11. Duplicity, U-Haul Trucks, and Second Chances…
Note: This is the eleventh installment of the serial publication of my memoirs, “What’s Left Behind.” To read previous chapters, go to https://medium.com/whats-left-behind.
It wasn’t until recently I unraveled a great mystery of my childhood.
Whatever did happen to that missing $5,000?
The essentials of the story I sorted out many years ago, an aggregate of overheard quarrels and phone conversations — not to mention my mother’s perennial soliloquies about the countless ways my father had screwed her over in life.
By all accounts, the money my parents had stashed in the closet — set aside to pay for the property taxes on our house — was “stolen” by my father himself, who supposedly used it to build a new kitchen for his girlfriend. The loss of the money exacerbated whatever debt my parents already accrued, and when they were no longer able to keep up with their financial obligations, the government foreclosed on our home.
At the auction, it would be my Uncle Liam — my godfather, the one I always wished were my real father, my hands-down favorite person in my family — who snatched up the property for a bargain, then knocked on our door later that day to inform my mother she must take my brother and I and vacate the premises by whatever ineluctable date.
Throughout the years, the whole story existed as an absurd and potentially misconstrued chain of events that occupied the back of my mind.
Until I started piecing it all together.
Why was it, I began to wonder, that my Uncle Liam — who almost never came to our house — just happened to be there the same night the money went missing?
Was it yet another coincidence that, once we had gone, our raggedy, ramshackle two-bedroom home was converted into a 4-bedroom, 2-bath, work of art, complete with fireplace and central heating — the renovations mirroring all the things my father said he would do for us one day, right down to the inset lighting in the living room and the location of the new staircase, which led to the newly constructed second floor.
Then, when all was said and done, the fully renovated home was rented out by its new owner.
Even with a trifling of hindsight, one could surmise that no “coincidence” led my uncle to “pass by” our house that night. The more I considered it, the more certain I was that everything was premeditated, and my father (a carpenter) and his brother (an architect) were likely in cahoots from the get-go.
Still, it was such a callous move — even for my father.
I couldn’t grasp what it meant to have to move. I’d known kids in school who “moved” in or out of North Sayville, but it was something that only seemed to happen to important people — like kids with parents in the military, or whose fathers had been offered a dignified job in some magnificent city I’d never been to, like Boston or San Francisco. I never thought people like us would have to pick up and leave. But we were exactly the kind of people it happened to.
My mother and Eric found an apartment in Bellmore, 25 miles east of us, on the South Shore of Long Island.
I wasn’t particularly worried about leaving. In fact, I was happy. I hadn’t a single friend in North Sayville except Billie next door, and that relationship was dysfunctional, at best.
Truth be told, Billie was a pint-sized, supercilious princess, forever demanding and never wanting to share. Nearly three years my junior, she managed to make me feel inferior at every turn, often criticizing my clothes, house, and family. Somehow, it was different than the ridicule of my classmates; somehow, it was less cruel — although, one day, Billie overstepped that boundary, commenting on how my mother did nothing but sit in the living room all day, eating nacho chips and watching TV. Not that her mother was anything to brag about. All her mother did since having her stroke was sit at the kitchen table, smoking cigarettes in the dark, crying.
Whenever I slept over at Billie’s, I had to help with all her morning chores before I could go home. It was a small price to sleep in a clean, warm house with sun-streaked, shiny wooden floors, crisp white linens on the bed, and a hot breakfast. But then, one day, my mother prohibited me from sleeping over anymore, arguing that I had been spending too much time at Billie’s house, claiming Mrs. Scanavino was trying to steal me away from her.
“This is it,” my mother said, excitedly.
I was sitting on my mother’s lap in a large U-Haul truck; it was the second time in my life I’d ridden in a U-Haul— the first time I’d done so rightfully.
When my father still lived at home, he would rent U-Haul trucks to transport material for construction jobs. One afternoon, after parking the truck in the driveway, he went inside the house to take a nap.
“Hey look,” Colin exclaimed, peering through the window at the keys still in the ignition.
We climbed into the truck — me on the passenger side, Colin behind the wheel.
“Let’s turn it on,” he said, excitedly.
“No, stupid. You don’t know how to drive!”
“I’m not gonna drive it!” he argued. “I just wanna turn it on.”
Colin twisted the key in the ignition and the truck rumbled beneath my seat. Then it started rolling forward.
“Make it stop,” I shrieked.
“I don’t know how!”
The truck was crawling slowly, but through the windshield I watched the garage door growing closer by the second. Colin was searching frantically for a way to stop the truck when it suddenly picked up speed and went barreling through the open garage, stopping only after it hit the side of the wall.
We turned off the engine, leaving the U-Haul where it had crashed, then sped away on our bikes, not returning home until the streetlights announced curfew. By then, both the truck and our father were gone.
This time, it was Eric driving the truck. On the passenger side, I perched uncomfortably in my mother’s lap while she and Eric joked how it was probably better for her to sit on my lap since I had almost outgrown her.
We pulled into the driveway, and I climbed down from the truck. I remember feeling the blistering sun on my skin and the sharp, hot pebbles crunching under my flip-flops as I walked across a gravel-filled driveway that ran alongside a wood-paneled building: a delicatessen with a second-floor apartment — our new home. At the end of the driveway, a small garage attached to a second, smaller, ground-floor apartment occupied by the lady who owned the deli, Hilda.
I followed my mother through the side door and up the staircase.
The apartment was big — huge, really; maybe larger than our house in North Sayville. My mother led me from room to room with an air of hope and excitement strangely foreign to me. She told me how we would never be without heat or hot water again, and that she and Eric had already signed up for a Cablevision package that accessed almost every channel I could want to watch.
When we were finished inside, she walked me out back behind Hilda’s apartment to show me the canal where Eric had already docked his boat, so we could take trips out on the water whenever we wanted.
But my mother didn’t know the best part.
I was going someplace where no one knew me!
Continue on to Chapter 12. Cock-and-Bull, Custody, and Oregon Trail…
