cathy was horrified.

“I don’t think that means a lot to her. Anyway, she told me the whole sordid story of how the parking space was far away from the house they were going to, and she dropped off Star and Saphyr and had to walk back from the parking place, and by that time they’d ditched her and gone off to some other place, a party, evidently. And by the time she found them they had a big huge fight and she came back here to tell me that Star is up there doing coke and meth.”

“That’s not exactly what Star said when she called me,” Cathy mused. “Do you believe what Greane has to say about Star doing drugs?”

“I don’t know. Anything’s possible. I just know that only one of them, if either, can be telling the truth. And at this point I’m inclined to think all the truth belongs to Greane, tho it’s a hard call.”

“Yeah. I’ve never felt more confused.”

“Well, try to get back to sleep. I’ve been dealing with screaming girls all day, and it’s actually been nice talking to an adult for a while.”

“Yeah, a sleepy one who’s no help to you at all.” But it was good to hear her ex compliment her. He must be in bad shape, because usually he sniped at her instead.

The next day, she called to check on things. Star answered. “How did you get home?” she wondered.

“Oh, Ben gave us a ride down here.”

“Who’s we?” Star never volunteered such details, and Cathy constantly fought to keep the names straight.

“Oh, Saphyr came with me. She’s going to be staying here for awhile.”

“Ah. And what are you doing home?”

Star snorted. “I live here,” silly.

“So what’s going on with Greane?”

“I kicked her ass out of here,” she reported victoriously.

“Why would you do that? She’s like nine months pregnant. Does she have anywhere else to go?”

“Fuck her. She’s on the street now. She was spreading lies about me.”

Cathy tried to sound noncommittal. “Mmm. What happened?”

“I drove her up to the top of our neighborhood and made her get out of the car. And now I’m cleaning up all her mess. She broke a glass and left it lying on the living room floor. The couch is a mess, she spilled diet Coke all over the place. And there’s a shit smell in the cushions. I’m afraid to touch the blanket she’d been using.”

Cathy was concerned for her welfare. Greane couldn’t walk long distances on those ankles. “Does she have a phone so she can call someone to come pick her up?”

“No,” she said triumphantly. “Bitch has to walk. Serves her right.”

Cathy disapproved. “Star, you need to have more compassion. She’s your friend, and she needs help.”

Star laughed at her and hung up. So much for compassion, Cathy thought.

Richard called Cathy from the car a few days later. He’d just driven Star to her boyfriend’s house for the weekend and wanted to discuss her condition.

“I know she’s doing drugs,” he announced. “I’m so tired of her attitude. She was all animated and chatty when she first got into the car, and then she became incoherent and started using words that didn’t make sense. I’m certain she took something to make her sleep so she wouldn’t have to talk to me while she was using me to get to her fucking boyfriend’s so they could fuck all weekend while I keep a fucking roof over her head.”

Cathy constantly had to balance what might be the truth with the irritating way that both Star and her dad had of exaggerated everything. She had a lot of trouble sorting it out. Was Star incoherent or was she just ignoring her pain in the ass father while he ranted at her? It was becoming a real bore having to remain noncommittal and reasonable in the face of such insanity coming at her. Only Gray was sane. And he was spending his days in the basement, working on his projects, and never picked up the phone. So Cathy was at the mercy of all onslaughts.

Like the day Saphyr stopped by, dragging a scruffy guy in dirty clothes with multiple piercings, who said nothing. While she used the bathroom and accepted a sandwich for lunch, she announced that she was working on a spell to cure her cancer. This surprised Cathy, who was immediately sorry for her.

“Yep, I’ve got a hard life,” Saphyr said with a sigh, looking under her lashes at Cathy to see how she was taking it, and seeing with some satisfaction that Cathy was trying to think of some way to help. “I’m beyond help,” she continued. “It’s my nose.” Cathy examined her normal-looking nose. “Nasal polyps. They’re cancerous. And I get migraines, and then I bleed from my tear ducts.” Cathy had never heard of such a thing.

Saphyr took a few bites of sandwich and scooted off the chair, heading for the door. “Yes, I don’t have long to live,” she finished. “My baby won’t have a mother, and I’ve got one on the way that might or might not make it to term.” She patted her belly dramatically.

