“Happy birthday, molecule.” I said handing Tess the album, on the morning of April 20th, about a week after I’d bought it. I had no trouble hiding things from Tess, for she was extremely short and I was very tall. That situation often came in handy and never changed; she was always at least a head shorter. I’d stashed it on the top shelf in the bedroom closet, in the bag that held the Christmas lights.

As it also goes for basketballs, there’s no need to gift wrap an LP. It’s either that or a calendar.

Tess was almost as amazed by the receipt I’d taped to the album (in case it turned out to be a skipper) as by the present itself.

“You actually bought it?” she said, for Tess often spoke first and thought later. She was in the kitchen, eating her idea of breakfast–Cap’n Crunch with Crunchberries, straight out of the box.

This prompted a dark look from Mom, who was lurking hard by, shrouded by Winston smoke the same way Saturn has rings, but no comment. She was busy getting ready for work. Mom was tired of Welfare and owing Graydon so she got a job at Howell Hardware through Nora. She had been threatening to go to work for a long time. I figured it occurred to her that she may as well because it would hardly cut into her parental duties–like, say, making breakfast. To be fair, I honestly don’t recall ever seeing her eat anything before noon. And to be fairer still, she had actually wrapped the art supplies that were her presents to Tess.

“This is so cool,” Tess said, “Thank you, thank you.” She always said thank you twice when she meant it–once only to be polite.

The main cause of Mom’s lack of appetite was her Winston habit. She was good for three packs per day, and often opened a fourth, and washed them down with black coffee, RC Cola and loganberry wine. I can still see the succession of cigarette purses she owned, and the mere thought of them strikes my atrophied sense of nostalgia. She bought soft packs and removed the tops and would cram one plus a box of Black Diamond matches in the little purse. She also kept her money there. She pulled out a five and handed it to Tess. “I ordered a cake. Pick it up on your way home.” Gavin’s Bakery lay between school and our building; it irked me that Mom always gave the money for things to Tess, never me.

I grabbed the box of cereal from Tess and poured a bowl. Unlike her, I ate mine with milk. I opened the fridge and discovered that there was maybe an inch of milk in the carton. Even though I was the person who’d left it that way, the near empty carton along with the money thing placed me in a pissy mood; whenever that happened I had to fuck with it.

“I hear some mothers bake cakes for their kid’s birthdays,” I said, ostensibly to Tess

Mom would twitch her head the same way that Elsa Lancheseter did in The Bride of Frankenstein when you fucked with it . It was a strange movement so sudden that it appeared to finish before it began.

“Something wrong, Miss?” Mom’s head twitched twice more and she measured me with a gunfighter gaze.

That remark was, of course, expected. It seemed that we had been at war with each other since the time I punched her for trying to spank me at nine–which was about when Mom stopped speaking directly to me unless absolutely necessary. And I would have replied in a manner that suited the situation if not for the pleading look I glimpsed in Tess’s eyes. She always got anxious when Mom and I flared up. But the best I could do was shrug and shake my head no as I began to eat my mostly dry cereal. Mom knew how far “Miss” got under my skin and always leaned into it extra hard, as you might expect from a person who still bore a grudge against her twelve-year-old daughter.

Another twitch: “You sure about that, Miss? I’d hate for there to be something wrong with buying your little sister a birthday cake.”

I hated “something wrong” nearly as much as Miss, and neither as much as when she’d bring someone else into our war. I’m convinced that there are magic words that lead to matricide. And whenever Mom used Miss, something wrong and used anyone handy like a prop, I imagined hurting her, bad. Real bad.

Tess wouldn’t always have the luck of the timely interruption going for her, but Nora’s arrival at that moment wasn’t unexpected. We heard the familiar rumble of an engine out front. Without dropping her gaze, Mom unlocked the door. Nora was close enough to have the right to sort of knock on the door on her way in, which happened instead of a mother-daughter showdown.

“Hey, hey, hey,” she said, “Troy’s gotta stop for gas.” Troy was Nora’s boyfriend, and though not a Speck, he was illiterate, yet had served in the Korean War and worked at the shipyard, even though he could barely sign his name to his paychecks.

Mom dropped her gunfighter gaze and grabbed her coat off the sofa in the living room, and her keys, two packs of Winstons and some more matches off the counter. She drank some then dumped the last of her coffee in the sink and said, “Let’s go.”

“Wait a minute, hon,” Nora said. She ran over and kissed Tess on the check. “Happy birthday, kiddo.” She pulled a small gift wrapped package out of her pocket and handed it to Tess.

“Thank you, thank you,” Tess said. We used to call her Auntie Nora when we were small. But as we got older there was an awkward in between phase between that and just plain Nora, in which we avoided calling her anything.

“Go ahead and open it now, Kid,” Nora said, “I can’t make your party tonight.”

She filched a Crunchberry out of my bowl and popped it in her mouth. “These taste like shit without milk, sister,” Nora said to me with a wink.

I had to smile, unwittingly, or perhaps otherwise, Nora had zapped Mom a bit for me.

Although it can be energized no better than by cliches, I like to remember Nora as she was then, so young and alive. I tried to keep that in my head six years later, when uterine cancer had reduced her to sixty pounds, before killing her at thirty-four. It’s easy to intrude ominous visions that weren’t extant at the time on the past; and yet I recall often experiencing a vague inexplicable sadness about Nora, as I had then, long before she got sick. Probably a trick of the memory, spreading out a pain too big for one time to handle alone.

