(This Week is the Second Book of Sarah and Tess)

Music

Toward her end, Mom didn’t always get enough oxygen to her brain to support a personality. Some doctors blamed it on alcoholic dementia, others figured it was caused by a series of small strokes she had suffered beginning in her early seventies. I do not know enough about medicine to form a dissenting opinion based on science, but I knew Mom as well as anyone ever could, and her so-called dementia was an in and out thing like tides. Her vacuity usually came in when it was convenient to have it and went out when we were alone. I’m not saying that Mom always faked it because there were times when attempting to have a conversation with her was the same as talking to an infant or a dog–not even Mom was that good an actress–but I am certain she was not always as sick as she’d have other people believe.

I admired Mom, if nothing else. She lived her life as though it were a practical joke on the world; her own form of revenge for having been born.

Two weeks prior to Mom’s death from renal failure at what I thought was age seventy-eight, but apparently two years younger, she had traced back to two weeks into her hectic life, as it had been told to her by one of the few nuns she had respected at St. James. The preceding paragraph was culled from hours of Mom’s mumbling whilst on the morphine drip, but as it goes with world class liars like Mom, when they tell the truth you know it.

There was a note pinned to a blanket which contained a sleeping infant girl found by a priest inside St. James Catholic Church at Victoria, B.C. on 1 July 1943. According to the note the baby’s name was Karen Patricia (the surname was not provided). She’d been born on 17 June. The note explained that the alcoholic father had long vanished and that after “two weeks of the blues” the writer of the note (assumed to be the baby’s mother) had decided that either the child or she had to go over nearby Steel Bridge, she had decided that suicide was the better way to go. The RMCP was summoned and the body of a young woman was found lying in the dry gulch a hundred feet below the bridge. An autopsy revealed that she had recently given birth. An investigation, which involved a lot of local door knocking, revealed that the woman’s name was Susan Jones–nineteen, who would have been evicted for non-payment at the boarding house she had been staying at if not for the baby. “Jones” was thought to be as bogus as the dimestore ring the woman had passed off as her wedding band, and further searches of nearby hospital records yielded no further useful information, for all the recent mothers listed were still very much alive and kicking and in possession of their equally lively offspring.

She never explained (or didn’t remember why) she had emigrated to the United States from Canada In 1955. She was raised a ward of the church and was transferred from one Catholic orphanage in Victoria to another in Seattle, from which she ran away regularly and for keeps two years later. Soon after her escape, Mom added two years to her age and changed the spelling of her name to “Kaaren”–after an actress of the same name. She also changed Patricia to Hester (in honor of that one Canadian nun she liked) and Jones to Nelson, which was the surname of what’s now called an “enabler”–someone named “Marie,” whom Mom had met on the outside. Mom said Marie pretended to be her aunt, but never gave me the why or how of it–though she once claimed that Marie had been a girlfriend of her father’s–but that had to be a lie because she’d never learned his name.

Regardless, sixteen-year-old Karen Patricia Jones vanished permanently when eighteen-year-old Kaaren Hester Nelson married our father, Delroy Spahr, on 10 July 1959, four months before I was born. He was in the Navy and I’m guessing that having an obviously pregnant fiance aided in gaining Mom a new green card, identification that further cemented her fictions and a social security number. Apparently the Catholics were not queried, nor did they seem to be searching for Mom. I might have questioned the entire scenario if I hadn’t found her “lost” original green card hidden in the false bottom of a jewel box she had held onto for God knows how long, shortly after her death. Sure enough it belonged to a smiling twelve-year old girl named Karen Patricia Jones. And it was easy to tell that it was indeed her. Anybody else would have destroyed that bit of evidence, but I can just see Mom removing it and gloating over her deception late at night.

Mom was very pretty. Small and thin almost to the degree of lacking enough mass to cast a three-dimensional shape, but she was still most definitely a girl, and men liked her. She and I both had dark hair, brown eyes and high cheekbones. We looked very much alike for years, until I got too tall and jangly to pull off delicacies, like a guy.

And for whatever reason that beat look most people who spend their lives in poverty acquire (our Anna Lou and, to a lesser extent, Nora were prime examples of that) never stuck to Mom. Mainly it was due to her having uncommonly great teeth–which was extremely rare in our society. Years down the road smoking did create lines around her lips, like crazing in old pottery–yet the downtrodden eyes, slurred voice, obsequities to small powers and drag in the step never found her.

She had many talents, but being a parent wasn’t one of them. I might have liked her if she wasn’t my mother.

End Chapter One