“What about your parents?” Cathy asked with concern, wondering if it would be possible to adopt Saphyr’s babies herself, and then squelching that impulse.

“My dad’s an alcoholic, and he beats me, even while I’m pregnant. I’ve already been to the hospital when he kicked me in the stomach. But Children’s Services is trying to help me find another place to live.”

“Maybe you can stay with Star and her father until you have your baby,” she suggested, deciding to call Richard and talk him into it.

But he wasn’t having any of it. “She’s not even pregnant,” he said when she offered to get a spare bed out of the attic and bring it down there in the truck. “Your problem is that you believe anything anyone tells you.”

“Whereas you don’t believe a word.”

“And look who’s right?”

“I have no idea who’s right.”

“All I know is that I’ve had about enough of Star and her antics. Her lies. Her friends. I’m about ready to kick her back out of my house and change the locks.”

There went Cathy’s brilliant idea that he would take in all three of the girls and they would live happily ever after. “Meaning what?”

“I’m just warning you so you have time to prepare for her possibly coming back to live with you.”

Cathy gulped. “Maybe she’ll move in with one of her other friends.”

“Drug friends.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

While he didn’t immediately throw her out, she started staying in town with various friends again, and spent one evening at Cathy’s, camping out on her ex bed, on the phone. She was full of anxiety about a friend of hers, who was in the hospital, and she wanted to go visit him, but her boyfriend was putting his foot down and acting jealous, and wouldn’t let her. She spent several hours on the phone with Spike, pleading with him to let her go see her friend, and Cathy could hear her from the kitchen, close to tears, arguing that nobody else could go see him, and he needed someone to stay with him while he lay so close to death. She could tell that Spike wasn’t moved.

Cathy walked into the bedroom to see Star pacing back and forth, her face distorted by tears. She could hear Spike yelling at her over the phone, he was accusing her of being faithless, of sleeping around, of doing drugs, and Star was pleading her innocence.

The conversation made Cathy extremely uneasy. She knew that pleading tone, she’d used it once when she was younger and dating a control-freak jealous boyfriend. Star was begging for him to love her and trust her to do the right thing, and he was demanding that she submit to his will. It was breaking Cathy’s heart to see her daughter suffering such abuse, and she started to say something, but Star turned and snarled at her to get out of her room. “I’ve got everything under control,” she insisted, thru her tears.

In the end, she defiantly told Spike that she was going to spend the night in the hospital keeping vigil over her friend. Greane came in the house while this was still going on, and Cathy immediately turned to her for an explanation of what was going on.

“Well, we’ve got this friend, Brendan. He was hit by a car last night.”

“Oh, that’s awful.”

“Yeah, he was just crossing the street out in front of his apartment, and a car came by and bowled him over. Completely crushed his knees.” Cathy cringed. “Yeah, they were all clotted and swollen, like a steamship round of beef.” Cathy felt sick to her stomach. Greane continued with relish. “They might have to amputate.” She paused for a moment, listening to the heated conversation between Star and Spike. “I don’t like the way he’s been treating her,” she said scornfully. He’s making a big drama out of everything. He thinks she’s been sleeping around with all these guys, and won’t listen to reason.”

“I wonder why he doesn’t trust her,” Cathy said, thinking about her old boyfriend.

Star came out of the room, wiping her eyes, holding the phone in her hand. “I’m going to stay with Brendan tonight,” she said. “Can I borrow a pillow and blanket so I can be comfortable while I stay up and watch him die in the hospital?”

Cathy went and fetched some bedclothes for her daughter. She was worried.

Right after they left, Spike called back, and Cathy tried to calm him down. He was certain she was up to no good. He didn’t believe that anyone was in the hospital, and accused Star of lying so she could go off to some party where there were free drugs. Cathy felt tired.

The next day Greane and Saphyr came by. Greane walked right into the house, without knocking, and called for Cathy to see if she had an ace bandage they could use to wrap up Saphyr’s leg. She’d fallen on it. Saphyr’s father had damaged it once before, she said, and now she’d hurt it falling over the night before. Cathy went and found something they could use, and went out to the car where Saphyr was waiting, unable to make it up the steps. She was dozing when Cathy got to the car, and woozily pointed out where her leg was damaged, then asked her for lunch.

