Vibrations

Chapter 3

I spent the first hour of the trip working through the details of how I was going to get home and find my mom had died... I thought of all the ways that could go down. All the ways that I could lose her. She was young, only sixteen years older than me, forty to my twenty-two... wait, no, thirty-eight to my twenty-two... god, was she really that young?

I spent the second hour wishing my phone would ring. That someone would call me. That they would tell me what the hell was going on... that she was fine. That this was all a big misunderstanding...

I spent the third hour hoping my phone wouldn't ring... I was sure if it did ring it would be someone on the other end telling me that she had died. Telling me that I had been too late. Telling me that she had left without me being able to at least tell her goodbye. That she had died without me being able to tell her how much she had meant to me. That I had missed my opportunity to thank her for all that she had taught me, all she had done for me...

The last hour, I spent thinking about the people who were waiting for me at home...

People that I loved...

I thought about my mom, Deb. She wasn't really my mom. She was my step mom, but to me, she was my mom. Family was about a hell of a lot more than blood, it was about the people who had bled for you, it was about the people that had been there for you. The people that stood beside you when the best thing for them was to walk away and let you flounder on your own. It was about the people that put aside their own needs and wants for you. People that had made sacrifices for you. People that took care of you when you were sick. People that looked out forrea you when you were in trouble. People that gave you advice when you couldn't figure things out on your own. That spent their time and energy teaching you to be a better person...

Deb definitely fit that bill in every way. She was my mom, she had earned that name in every way that really mattered.

I let my mind drift back to how she and my dad had met...

It wasn't a love story for the ages, but it was a love story nonetheless...

My mom died when I was nine. My dad dutifully shouldered the responsibility of taking care of me. It didn't really seem like something he wanted to do, it was just another task that he put his shoulder to, another boulder that he pushed up the hill.

At the time, he worked at a mill, graveyard shift. By the time I was eleven I had gone through several babysitters. I went over to their house and I slept there. Apparently, that was too much trouble for most people.

We lived in a shitty little trailer in a shitty little trailer park. A couple moved in next door. Husband, wife, little girl. Deb, her husband, and their daughter. My dad and I were always pretty standoffish with our neighbors, we were the type of people that kept to ourselves, and made it apparent we expected everyone else around us to do the same, but for some reason my dad hit it off with Deb. She played piano, and he would sit there on the couch with the window open and listen to her play. She would play Moonlight Sonata, by Beethoven, and he would just sit there with this enraptured look on his face...

It was about then that I realized that what the really noticed, was Deb.

He would find an excuse to walk outside when he heard her mowing the lawn...

And Deb started to really notice my dad.

She would come over every few days and borrow some little food item or another, an egg here, or a little sugar, and then she'd show back up an hour later with a plate full of cookies...

After a couple of weeks, he asked her to start sitting for me. He made the excuse that it would just be easier to have the neighbor watch me. They were a poor family, and they could use the extra money. I would go over there at night, sometimes in the evening if he took on extra shifts, and I'd sleep there, or sit and watch Disney movies with little Adrianna as Deb played the piano, or cooked for us, or did one of the million other things that seemed to be her responsibility as a housewife...