Read Online 100 Days by Nicole McInnes - Free Book Online Page A

was her. She was the one who’d become a widow and a single mother in one fell swoop. I was just half an orphan.
    For a while after my father died, I figured her inability to deal was just a phase. Life had thrown both of us overboard without any warning, and we were just trying to stay afloat. As the weeks went by, though, it seemed like Mom’s grief was dragging her farther and farther out to sea. I was getting knocked around by the waves of sadness and fear, too, but I could still see the shore, and I could also see how life might someday get back to normal if we just swam hard enough in the right direction.
    I waited one month after my dad wasn’t around anymore before even thinking about whether or not I should go back to eighth grade. I didn’t want to put more pressure on Mom, but it wasn’t like anyone was coming around to offer me rides, either: my parents didn’t really have friends to speak of, and my dad’s family had pretty much all died off before he did. If we were a normal family, Mom’s parents might have helped, but they lived back East. They hadn’t been thrilled with her decision to marry my dad, from what I’d heard over the years, and I only met them once, when I was a baby and too young to remember them. Still, weren’t grandparents supposed to help out at a time like this? Women from a couple of local churches had been dropping off meals at our house since word got out about what happened to my dad, but I knew the charity of local strangers would only last so long until we’d be expected to start standing on our own feet again.
    Another reason I waited before going back to school was that I didn’t like the thought of leaving Mom alone during the day when she was such a mess. What if she … did something during the hours I was away? What if I came home and she … wasn’t there anymore? When the middle school secretary called about a week into my absence, I told her I was being homeschooled now. Which was a laugh, but it worked to get her off my back, at least for the time being.
    â€œCan you have your mom send a note verifying this so we can add it to your file?” she asked me. “At some point we’ll need the necessary paperwork as well.”
    â€œNo problem,” I answered. “My mom will send the note tomorrow.” The next day I wrote a note, forged Mom’s signature, and rode my bike six miles to the post office to drop it in the mail.
    Not too long after that, the shock of my dad’s being gone for good seemed to wear off for her, and the new reality of our situation set in. The man who’d once been the center of her life was never coming back. Even during the year after he fell off that roof and turned into more and more of a ragey drunk, there was always hope that things would get better. My mother took her pills and insisted on two things: his body and his mind would heal, and he would get back to being the man he once was. Now all that hope was gone. Without warning, she and I were on our own. There was no tidy wrap-up of my parents’ marriage, no Happily Ever After to balance out the Once Upon a Time we’d enjoyed back when we were a relatively normal family with the same ups and downs as everyone else.
    This realization, combined with her new refusal to stay on the antidepressants (“There’s no point,” she told me when I asked her about the full pill bottle I found in the bathroom trash), seemed to flip a switch somewhere inside my mother’s brain. Within a matter of weeks, she stopped taking all but the most basic care of herself, and she became terrified of being out in public. Anything from a drive to the gas station to fill the truck’s tank to a trip to the grocery store usually ended up with my mother acting as shaken and traumatized as if she’d just had a brush with violent death. I ended up doing everything—educating myself the best I could,