Cathy examined Saphyr’s leg. There was nothing wrong with it, no scrapes, no bruising, as normal as she’d ever seen her legs. She made them come into the house. Saphyr was very shaky on her feet, and wobbled up the stairs. Greane smelled of shit again. Cathy assumed that Greane was so big and pregnant that she could no longer reach her butt to wipe it.

“Is there anything else wrong with you?” she asked Saphyr, who was perched at the edge of her stool as if she were about to fall off it.”

“Oh, someone gave me a pill for the pain,” she said, reaching down to rub her leg and toppling right off onto the floor.

“I’ve got to talk to you about your daughter,” she said as Cathy helped her to an easy chair in the corner and turned to make sandwiches for the girls. “Witch to witch.”

Greane stood around, telling Saphyr to hush, the news was so bad that Cathy shouldn’t hear it.

“You know Steven, the guy who’s in the hospital with a bad leg?” Cathy nodded. It had been Brendan yesterday. “Well, he wasn’t hit by a car at all, but was shooting up, and he blew a vein in his arm. You should have seen it. Six inches of his arm, hard as a rock, dead. They might have to amputate.”

Cathy was confused. “Then, what was all that about? Did she spend the night in the hospital watching over him?”

“Yeah, she did, but Joey, a friend of ours, he went by to say hi and caught her shooting up Steven in his other arm. And later he came back and saw her in the bathroom, injecting herself in the ankle so she wouldn’t leave track marks.” Saphyr glanced at Cathy’s ashen face. “She’s that far gone,” she said, sounding satisfied. “I just thought I needed to let you know what she’s really up to, so that you aren’t fooled by her lies.”

Cathy felt sick. As she was hearing this sordid tale, she was trying to figure out just why she was feeling so ill. Certainly the things she was hearing were enough to make her toss her lunch, but she sensed that the bad feelings were coming from the girls. It was as if they were under a cloud of negativity that they spread wherever they went. She had the sudden feeling that she couldn’t wait to get rid of them, and hustled them out to their car as soon as she could. And, in fact, she felt much better the moment they turned Star’s car around and left the neighborhood.

She headed for Gray, the bright spot of sanity in her muddled universe. But even his calming influence could do nothing to distract her from the continuing catastrophe. It was a constant crisis. The pace seemed to confuse even the girls, who would be completely taken by the details of one crisis, only to forget them entirely the next day, when some other crisis would develop.

The next day, she got a call from Greane just as they were getting ready for bed. It seems that Saphyr and some unnamed others had stranded her at the local hospital, and she wanted Cathy to come get her. So Cathy got dressed and picked her up on the corner of the street opposite the emergency room entrance. Greane was a dark, hulking shape under the street lights. It was as if she carried her own shadow that overpowered the yellow mercury glow of the lights. She got in the car, reeking of cigarette smoke. “Saphyr’s been arrested,” she stated excitedly.

“What?” What now? Cathy’s heart sunk. No more strange and distressing revelations about girls she would avoid if they weren’t Star’s friends and in such obvious need of help that Cathy was beginning to regret wanting to offer.

“Yeah. We went into the emergency room earlier this evening, because Saphyr needed something for her migraine. She told you about her polyps, right? Well, they give her these ferocious headaches and she can’t move without something. So she went in there, and they told her she was a drug addict and said they wouldn’t treat her.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, and then she started yelling at the nurse, ‘cuz she was in so much pain, and the bitch called security. And all of a sudden there were six police officers standing right there, ready to arrest Saphyr. I didn’t know what I was going to do. They were arresting her, and I was afraid they were going to arrest me to, so I left with Marty.”

“Who’s Marty?” It was so hard to keep track of all these faceless people. For all Cathy knew, they might all be fictitious.

“Oh, he’s one of the guys who lives at Brendan’s house. That’s where Steven lives, the guy who was in the hospital.”

“And how’s Steven?” Cathy kept her attention on the road, not really wanting to see the look on Greane’s face, not wanting to catch her in any of the lies she must be struggling with. All of this just couldn’t be true.

