Forged in Texas Fire

Chapter 2 Mama's Angel Baby

TRIGGER WARNING
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Please be aware this is where sunshine and roses gets a little darker. This chapter does highlight domestic violence and it's ugly consequences.

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I'll never hear her lecture me again because my mama has been dead almost 6 years now. Some days I feel like I can smell her lighting up a Pall Mall cigarette right behind me. Some mornings I wake up and the first thing I notice, or think I notice anyway, is the way her Tommy Girl perfume would seep into the pillows and sheets and when I'd wake up extra early in the mornings, I'd find my way to her room and without ever really waking, she'd wrap her arms around me, kiss me on the cheek, and we would snuggle until it was time to start the day.

"Brookins, hurry up baby you are going to be late," she shouted from the kitchen as she poured three separate bowls of Trix cereal. My little brother and baby sister were already sitting at the table surrounded by mounds of bills and last and final notice statements. It was no surprise my mother struggled.
There was nothing different about the start of that early December day than any other year of most of my life. Her thick chestnut colored wavy hair was thrown up in a messy bun on top of her head with a bright red scrunchie and her white t-shirt already had a large coffee stain down the front of it. I could tell she had been crying and her eyes were heavy from lack of sleep so I made sure to hurry my brother along and not to give her any added stress that morning. When I placed our bowls in the sink and brushed passed her in our tiny kitchen, I remember hugging her around the waist a little longer than I usually would have. If I would have known then what would happen that afternoon, I would have laid my head right there on the small of her back and a herd of wild horses couldn't have pulled me out of that house. I grabbed my back pack, brought my brother his, and kissed my baby sister on the forehead. She smelled as if she could have used a diaper change and even though Mama usually fussed that I made a bigger mess when I helped clean her up, I wish I could have done anything to help. The bus stopped with a loud screech in front of our run down little cottage and Mama kissed us both and whimpered out, "Get on now! Learn something today." She had big tears welling up in her eyes and I just figured her and Steven were fighting again. Looking back now, I wondered if Mama knew we would never sleep another night in that little house that my memory now remembers more like a mansion.

I climbed of the bus and made my way to the door of the elementary school. I was hoping my long blonde hair would act as a hood as I stared at the ground and no one would notice me today. It had been a tough enough morning not seeing my Mama dancing around the kitchen to old Stevie Nicks songs like she usually did and her stress was wearing as heavy on my mind as I'm sure it was her heart.
"Ugh she's still wearing those ugly shoes! At least they match her ugly face!", shouted Lisa Francis from the other side of the court yard. Even though we were in the same grade, she stood nearly a foot taller than me and her pudgy belly was showing just beneath her silky leopard top and brand new GAP jeans. Her wiry brown hair was knotted up in two pig tails and her freckles dotted her cheeks like a Dalmatian puppy. She still carried traces of a sunburn from her spring break vacation she spent at her daddy's beach house down on the gulf. She made sure to bring her new leather bound photo album to show off all the pictures of her slashing in the waves and writing her name in the wet sand. Lisa wasn't very pretty and her personality could make you question the kindness of rattlesnakes but she had money. Lisa's Daddy was a fat cat in oil rigging and through parties with DJ's and ponies where the party favors were Gift wrapped CD players, not the cheap kind from the dollar store but the special ones that didn't skip. Everyone at school was invited to these parties, everyone but me. Although I felt like the smartest girl in the third grade, I could never figure out what made her hate me so much. Mama always told me to keep my chin up and know it was only because she was jealous of my big blue eyes, but I knew there was no way that could be true. How could anyone be jealous of my eyes when they never saw them? I always stared at the ground because I remember being pushed around and bullied from the first year I ever had to go to school. It was clear to me Lisa Francis hated me because of where I came from. There was a clear split in Odessa between how much money your parents made. Most fell somewhere right in the middle from years of hard work out in the oil fields, or their mamas worked down at the hospital, or even at the local Wal-Mart. A select few, in high school we would come to call them the "Silver-Spooners" or "Spoons" for short, live on the North side. Their daddies were oil tycoons or worked for the airlines or came from old money. They never had to work for anything for the rest of their lives. They showed up on the first day in the hottest new trends, things the rest of us boggled over on Nickelodeon or Disney Channel and spent their weekends sipping icees and eating pretzels just showing off. Then there was me. Mama bounced us from house to house all over this county whenever she wouldn't make enough for rent and beating those long thick eyelashes, cooing out pleas in her sweet southern drawn wouldn't work any longer. I had only been to a mall once in my life when we stayed with my aunt for a long weekend. She loved us to pieces but she would have been on the "Silver-Spooners" side of the Great Wall of Odessa. She got frustrated with me when I didn't know the best brand name of shoes I should have picked out and she really lost it when my little brother was more interested in the display of toys in the middle of the mall as opposed silk ties. However, my mama knew the divide I faced and the microscope I was under being a little girl in the third grade. On her days off from the dinner, she would spend the entire summer combing clearance racks at the Dollar Tree and the Wal-Mart trying to find me shoes that sparkled just like Lizzie McGuire's. She spent weeks hunting up my brother the closest knock offs to the brand new Michael Jordan shoes. I could care less what the girls at school had to say. I knew the work that went into every dollar and I was so damn proud of those shoes just because she picked them out. Most of all, I knew the cheap condescending people of this town didn't tip enough for her to make it. She would get us all fed and bathed and just when she thought we were all fast asleep, I'd head the click of her heels across the old hard wood floors. Mama's charm and loyal smile always made it easy for her to make friends wherever she wound up and she would persuade one of the neighbors to keep an ear turned toward the house while she got gussied up to go work the local bars. She never thought I knew, but I always did. I'd force my eyes to stay awake just so I could get a glimpse of her. She was beautiful anytime but she stopped traffic when she was ready for a night out. I always saw her with her hair tangled up like a tumbleweed on top of her head so to see it down, long and flowing like waves I the ocean took my breath away. Her lips would be painted as red as firetruck and it made the blue of her eyes stand out like fireworks on the 4th of July. When I would hear the dead bolt click knowing she was gone, I'd get down beside my bead and pray that when I grew up, I'd be just as beautiful as her. Some nights the roar of motorcycle or truck exhaust would wake me up as one of the many men who paid for an ounce of her time brought her home pulled in front of the house but I faced the wall and lay still as I could. I'd never want her to know that I knew. She never slept to give us a better life. I could never make her feel any shame for that.