Read Online Shout Down the Moon by Lisa Tucker - Free Book Online Page B

reason for drinking, but this one was friendlier than most. I sat with her, I let her toast me. We ate saltines dipped in ranch dressing and talked about (but never cooked) supper. I remember how happy I was when she mentioned that I would have my first kiss before long.
    I was chattering about boys at school, which ones might like me, which ones I thought were cute, when her mood started to change. She told me she didn’t want to hear any more about my social life, and poured herself another shot of whiskey.
    After a while, she started talking about how she met Daddy. This was one of her favorite topics when she was drinking. I knew the whole story by heart. Daddy was with another girl when Mama met him at the warehouse where she was working then. Evelyn was the other girl’s name. This Evelyn was well liked and pretty; she had a good job as a supervisor. “But he didn’t end up with her, now did he?” Mama would say, and laugh. “I’m the one he married.”
    I never really understood why Mama was so interested in Evelyn, but I always nodded along. One time, when I asked her where Evelyn was now, she said, “Working in a ditch, for all I care. Ten kids and no teeth. On welfare. Wrinkled up and ugly as a prune.”
    Mama called herself ugly sometimes. I tried to tell her she was pretty, but she insisted that she was too short and too heavy to be pretty; her face was too square. She was twenty-nine when she married Daddy, an “old maid,” as she put it once. He was twenty-four, blond, and very handsome, everybody said so, according to Mama. They also said she was robbing the cradle, but she told them to get lost.
    “I wasn’t robbing no cradle. That Evelyn was a slut, but hell, I was still a virgin when your daddy came along.”
    I nodded, thinking that I would be a virgin until I was at least twenty-nine, hopefully longer. The whole sex business seemed more frightening than fun, especially on that day, when I was having my first period, and bad cramps to boot.
    I could have listened to Mama discuss Daddy for hours. But after seven or eight drinks, she changed course and started in on her other favorite topic—all the sacrifices she’d had to make for me.
    She’d worked full-time to put food on the table and clothes on my back. She’d taken care of me for twelve years almost by herself, because even when Daddy was alive he was gone six nights out of seven with his truck-driving job. She’d listened to my constant humming and whistling and singing and blabbing about my childish ideas. She’d put up with all my selfishness and ingratitude.
    I always felt bad when she said these things, though I figured it was probably true. She had taken care of me. I was selfish sometimes, and loud, although I was trying so hard to be quieter. I thought if I could only be quiet, like she asked, then she wouldn’t get mad at me.
    “Today you’re a woman though,” she said. “You can go out on your own. Then you’ll see what it’s like. You’ll see it isn’t easy as you think.”
    She’d said today, but I had no idea that she meant this very minute until she stuffed the Tampax box in my backpack, “for the road,” she said. I had nowhere to go, and I told her so, repeatedly, but she ignored me.
    “Everything is about you, you, you,” she said. “You’re the princess. Well, things have got to change.”
    She threw the unzipped backpack outside, and when I ran out to get it, because I was worried about my homework blowing away, she locked and bolted the door.
    A child with some pride would have walked away, but I wasn’t that child—yet. I banged on the door, begging and pleading and crying for her to let me in. When I saw one of the neighbors looking at me, I went around to the back door and started banging there. I must have done this for at least two hours before she finally relented. She was really plastered by that point. She thought it was funny, except when she was yelling at me for disturbing the Fowlers,