“Who? Oh, he’s fine.” She dismissed it as if he hadn’t been lying close to death in the hospital just hours before.

Greane wasn’t fond of the idea of going home with Cathy, who offered her a nice warm bed and a (hint, hint) shower. She wanted to go back to where she’d been hanging out, Brendan and Steven’s.

This was the same place Star had been hanging out, in some upper floor apartment she couldn’t point out, where Greane had earlier told her all the occupants did all day was to snort oxycontin and smoke meth and take pills until they were wasted, and then they’d watch TV and loll about in their own shit.

“Are you sure you want to go back there?” Greane nodded vigorously. Cathy reminded herself to look up what kind of drugs caused diarrhea. As well as what drugs caused craziness as a side-effect. She felt like she was getting crazy herself, from exposure to all this strange behavior from the girls.

At four in the morning, she was awakened by a knock on her front door. She went to the door, but could see nobody thru the glass, and was halfway back to bed when she realized someone was on her front porch.

She opened the door to find Greane slumped on her glider, smoking a cigarette. With her was a scruffy boy with a long bear and a heavy metal t-shirt with the sleeves ripped off. He rose from the glider as Cathy opened the door, and fled down the stairs, saying something about how the others had left her at the apartment to go to the hospital and she didn’t want to go with them, so he brought her here. He mumbled something about her breaking her waters, and Cathy was alarmed.

She turned to ask Greane for more details and to see if she wanted to be examined for signs of labor, but the poor thing was close to passing out, sitting there on the glider. The cigarette was in her lap, smoldering, while she stared at the street light. Cathy reached out and took the cigarette from her. Her lap was dry. So much for breaking her waters, she thought. Greane gave no sign of being able to feel the cigarette burning her skin, tho Cathy smelled scorched cloth, and a very strong smell of shit. She wanted to stick Greane in the shower, but took pity and put her to bed in Star’s old room, instead. And was immediately sorry as she noticed that Greane’s heel was caked with something dark brown and crusty.

The next morning, Cathy woke to hear Greane stumbling around in the hall bathroom. She made lots of dropping and slamming noises, and Cathy thought that maybe she was looking thru the drawers for some soap. Or drugs. So she got up and got dressed and went and knocked on the bathroom door. Greane opened the door, wrapped in a towel. But, Cathy noted, dry as a bone. Her right foot and ankle were blackened with a cracked substance, like dirt, only blacker. Tar, perhaps. Maybe she stepped in road works.

She asked, “Do you have the runs?”

“Yeah, I was just going to take a shower. I stepped in a big pile of dog shit last night.”

“Why don’t you wash your foot off in the toilet first, so you don’t clog up the drain?” Greane nodded okay and closed the door, and Cathy went off to inspect the sheets in the spare room, which were smeared with the same black, foul-smelling crusty stuff. She pulled them off the bed and stuffed them into the washer.

Greane came out of the bathroom, not having taken a shower, her ankle and foot partially clean. Cathy made a note to take a sponge to the floor where she walked back to the spare room to get dressed. She stumbled out of the bedroom a few moments later, a cigarette in her hand. She was trailing things out of her clothing, a bunch of coins that kept dropping out of her pocket, her charger cord that she kept tripping over. She sat on the front porch and said in a small child voice that she just wanted to go home. Cathy felt sorry for her and drove her back to her mother’s house.

All the way down there she insisted that Star was living dangerously. She kept mentioning oxycontin and meth and coke and pills. Cathy was getting tired of hearing it. She replied that unless they could put Star into rehab, there wasn’t much they could do about it, and Greane reacted indignantly, as if Star’s downfall would be Cathy’s fault. Cathy couldn’t wait to drop her off, and promised herself she would have nothing more to do with either Saphyr or Greane.

But Greane didn’t notice. “Yeah, I used to be a crackhead, myself,” she said, a trace of satisfaction in her voice. She was smoking another cigarette, her third since she got in the car. “And I used to do an eighth of an ounce of meth every day, when I was selling it. I had Saphyr working for me, too. We were still in high school.” She took another drag. “Yeah, I know all about addiction and recovery. Because I’m clean now,” she said, looking at Cathy with concern. “I want you to know that. I should know about what Star’s doing, and I’m telling you it’s as bad as the worse things I’ve ever done. She’s mainlining meth, and she’s going to die.”

