Oh My

Julie had gotten into a lot of trouble as a teen, finding her way into the carnival circuit where she learned to refine her skills at deception and manipulation, becoming a con artist. She played me out well too, speaking with an air of sophistication in the English persuasion with Casey feeding into the charade as best supporting actress. It seemed like it was all in playfulness but it was just part of a larger deception. Sometimes she would mention researching to find her lineage before being put up for adoption but even she speculated that she was descended from criminals. She had suspected gypsies because of her black hair.

She had an injury to her throat, sustained in a car wreck when she was seventeen, that required the routine use of a Teflon tune-up in the form of an injection from time to time. This was to help her speaking, since she had a hoarse ugliness that rattled the glass panes, chasing even the most incapacitated man away. I felt sorry for her. Her boyfriend and a couple of their friends were heading toward the west coast to do some “work” in the adult movie industry. She slept in the backseat while they were coked up and speeding down a dark stretch of highway. Somewhere, between wrong and right, they were in an accident. Who was to blame wasn’t going to change the fact that people were killed, including her unborn child. She was the only one to survive, and wouldn’t learn of her pregnancy until many days later. Her body was nearly severed in two, receiving massive amounts of care and hundreds of sutures and staples, leaving her badly scarred around her abdomen. Her throat was deeply lacerated, damaging her vocal cords. Teflon could only take the scratch off of the surface. Secretly, I felt a joy of sorts over the loss of that child, an uncontrolled voice of the ego, maybe, or was it that someone had escaped an undeserving hell of this family’s reality? This partly explained how she ended up in the carnival, maimed and disfigured, damaged goods and starved for attention…. Even if it was from a man who’s interests were purely superficial.

Jean went downhill fast, requiring someone to be appointed responsible for the finances. Julie was made executor of the estate, which was made into a trust fund, all the while letting her own home go into a state of delinquency as an effort to get out from under the debt. On the surface it appeared as though she was preparing to consolidate households due to her mothers caretaking needs but in reality she was just moving back in with mom. She put her moms house on the market and searched for a house that was big enough for the four of us. It had to be on a bus route. And it had to be in Rockford School district. Casey insisted on staying in that school but I had reasons to believe that the school could have done without her.

An impending sense of urgency created a hostile environment to which Kenny did not help. While I am at work, Kenny is sneaking underage girls over to have sex with. He knew his mother was at work, and that I was working. It was impossible to take them to his father’s house, and the cost of gas limited his driving, so it only made sense to take them to his mother’s.

Casey had tried telling her mother about Kenny’s perversions- that he had been trying to fondle her, and molested her in the past. Whether true or not, I cannot ascertain. There was so much untruth and manipulation that I could only observe and wonder. My concerns blew up when it was ME that was in the house, and in a position to be the responsible party in the home. I feared being the one implicated with accusations that any man fears. Thank God I didn’t get caught up in a bad scenario involving a statutory rape case with an irate father of a teenage girl who needed a good excuse why the school had called saying she wasn’t there. What a nightmare.