Read Online I Swear I'll Make It Up to You by Mishka Shubaly - Free Book Online Page B

. . . just point me to the eggs, flour, butter, and sugar and stand back!” She got a job working in the bakery department at Albertsons for minimum wage, sneaking the stale cookies home in her purse for her and Tashina to eat. She never let it get her down. My parents had both been poor farm kids so we weren’t indoctrinated in social stratification. A job was a job, and any job had dignity. Still, I burned inside to think of her in her Albertsons uniform and hairnet, bagging bagels in clear plastic gloves, a servant to the sneering locals.
    That spring, at my father’s insistence, my mother tried to refinance our house. The bank told her that, as a matter of course, there was no reason to refinance their mortgage because my parentshadn’t missed a single payment. Though they had the money in their account, she didn’t make the house payment one month. The bank immediately initiated foreclosure proceedings. It wasn’t enough that my father had abandoned us; the bank had played us for fools, and we were now to be driven from our home.
    We unceremoniously disposed of our pets. Tasha, our gorgeous, airhead Afghan hound—she had knocked herself out by running into not just a sliding glass door but also a tree—was given to a snooty but kindhearted old lady. Zeke, Tatyana’s gregarious golden retriever, who spoke to us and wagged his tail so hard his rear legs skittered back and forth across the hardwood floor, went to a group that brought animals to visit old folks’ homes and the terminally ill. Our three cats, too, were handed off like old clothes.
    Katie was my dog, a black lab born on my mother’s birthday, whom we got from an animal shelter. As a puppy, she used to fall asleep inside my shirt. When she got bigger, she slept on my bed every night. She wasn’t a particularly obedient dog, but I taught her a trick much better than heeling or doing something so banal as sitting on command. When I tapped my chest, Katie would jump up, put her front paws on my shoulders, kiss my face, then put her head next to mine and draw me in for a hug. God, I loved her. Katie would go to a fussy young family my mother had found, a family I had zero feeling for. There was nothing to be done about it.
    Our oldest dog, Princess, an abused Afghan hound mix we had adopted from the pound when I was six, did not have to be given away. My father owned a La-Z-Boy recliner my mother had given him for Christmas before they had us kids, before they had any money. She had saved up her earnings from taking pictures for the local newspaper, bought the La-Z-Boy from Sears, and hid it at a friend’s house. On Christmas Day, she had brought my father over there to surprise him. Princess crawled into my father’s easy chair one night, a chair that had always been off-limits to her, and quietly died.
    My mother found Princess the next morning and was allowed the rare pleasure of burying her dog in the backyard before our house was repossessed. It seemed like a good, lasting fuck-you to my father from the dog he’d never wanted.
    We sold everything we could at a garage sale that stretched on interminably. My father’s Ford Taurus, our Aerostar minivan, our furniture and TV, my Atari, my Nintendo, board games, toys, dishes, clothes: everything must go. We had so much useless crap—a jogging trampoline? Nightmare, the VCR board game? Garbage bags full of stuffed animals, Popples and Pound Puppies and Cabbage Patch Kids. Literally tons of cheap plastic molded into GI Joes and Barbies and Ninja Turtles and My Little Ponies. Had we really needed this? My vast crates of Lego, my library of Choose Your Own Adventure books . . . how much of this self-indulgent garbage would we have to un-buy in order to have enough money to keep our home? How much, or how agonizingly little?
    It was crap, undoubtedly crap, literally crap, just plastic and wood pulp offal . . . but also somehow meaningful, drenched as it