“I came home to candles and yelling again last night,” I sighed out the words, not meeting his eyes. I knew his reaction to my news would be a negative one.
“Goddammit,” he muttered, his lips pursing in an expression that displayed both his frustration and resignation. We’d been dealing with our parents’ financial and marital struggles for our entire lives. The power being shut off was nothing new and neither was the constant arguing between them about their lack of money. “You need to get out of there.”
I didn’t have that option. My mom needed me, and I didn’t make enough to get my own place. David’s studio apartment didn’t have the room to accommodate me, not that I’d want to burden him with my presence, anyway.
As a waitress at a local bistro, I made exactly enough to pay for groceries for my mom, my dad and myself for a single week. And that was keeping everything off-brand. I’d been working there since the age of sixteen. Now, as a twenty-three-year-old woman who’d never been able to afford a college education, opportunities didn’t exactly abound.
I couldn’t complain, though. David had gotten his first job even younger.
We’d both had to pitch in to help pay the bills. In order to go to the police academy, he’d worked three different part time jobs. He’d managed to make something of himself and was finding his stride as a police officer. He’d mentioned wanting to take the test to become a detective at some point in the future. I was happy for him.
Even if I did feel trapped by my own life sometimes.
My mother had been diagnosed with osteoarthritis shortly after my birth, due to a congenital disorder of her hip and knee joints. Before this she’d had a job as a visual manager in a retail store, a position that had required her to go up and down ladders on a daily basis.
She’d started to experience pain in her legs, and it’d escalated to the point that she needed hip and knee replacement surgery on both the left and right sides of her body. Since my father had insurance through his job as a production machine operator at a nearby factory, she thought this was doable.
She’d been in the process of recovering from her first hip surgery when my dad got laid off.
This had been a horrible turn of events, made far worse by the fact that he never told my mom about his layoff. So when she went in for the other half of her hip replacement, she didn’t realize this would mean incurring tens of thousands of dollars in medical debt.
But it did.
After about six months he was able to find another job, but it paid only half of what his original position had. We’d had to move out of the middle-class apartment we’d had and to one of the least desirable neighborhoods in Philadelphia. Around this time was when my parents decided to use screaming as their main form of communication with each other.
Even though my brother and I grew up with a roof over our heads and at least some food in our bellies, my mom and dad’s perpetual bickering over money hadn’t been a pleasant experience overall.
Which was why I was sick of discussing it.
Instead, I concentrated hard on the picturesque landscape around us. This park was located two blocks from my bistro, and I spent as much time here as I could. The transition from summer to autumn had started to take place, the trees just beginning to flare into their crimson, tangerine and sunshine yellow glory.
It reminded me that no matter how bad things could be within the dingy walls of my home, there were still things I could appreciate in the w
orld.
“It is what it is, Davey,” I said, calling my brother by his nickname. I was the only one he’d let use it. I smiled as he handed over the Swiss chocolate bar, the one he knew was my lifelong favorite. As a kid it’d been more expensive than other candy bars on the market so my parents had rarely indulged me. “It’s not like we can turn back time.”
The reason my parents fought so much was due to my father’s withholding of the truth. If she’d known about the lack of insurance, my mom would’ve waited to have her surgery until the funds were available, no matter how much pain she’d been in. She continued to be in pain now because she still needed to have each of her knees replaced.
That surgery wasn’t going to happen anytime soon if at all. The physical discomfort mixed with her anger at him led to some intense shouting matches. And his guilt over the whole thing only served to fuel the flames, especially since he’d been the one responsible for setting their finances into a tailspin they hadn’t managed to recover from.
At this point, I wondered if they ever would.
They’d somehow stuck things out in their marriage for over twenty years, which I guess I should consider admirable. I loved them, but sometimes, I wondered if we wouldn’t all be better off splitting up and going our own separate ways.
“You don’t deserve this, Kelly. You should be out living your life, not standing on your feet around the clock and giving Mom and Dad all your money.”
“How’s the studying for the detective test going?” I asked him, more than ready to change the subject. We’d covered the ground of my parents’ troubles so many times that we’d trampled the grass down to bare soil.
“It’s going, though I haven’t had much time for it lately. I’ll get around to it eventually. Busting petty street thugs and helping little old ladies across the street keeps me busy.”
“My brother, every little old lady’s hero,” I said with an exaggerated sigh, and he bumped his knee against mine. He liked to kid, but he enjoyed swooping in and saving the day. Only unlike when he saved my parents, being a cop meant he’d get accolades and commendations for it, rather than more requests for the same kind of help.
“Now, back to you,” he said, and I knew my attempt at diverting him had failed. Great. “When are you going to develop some sort of life outside of home and the bistro?”
“Hey, I hang out with Chloe and Laura.”
“Yeah, at work.”