The Boots My Mother Gave Me (3 page)

“Harley!” Mom and Kat cried in sync.

I stared at him; he glared at me. For a moment, he thought I was as crazy as I believed him to be. I could see it in his eyes. He looked at me, my hand around his on my neck, bearing down, daring him to squeeze the air from my body.

He saw a piece of himself in me, bitter, crushed, angry, and desperate to be loved by the one person who never could. His mother could not make herself love him, and my father could not make himself love me. In that moment, my eyes as empty as his, devoid of feeling or concern, he recognized it.

He had killed me so many times with his words, he might as well do it with his hands. Probably wouldn’t hurt as much. I thought he might pull me into him and hug me. His eyes anguished, he looked as though he wanted to. He did not.

“You’re not worth it.” He pushed me away, releasing his hand from my neck.

I fell backward into the warmth and comfort of Jeremiah’s frame. He caught me, wrapping my torso in his arms. “I got you,” he whispered, holding me up, my legs like Jell-O.

My father walked back to the front porch, settling on the top step in front of the door to the house. My mother followed him, attempting to coax him inside. She stood on the bottom step, beneath him, her rightful place since they married. Kat came to Jeremiah and me. Tears running down her face, she busied herself inspecting my neck. I wiped her tears, hugged her tightly and kissed her on the cheek, insisting she go inside and get to bed. After all, it was a school night.

“Come on, Miah, I’ll take you home.” I motioned to the old flatbed Ford.

“You’re not going anywhere in my truck,” my father said.

I turned to see him standing on the step, his perch, looking for all the world like a banty-rooster with his arrogant smirk and exaggerated posture, attempting to make himself big and important. I shook my head, returning the same arrogant smirk laced with contempt. “We’ll walk.”

“Get the hell off my property and don’t come back, you or the bastard,” he called after us. Jeremiah and I made it to the road.

“Harley, you come in, get ready for bed, and I’ll take Jeremiah home,” Mom said.

“Shut up, Marilyn. You’re not going anywhere. I’m going inside to get my gun, and you better be off my goddamn property when I get back.”

“I’m not on your property,” Jeremiah challenged. “I’m in the middle of a state-owned road. Why don’t you join me? I see you’re good at putting your hands on your wife and your girls. How about putting your hands on me, one bastard to another?”

“Harley, you gonna let that son-of-a-bitch talk to your old man that way? If you want a roof over your head, you better get your ass in the house and send him home.”

“Come on
old man,
let’s see what you got!” Jeremiah was amped full of fight-or-flight hormones, his voice and body shaking, aching for release.

I faced him until his focus shifted from my father to me. “Don’t let him do this to you. Don’t give him that kind of power. Come on.” I pulled his hand, his body following as we started the half-mile walk to his house.

My father remained safely on his perch with nary a thought of actually taking Jeremiah up on his challenge. In his self-proclaimed victory, he laughed. “That’s right, you don’t want any of the old man. Never send a boy to do a man’s job.” I could feel every fiber of Jeremiah’s body fighting me as we walked away but he stayed with me, never breaking his stride. “You leave with him, Harley, you stay gone. I got no goddamn use for you around here anyway.”

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Mom called after us, our silhouettes fading in the distance.

I swore Jeremiah to secrecy, but he never looked at me quite the same. Before that infamous night, we were equals in our relationship. Now, sometimes I could see it in his eyes and his actions, he pitied me.

He became cautious with me, as if I might break. The kid who never
let
me win anything, the one who always treated me fairly in every way, suddenly treated me like a wounded bird. We played hoops and miraculously I won. We played football in the neighborhood, and if I got tackled, Jeremiah would run to me, helping me up, asking if I was okay and insisting the other guys
lighten up.

I did not want his pity. I wasn’t pitiful or broken or wounded. I didn’t feel like a victim, and I hated it when he looked at me like one. I wanted to hate my father for casting me in that role for Jeremiah to see. I wanted to hate my father for many things. At times, I thought I did.

I
had worked for Benny Goodman, owner of Benny’s Automotive, since age fourteen as a gopher in his shop. A retired New York City firefighter, Benny and his wife moved to Georgia for a peaceful country retirement. After a year of such retirement, Benny’s wife decided he needed a hobby because she needed her “me time.” So he opened the shop and found himself working more hours than he did as a firefighter.

