Chasing Dandelions

Chapter 4

The Morgan family was in church every Sunday, prayed before meals, didn't watch obscene movies, enforced immediate obedience with their children, and never answered any questions about their home life to anyone on the outside. Will cleaned, Lizzie cooked, and Addie tried with all she had to get out of anything she was supposed to do. Much to her parents' frustration Addie was always lost in her head, wanting to be somewhere else.

They lived in a small house with wooden floors and cream-colored walls, the paint cracked around the edges of the trim. The bathroom was painted a pale yellow, the two sisters shared a room, and Will always kept the yard in impeccable condition. Before leaving everyone knew to turn off all the lights, unplug anything electronic, and double—at times, triple—check that the doors were locked. Sweet tea was always stocked in the refrigerator—come hell or high water— and no matter how much cleaning had been done, it was guaranteed that Mrs. Morgan would exclaim with a groan, "This house is such a wreck! Look at all that dust."

At least five times a year the family had to interact with members of their mother's family. They all knew to nod along, mind their manners, and never talk about whether Mr. Morgan had a job or not. For Joseph Morgan, he was always waiting for the phone to ring to tell him he was out of work. It was never anything anyone understood, but Addie would sit with him late at night and listen to his war stories, eat cereal, and encourage him. The debt was like a slow-burning fire and every member of the family had learned how to feign surprise when the grocery store clerk said, apologetically, "I'm sorry, your card was declined."

The cabinets, oftentimes, weren't filled with much more than things like noodles, chips, brownies, and Pop-Tarts. Other times, they contained one lone can of tomatoes, some corn starch, a half-empty jar of peanut butter— but not much more. In the summer when they couldn't afford to fix the air conditioning, the family set up fans and sleeping bags in the living room and slept with the windows wide open. In the winter when they couldn't pay the heat bill, the family pushed all the mattresses and quilts into the living room, hung up sheets on the doors to contain the heat, and loaded the wood-burning stove with logs. Mr. Morgan would stay awake most nights to tend the fire, nudging one of the children to go grab another log when it was about to die out. The family never went on vacation and never had friends over, except the few friends the siblings invited over every so often for sleepovers.

"We're not the sort of people anyone wants around," Mrs. Morgan had explained to her children, point-blank. It was a Sunday afternoon, following one of Mr. Morgan's stories about overhearing the rumors about them at church, again. The three siblings never had been able to draw any other conclusion besides not being wanted by anyone outside their four walls.

Late the following afternoon Addie Morgan sat cross-legged on the white-tiled bathroom floor, the tile cold against her bare legs. Barely fourteen-years-old at the time, she bent her head forward as she worked through her hair again and again. She had the door locked so no one could come in. She sat for nearly an hour, drawing one dark, coarse hair at a time, plucking it, and pulling off the root. She dropped the hair to the ground, barely noticing the steady pile of hair that was growing by the minute. Addie was much different from the freckle-faced six-year-old she'd been just eight years ago, her face rounder and her teeth more spaced out. She was large for her age, her belly overlapping the clasp of the loose-fitting shorts she wore. She paused a moment, stopping to sigh and grab at the thick, cellulite that seemed to multiply on her body by the day. The empty candy bar to the right of her certainly didn't help, but the hoarding food was a secret Addie kept to herself. She'd stash old wrappers in the bottoms of trash cans, rearrange food to make it look like she'd eaten less than she had, or smooth cookie dough over so no one would know she'd snuck a bite or two. She knew she shouldn't sneak things, but she also didn't know how to stop.