“Mmm,” Cathy said. “And what are you on now?”

“Nothing. I swear. I’m pregnant.” She blew out a lungful of smoke with vigor. “I blew out all the serotonin in my brain with all the drugs I used to do, and they finally put me on something strong,” she waved her hand vaguely, “during the day, and at night I’m taking seroquel. They’re antipsychotics.”

That’s comforting, thought Cathy. “Don’t they realize you’re pregnant?” she asked, unable to believe doctors would prescribe such drugs to a pregnant girl.

“Oh, they don’t have any choice,” she said. “I’m crazy without them.”

“Mmm.”

“Yeah, Saphyr’s on lithium, and she’s got a brain tumor. And she’s pregnant.”

Cathy was beginning to doubt it. She was beginning to doubt a lot of things.

When she got back, she noticed the bowl where she collected loose change that came out of dirty jeans. It was empty. The smell of shit was overpowering in the bathroom, and there were brown smears all over the toilet seat and in the toilet bowl. She flushed several times, but the smears were like glue, so she got out the brush and the comet and cleaned it thoroughly. But the room still smelled of shit. She lit incense, the strong stuff. But the smell was still there. She turned on the fan, but it didn’t help. She scrubbed the floor. It still stank. Finally she discovered Greane’s shit-covered socks in the garbage can.

Richard called, and Cathy felt more sympathy for him than she had in some time. To be dealing with those girls on a daily basis.

“What do you think of the things Greane and Saphyr have been telling you?” she asked him.

“I’ve told you for awhile now that those girls are pathological liars.”

“You’ve been telling me Star’s a pathological liar.”

“Yeah, you can’t trust anything any of them tell you.” He paused, looking for something good to say about Star. “She’s been making a real effort to keep her room clean,” he offered. “She’s been making dinner for me, and she’s been a lot more polite – she spoke to grandma on the phone and actually said she loved her.”

“Wow.” Star went out of her way to be rude to the rest of the family. “She could just be putting on an act.”

“Yes, she could. But why would she bother? She’s been rude to us for months now, whenever she felt like it. She’s only nice when she wants something.”

“Just like every teenager.” Cathy felt guilty, and decided to call her mom later and apologize again.

“I tend to want to believe her over her friends.”

Richard was interrupted by the arrival of Greane and Saphyr in the driveway, and promised to call Cathy back. But he didn’t, and later, Greane showed up at Cathy’s house with Star’s car and a guy with crutches in the passenger seat. She was looking for Star.

“But Star’s at her dad’s,” Cathy protested.

Greane was frantic. “No, she left with Spike. He showed up at her house right after she gave me the keys. Saphyr’s all upset because Star went to her mother and told her she was going to file a police report that Saphyr had stolen her car and wrecked it, that night we were up here. You need to call Saphyr’s mother and tell her she didn’t do it.”

Cathy’s head was spinning. She looked at the guy in the car. “And who are you?”

Greane waved dismissively. “Oh, that’s just Steven.”

“Ah.” Cathy went up to him and examined him. A cast on one leg. “So, how’re you doing now? I heard you had a close call.”

He seemed embarrassed. “Yeah, I’m fast. My head and leg aren’t too good after being hit by a bike, but I don’t know what to do about it except keep taking drugs.”

She wasn’t sure how to interpret that. What did fast mean if he had a broken leg? What was this about a bike? And what drugs was he talking about? “Okay, well, you keep off that leg,” she said weakly, and turned back to Greane, who urged her to call Saphyr’s mom without giving her a number, and then sped away in Star’s car.

Richard finally called her back, hours later, as they were getting ready for bed. Cathy ran to get the phone, naked, before it went to the answering machine, and stood there shivering while he unleashed the latest on the girls. He sounded livid with rage. “Your bitch of a daughter came back after being out with that criminal,” meaning Spike. “And she had that bitch Greane with her. I couldn’t believe her gall. She traipsed up to her bedroom and told Greane to sleep on the couch, as if we’d never thrown her out.” Cathy already had questions, but didn’t bother. “I whipped her aside and said no way you’re not staying here any more. And then she stood there trying to worm her way back into my house, saying she’s sick, crying, being all dramatic. So I let her stay, just for one night, but told her she couldn’t live there, and that I didn’t appreciate all the lying she was doing about Star. And then she started in again. I nearly tossed her out into the cold.”

