I guess naiveté is something that is a part of my make up, but what happened next left me speechless.
“You kept it?!” Dad roared at Mom.
Mom sat there awestruck, looking at the green thong she thought was buried, hidden, and forgotten.
“Yes, but…” was Mom’s only response.
Honestly, Dad was stuck between ruining my Halloween completely or brow-beating Mom with an angry torrent of pent up emotions. He stood up, red-faced and trembling, and stormed from the room.
“I’m sorry, Mom, I didn’t mean to…” I stuttered, beginning to tremble myself.
“It’s ok, Beth, it wasn’t your fault,” she replied. Mom gave me a big hug and attempted a smile as she told me to have a good Halloween and enjoy myself trick-or-treating with the other kids in the neighborhood. I cautiously walked out the door onto the street, wondering if I had done something terribly wrong. As soon as my friends saw me, all they could do was like “Wow!” and “Cool!” me to death over the costume that I thought would be my crowning glory, but somehow had backfired, causing friction, the nature of which made me shudder, wondering what was going on back home.
All that aside, for an hour or so, I was the coup-de-grace of the Halloween scene. Everyone extended endless compliments wherever I went. The other kids wanted to be seen with me. It was the Halloween to remember. I often noticed, walking away from the houses, how the older men were eyeing me. I made sure to wiggle my butt in a playful manner, just like Tink! Everything was perfect. Except…
When I got home, things were very quiet in the house. The lights were out and the candy basket was still full. I don’t think Mom and Dad had handed any out. I went upstairs and took my costume off and went to bed. But Mom wasn’t there. I looked all over the house. She wasn’t anywhere. She was just gone. I’ve never seen her since.
So there I was, standing in the living room in a tiny green thong. I knew something awful had happened. I took it off and threw it in the trash. “What a fucking idiot I am!” I told myself out loud. Dad came up behind me and assured me it wasn’t my fault. We popped some popcorn and ate some candy and watched, of all things, a Tinker Bell movie.
*
Fast forward to now. Six years later. You wouldn’t recognize the place. Dad sort of went yuppie crazy after Mom left. First to go was all the STUFF that had been piling up for years. We started with a yard sale, and you wouldn’t believe how many people buy other people’s trash. We made a pretty penny, but we sold only a fraction of what we had, so Dad rented a flatbed truck and piled it all in and we took it all to the dump. The house fucking echoed with all the space we had.
Next to go was Mom’s stuff. That was a little hard on both of us, but neither of us knew where she had gone, and we couldn’t just dance around it like she was gonna walk through the door any minute. She had worked at home as a medical records keeper in the second bedroom. After six months we hired a smaller flatbed and hauled the entire room’s contents to the dump. We high-fived each other and said good riddance, but we were still trying to get used to it…living alone without her.
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