I half-seriously considered boosting the copy of the Beatles’ White Album I gave Tess on her tenth birthday. I didn’t care who made it; I didn’t care if it was a double record–Seven bucks for a four-year-old album was bullshit. I figured I could easily outrun the burly young clerk who looked like the only person working in The House of Values crazy enough to give chase. For if I did make the move, it would certainly come to that. Getting away unnoticed with an album was almost as dumb as trying to conceal a basketball under your sweater. But a little voice inside told me that it was bad luck to steal a birthday present when you have the money. So, I wound up buying the goddamn thing, but I did hook a Rocky Road bar at the register so I wouldn’t go away feeling like a complete chump.

Still, I walked home slightly unhappy about the situation. A new Speck had taken over the Elmo drops and he stayed until the dirty old bastard answered the bell. The loss of our source ended the picture business, which was probably for the best because one boy got pinched holding an especially vile group sex thing. If he had squealed the money his parents had laid out for braces would have been wasted. But he kept his mouth shut about us and said he found it lying in the street. It was a miracle we never got busted.

The seven dollars took a big bite out of my half of the savings we had stashed at Fort Oxenfree. But I got over it and planned to inform Tess that a shitty little school art project would no longer cut it come my birthday in November. Ironically, that was around the time in her brief life she’d begun to sketch and paint items that continue to sell for sums unimaginable during the era of Fort O. When she began the transformation from a camera to a prism. It’s a shame that money measures the beauty in things.

Charleston has changed little over the years. Although the House of Values bit it long ago, a Wal Mart sprouted in its lot like an atavistic wart sometime in the nineties. Unless replaced by yet another Shipyard parking garage, when a local business goes under it is replaced by a chainstore version of the same stripe. Except for the taverns. The ones that went under became parking garages. There once was a run of fifteen little dives in a six block radius downtown. Today there are three. All are “Sports Pubs,” which is the sort of shitty deal you get when the corner bar is gentrified out of its soul by hipster doofuses who like to pretend they are European bohemians. Rich fucks slumming.

It was exactly nine blocks from the House of Values to our apartment. Six north, three west. Maybe a ten minute walk. But Tess and I took the distance in far less time because, being kids, we had figured out as direct an A to B diagonal route possible through the yards and alleys. Which is precisely what I did after I’d bought the White Album.

I’ve never learned how to ride a bike. Tess had a bike, well sort of; it was a rusty third-hander, the type of thing you didn’t care if it got stolen. She had won it from the Church for memorizing verses during the Jesus phase. I felt bikes were a waste of time. The hilly topography of Charleston resulted in either a lot of pushing uphill or suicidal plunges down–you couldn’t go two blocks without running into a hill. But I excelled at running, hopping fences and trimming distances, and I had a mail man’s awareness of unfriendly dogs.

“Hey,” a slightly familiar voice called from behind as I cut behind a duplex whose yard was free of dog turds, which was a good sign.

I glanced back and recognized Lydia the Jehovah’s Witness. Her last name was Simmons, but we referred to her as Lydia the Jehovah’s Witness. She was a classmate of mine and the only kid in school my height. Lydia was standing in the doorway on the back porch, slightly obscured in shadows; and although she looked different from what she did at school, it was still clearly Lydia the Jehovah’s Witness. She was a loner. I had known her since second grade and the only time we had anything that resembled a conversation was the previous December–and that went strangely. Not a fight; not much of anything at all, yet enough for Lydia to often be near the surface of my mind.

“I didn’t know you lived here,” I said, slowing, but still in motion. It was April, and although the weather was calm for the moment I could tell that another brief spring tantrum was about to blow in off Philo Bay and I figured I’d better hurry. Yet I felt an odd little hitch in my stomach when I saw her; alien yet at the same time something I almost recognized.

“We just moved in, from up the street,” she said. “My mother doesn’t want people cutting through. She’s going to plant a garden.”

I swiftly took the fence, taking care to not bend the album, and turned to face her. “Oughta go to the pound and get a big ol’ retard of a dog. With rabies, if you can swing it. That’ll keep me out.”

She had followed me to the fence. A thin crooked smile insinuated in her face. She had intelligent pale eyes that did not work as well as they looked. She’d always worn a pair of goony kitty cat glasses, but not at that moment. Along with the specs, you always saw her dressed like an old woman with her nondescript hair tied back in a bun. Everyone figured Lydia looked like that because that’s what the Jehovah’s Witnesses wanted; she had no siblings for us to compare her to, so that was the consensus. She was wearing an old fashioned frock, but her hair was loose and long, and was relaxed enough to reflect brown. It was as though I’d interrupted the removal of her Lydia the Jehovah’s Witness costume, and that a real person lay beneath it all. I even saw a run of hitherto unknown freckles on the bridge of her nose that her glasses normally concealed.

“We have a weenie dog, Roscoe. But he’s sleeping now,” she said quietly, humor in her voice, the little crooked smile holding ready. She shifted her eyes left and right without moving her head, save for a tiniest between you and me nod, “I trained him to go for the Achilles–that’s the back of the heel, if you don’t know. Consider yourself warned.”

I wanted to wisecrack something back, something fancy and smart, up to the standard she was flying at, much higher than what you normally get from girls our age. Then something came to mind at the point I almost gave up. I laughed and said, “You look different without glasses –didn’t know Jehovah’s Witnesses were allowed to have freckles–say hi to Roscoe for me.” And I ran away, clutching Tess’s present close.

I was blushing. I had never blushed before. It felt like coming down with something.

(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