Benny, larger than life at over six feet tall, came equipped with a big handlebar mustache and a gruff voice that spouted words in a New York accent. He was boisterous and quick-witted, his hands, each as big as my face, calloused from years of hard work.

I loved Benny Goodman. The garage was my sanctuary. I could just be, live, and breathe. At Benny’s I appeared likable and capable. Contrary to the home I grew up in, my gender was not a handicap. As with everybody else, after my first year, he gave me the opportunity to advance from gopher to mechanic. I apprenticed at my first trade, grease-monkey.

After my father kicked me out, Benny offered me the apartment above his garage for fifty dollars a month, with the stipulation I stay in school with good marks. In my mind I had no option but to maintain straight A’s, always pushing myself, attempting to prove worthy. Strange how completely adequate a person looks on paper, yet how inadequate they feel inside.

Mom and my gram brought me packages full of food and hygiene supplies every week. Gram tried to convince me to stay with her. “No seventeen-year-old kid needs to be living on her own,” she said.

Mom tried to convince me to come home. It didn’t look good, me living above Benny’s. “What will people think of the family?” she asked. Apparently my father agreed I could move back in.

Hell, no!
My pride, swollen by this stage in my life, emerged so formidable at times I thought I might choke on it. I’d rather be homeless than give him the opportunity to throw me out again.

As my mother’s confidant, I questioned her motives for wanting me to come home. I felt guilty she and Kat would now face the brunt of my father’s behavior on their own, but I also felt betrayed. I knew my return would make things more bearable for her. Did she want me to come home for my sake or hers? My father did me a huge favor by kicking me out. He let me off the hook without even trying. Mom chose to live with him. Kat and I lived there by default. After seventeen years, I found in my possession the ultimate choice. Without a moment’s contemplation, I chose my life. I was in a good place, right where I needed to be.

As early as I could remember, I dreamed of getting out of the town I grew up in. It sat there, so small, with no opportunity, no excitement. The town was my father and my father was the town, suffocating, narrow-minded, a dream stealer—a succubus. There had to be more to life than this, and I was determined to find out.

My English teacher, Ms. Thoreau, told me the world was my oyster and I actually believed her. Upon graduation, I would search for my pearl. Living on my own proved the perfect prelude to my plans.

I settled into my four-hundred-square-foot apartment over Benny’s Automotive like a baby bird in a nest. It felt cozy, comforting, and safe, a completely different world from the house in which I was raised. For the first month, I worried myself to sleep at night, feeling guilty, wondering what turmoil Mom and Kat were going through.

My father’s abuse came in cycles. One day or week, he might feel good and allowed everyone around him to feel in kind, expected us to feel so. Then in an instant, he would blindside us. I often wondered if he flipped a coin,
heads I’ll be good, tails I’ll be bad.
It seemed that easy for him. I never knew anyone more in control of manipulation and abuse. That’s the bitch of it, really. He wasn’t mean all the time. Maybe that would have been easier. He was the puppeteer, we the puppets. Send in the clowns.

It was a crisp, fall Saturday morning at the shop. I greeted a customer who brought his car in for a transmission and engine rebuild. He parked an old-school muscle car, my favorite, a 1970 Chevelle SS 396. He bought it at auction a few years ago for his son’s first vehicle. The idea was they would spend time together restoring the car.
How cool would that be?

Unfortunately, the son had no interest and no time for his father.
Why is that?
The universe gets turned around sometimes, ass over tin cup. Here’s this guy, trying to find a way to bond with his son and have some semblance of a relationship, and the kid has no interest. And there I was, wishing my father would want something, anything, to do with me.

The car had potential, a real beauty. The exterior was primer gray and the interior needed a lot of work, not to mention all the rusted parts under the hood. But the frame was gorgeous, mean and sleek. I could see it with a shiny red paint job, black racing stripes from bumper to bumper, black leather interior, some wide tires and a few inches of lift under the rear-end. Just the thought of it made me a little weak in the knees. The shop wall offered support as I leaned against it.

