My Mother, The Counselor

Chapter Seven

"Blake we've been over this." I groaned, falling back in my chair heavily. "You can't talk about how Shakespeare thinks this person was a 'total babe' in your test. You have the right idea but you can't put it that way."

"Then how else should I put it?" Blake questioned, raising his voice aggressively. "I'm just done with this shit now, Mia. I'm fucking done!"

He shot up from the table and threw the Shakespeare poetry book at the wall across from the desk. His hands were clenched tightly and he stormed over to the large brown couch beside the bay window. He flopped onto the couch and grunted angrily.

I paused for a moment in disbelief. I was stunned with how he had just behaved. I had never seen him act so angry. I shook myself out of the daydream of disbelief and sat down on the couch beside him softly. I put my arm around him and pulled him close to me. If I listened very closely, I could hear that he was crying. He was covering his eyes with his hands and he was almost silent apart from the occasional sniffle.

"Blake-" I began.

"It's my birthday tomorrow." He sobbed quietly.

"Why are you sad then?" I asked.

"Because my mom has been missing for the past year." He cried. As soon as he said those words, his crying became not so faint anymore and his tears were staining his trousers.

I stayed silent for a moment. Partly because of shock but mainly to let him cry it out before he started talking about it. Once he calmed slightly, I asked "I'm sorry, Blake. Do you want to talk about it?"

He sat up slowly and turned to face me. His eyes were so red you could see his broken heart in them. "Oddly enough, I do." He put out his hand and indicated for me to hold it as he told this story. I hesitated for a moment before taking it in my grip and squeezing it tight.

"My dad is an alcoholic and a drug addict." He began. "He would go away for days very often and he wouldn't come home until he ran out of money. My mom worked her ass off to keep me and my older brother in school and to keep food on the table. She worked four jobs to keep us all going. My dad would come home, take money out of the accounts and then leave again and spend it all on drink, drugs, and gambling. He'd clearly never win anything in the gambling though, so he'd come home with nothing but blood and bruises all over him from getting in bar fights. My mom hated him, but never did anything about it because she didn't want the hassle of a divorce. Or that's what she told us until one night me and my sister Nelly heard her and my dad fighting, and then we heard a hit and my mom screaming. 

'My mom came out of the room with blood coming from her hair line and out from her nose, and a black eye was forming. It kept happening and on my fifteenth birthday, I stepped in when my dad raised a hand to her. Nelly had moved to Santa Barbara for college and it was just me left to deal with it all. Dad started to hit my mom again so I decided enough was enough and I stepped in and took the hit. He punched me right in the face and I fell to the floor. He got so angry at me for interrupting his hit, so he kept hitting me, kicking me on the floor. Mom was screaming at him and jumping on his back trying to get him to stop but he just kept shoving her off until she was too weak to keep trying, so she sat on the cold tiles staring at her son being attacked.

'I don't know if you remember, but I came into school one day two years ago with two black eyes, a broken nose, and bruises all over me. That was from that night. My dad kept leaving for gambling, but not for as long. So there were more days for him to hit us both. Until the week before my seventeenth birthday, my mom disappeared. She just left. Left me behind, all alone with the psycho of a father. Left me with bruises all over me and only a part time job at the music shop down the street to provide for myself. My dad still leaves for days, but he hasn't beat me in a few months. He still yells, and takes my money before he leaves, but I have no recent bruises. But I am reminded every year on my Birthday of her leaving me.'