“Did she smell of shit?”

“Hell, yes. I made her take a shower. In Star’s bathroom.”

“So, they’re all friends again. I wonder is she surrounding herself by people worse off than she is so she can help them?”

“Or are they all in it together?”

“Well, her behavior is just as erratic as theirs is,” Cathy observed, thinking of the phone conversation with Spike where Star pleaded with tears in her eyes and desperation in her voice.

“She has crying jags, she sleeps all day. I’m throwing my hands up.”

But there was more. He called Cathy the next evening to say that Saphyr had just come to the house, twenty minutes before, and told him where to find a bunch of drugs in Star’s room.

“She stood on the threshold, wanting to come in, and I told her she couldn’t and to tell me what she wanted to tell me. She was acting very strange.”

Cathy got a cold feeling.

“There was this scuzzy looking guy with her. Some guy with curly hair and a high forehead. Do you know him?” Cathy didn’t recognize the description. Richard continued. “She went on about the three of them being at this party the other day, drugs blah, meth and coke and pills blah, danger blah, something about something in her purse. And she was still trying to get in the door, but I had my foot against it so she couldn’t push it open.”

“Good for you.”

“So Saphyr insists that Star stole $500 from some guy at this party. They all fell asleep together and when he woke up his wad was missing. And she’s sure Star has the money. So I said I’d check it out, and closed the door on her and went upstairs, and Star’s asleep.”

“Okay.”

“Well, I was getting ready to go thru her room when Saphyr knocked on the door again and asked if she could come in. She just had to get something upstairs, she said. And this was so incredibly suspicious that one look from me and she shut up. I told her nobody was coming in or out, and then she put her hand thru the crack in the door and shook my hand. How strange.”

“Oh,” Cathy said. “Didn’t you know? She’s a witch, and she just put a spell on you. Are you getting warts on your hands yet?”

“Hah, hah. Anyway, I went back to her room and after tossing it – without waking her – I noticed she was holding onto a Crown Royal bag, so I pried it out of her fingers and took it into my room. There was her phone, cigarettes, other junk. But there was also a pill bottle with no label, and inside there was a cellophane cigarette pack wrapper with some white powder in it, and twenty seroquels, and two and a half bars of xanax.” He paused to let this sink in. “I’ve done seroquel. I took two and was out like a light for twelve hours. Alarms didn’t get thru, phonecalls didn’t get thru. Nothing. These kids, they use 200s, which is like five times the dose, and they break the coating, which circumvents the time release feature, and gives it to them all at once. This is how they are nowadays. It’s not just weed and the pep pills in your mom’s medicine cabinet anymore.”

Cathy felt sick. Again. “What about the white powder?”

He wasn’t sure if it was coke or meth, and he didn’t want to find out, so he’d called Spike, who was on his way with a home drug test, and he was threatening to break up with her then and there if she didn’t use it.

“Can you call a bunch of rehab places?” he asked a shocked Cathy. “I mean, granted that she tests positive for this stuff. Perhaps we can pressure her to go in and stay in, and it would be good if you could expedite it.”

“What are you doing talking to Spike?” she asked.

“He called me. It seems he’s as concerned about her behavior as I am. Maybe I judged too quickly.”

“I don’t know. Maybe we’re not judging quickly – or harshly – enough. This is wearing me out.”

He laughed, a short cough and sputter. “You’re not the only one. I’m so far behind in my projects at work that I’m wondering if they’re not going to fire me at the next layoff cycle.”

“Well, keep your head down. I’ll look for rehabs. What kind of insurance do you carry, and is she on it?”

“Yeah, I haven’t cancelled her yet.” He’d threatened to when she came to live with Cathy the last time. But most of his threats were half-assed. Which is why Star felt she could push her luck with him.

He called back the next morning to say that Spike came to the house and walked right into her room, screaming at her. She woke up, and they had an enormous argument, very loud. Richard had retired to his room to avoid the fracas, muttering about never getting a break, while Spike made Star pee into a cup. They went back to fighting while the test developed.