“More trouble than it’s worth...a money pit,” the man said, throwing the keys to me.

The keys hit my hand, and I knew that car was meant to be mine. I looked at her in all her dreary grayness, her headlights—her eyes—devoid of any light. I swear I heard the cough of her sickly engine calling, “Help me!”

Once among the premiere sports cars of her day, she pioneered Chevrolet’s entrance into the muscle car arena. I wondered, was she the first car of a vibrant young teen or a middle-aged man’s way of recapturing his youth? Surely many had lost their virginity in her backseat. How many speeding tickets was she an accomplice to? Someone used to scrub her up every Sunday, taking their time, caressing every little nook and cranny to bring out the radiant color underneath a week’s worth of road dirt and grime.

She strutted her stuff as the hottest car on the block at some point in her life. Now, like the aging Hollywood starlet, she took a backseat to younger models. She had her time in the limelight, her heyday long past expiration.

“How much?” the words slipped from my mouth.

The man paused a moment, calculating. “I’d need $2600 to make it worth my while.”
Twenty-six hundred dollars!
What was I thinking, asking how much he wanted for his car? I didn’t even have twenty-six dollars to spare.

“She’ll give ya $1500 and nothing more. There’s a lot of work needs to be done to that car,” Benny said, walking toward us. “$1500 cash.”

The man walked to the passenger side of the car, opened the glove box, took out the title and handed it to Benny. In the meantime, I fired up
Charlene the Chevelle
to pull her into the garage for a mechanical assessment. I always named cars. It seemed fitting as they had so much personality. She sounded like she had a cold, plugged up and froggy. It took a few cranks of the starter before she fired up, then she shook a bit, her engine knocking rhythmically. I identified with her. She sure wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, and she was a little rough around the edges, but she had so much potential.

“Take it for a spin, kid. Not too far, though, I’m not sure you’d make it back in that thing. And you better sign your title. When you do get back, pull it up in the bay, and we’ll get to work on it.”

“Benny, I don’t have $1500. You can’t give me a car.”

“I’m not giving you anything. You pay me back, as you can.”

“Any extra money I make, I’m saving. Benny, I’m getting out of this place.”

“We’ll do it like the furniture store, no interest, no payment for the first year.” Benny closed the door to the car, shutting me inside. “Now, get outta here.”

I sat there inside Charlene, dumbfounded, as I watched Benny walk away. There went my
almond
again. I felt all warm and mooshy, my eyes building with tears, sure to leak. Rumor had it Benny and the missus could not have girls. They had three boys, all men now, carrying on the family tradition as New York City firefighters. Benny had a soft spot when it came to me, and I for him. I often wished he were my dad. What a different life I might have had. I climbed out of the car and bum-rushed him with a bear-sized grasp. He returned my hug, laughing jovially.

“Hey Benny, how come you never bought me a car?” Ricky, one of the shop mechanics, yelled playfully.

“Yeah, me neither. What I gotta be, a girl or something?” Mark, another mechanic chimed in.

“You guys ain’t never going nowhere. Born and raised right here in Georgia, Pennsylvania. Harley needs wheels to get the heck out of this town,” Pete, Benny’s right-hand man replied.

I popped the hood on my way back to Charlene, only to find she came with a big block 454-engine. “Wholly crap Benny, she’s got a 454!” I dropped the hood, approaching the driver’s seat.

“Give her hell, Harley,” he said.

“Ah, that’s way too much car for you, Harley. Girls don’t drive 454s,” Mark jeered.

“They do now!” I exclaimed, shutting the door as I dove in.

Even though she was a bit under the weather, Charlene didn’t disappoint. I pulled out onto Main and gave her a heavy helping of acceleration. The front end reared up, the smell of freshly burned rubber filled my senses before she took off like a rocket. I was in love.

As I drove to the edge of town, which didn’t take long in a burg with just one traffic light, I wanted to keep right on driving, let the road take me. Like the rather awkward-looking feet my father gave me, Charlene appeared a bit rough in her current state, however she, too, had the ability to take my restless soul anywhere, an alternate means by which I could run. I finally had my ticket out of this place. My mind raced.
Where would I go, who would I meet, what would I do? What could I do?