“She’s negative for meth and weed.”

“That’s good for her probation. She’d have to go back to jail for a long time if she gets caught violating it again.”

“Yeah, but she’s positive for coke and benzodiazepine, which is valium and xanax, and it’s maybe for antidepressants. They kept on yelling at each other, and I could hear scattered phrases, like everything we’ve been working toward. It seems he got everything out of her, which I’ve got to hand it to him is more than I could do.”

Me too, thought Cathy.

“Then the two of us went thru her room with a fine-toothed comb, and busted her for everything she had. Coke, pills, all the rest. Spike found out that Josh supplies her the coke. He’s a guy on crutches.”

“Isn’t his name Steven? Isn’t he the one who was hit by a car, run over by a bike, and blew a vein trying to mainline meth?”

“Hard to say. Anyway, Star told us that he’s on a thousand milligrams of seroquel daily. And he’s driving Star’s car at the moment.”

“Oh, God.”

“Get this.” He sounded proud. “We got in the car and went over to Josh’s house and scared the shit out of his mother and sister. There I was dressed in hippie clothes, and there was Spike, dressed like he’s ready to kill someone, carrying a gun. We told them we wanted Josh’s cellphone, but they wouldn’t give it to us. They called him instead and let me talk to him. And I told him he had twenty minutes to get Star’s car into my driveway. He said it might be difficult. Might be difficult,” he repeated. “I told him that I was going to cancel the insurance on the car in twenty minutes, and in twenty-one minutes I was going to report the car stolen.”

“How long did it take?”

“He showed up twelve minutes from the time I hung up the phone. First Spike took him aside and had a few words with him about giving Star coke when she was on probation. Then I drove him home and had a few more words to him about how much of a living hell I was going to make for anyone who gave Star anything. Pass the word.”

Cathy figured he might know. “What drugs give you diarrhea?” she asked, thinking of Greane.

“I think coke gives you the runs,” he said.

“I think Greane might be doing coke,” she replied. “She’s been smelling awfully barnyard lately.”

“I noticed that. It just could be that she’s very pregnant.”

“Well, I didn’t smell like that when I was pregnant.”

“Yeah. Oh, I forgot to tell you. Greane’s in the hospital at the moment. With a GHB overdose.”

“What the hell is that?”

“Date rape drug.”

“Won’t it stop? I can’t stand much more of this.”

“I don’t think it can get much worse,” he said, reassuringly. “She’s going to move in with Spike right away, and she’ll be his problem from now on.”

“That means I can stop looking up rehabs now,” tho she hadn’t had time to even start.

Chapter Four

Then one day all hell broke loose. Cathy got a frantic call from Star. “Mom, the police are here. I may be cut off at any moment.”

Cathy was alarmed. “Star, what’s going on?”

“There was a break-in. They pistol-whipped Spike. They tied me up and put a gun to my head, but I was brave.”

“Who did? The police?”

“No. These dudes Spike knows. They came to rob us.”

“I’m coming down there.”

“No.” She was insistent. “If I knew you were going to do that I wouldn’t have called you. I’ll be alright. But I’m not sure if they’re going to arrest me.”

God. What was going on? Cathy pictured a shootout, her baby lying in a pool of blood, a cop standing over and shaking his head sadly because she’d gotten caught in crossfire.

“I just wanted you to know what was going on,” Star continued.

“I’m glad you called me. Is there anything I can do?”

“No. You just stay there. And don’t worry. I’ll call you later.” And she hung up.

Cathy was shaken. She banged on the floor with her foot to signal Gray to come upstairs, and when he came thru the front door she flung herself on him and hid in his arms, telling him what Star had said. “My little baby,” she sobbed.

She waited for a phone call. And waited. It was several days before she heard anything. Star’s cellphone wasn’t answering, and Richard wouldn’t pick up. She didn’t know how to contact Greane and Saphyr, and had no idea what Spike’s last name was. She thought about calling Miranda for advice, but she kept feeling that if she picked up the phone she would miss Star’s call, so she sat next to the phone and stared at it.

go to tomorrow’s writing