“It’s not even two yet,” Lois said, keeping her voice calm. “You know how mom gets.”
Lucy’s voice was tearful. “She wasn’t supposed to leave. We were gonna have movie and popcorn night.”
Silent for a moment, Lois sighed. “Can you call Uncle Mike?”
She’d hoped that being forced to raise Lucy alone would be enough to stop her mother from doing this; it hadn’t been so bad before Lois had her driver’s license, but once she had, nights like this had become all too common. She’d assumed that Lois could take care of Lucy just fine and so she was free to go out as she pleased.
Night after night of waiting up for her mother, worried that the telephone would ring and she’d find out that her mother was in an accident, that she’d killed someone or hadn’t made it out herself had been enough to drive Lois into her father’s house.
“He’s gone on a fishing trip,” Lucy said. “He made mom promise not to do this.”
The word of an alcoholic wasn’t worth much; Lois had learned this a long time ago, but it seemed to be taking Lucy a lot longer to catch on. It was as though she still had hope, and she kept reaching out to Ellen. It hurt Lois to see the disappointment in her sister’s eyes.
Lois had been thinking of her mother as Ellen for a long time, but to Lucy she was still Mom.
“Do you want me to come pick you up, or do you want me to try to find her?”
There was silence on the line. “Find her,” Lucy said at last. They both knew that with Lucy in Midvale, by the time Lois reached her, closing time would be over at the bars. Lois would never find her after that, not until she came home.
She’d been gone an entire weekend once.
“Ok,” Lois said. “I’ll make some calls.”
As Lucy hung up, Lois grimaced. She’d talked to a school counselor once who’d talked about enabling behaviors in alcoholics. Lois hadn’t let her know about her own situation of course. One of the basic truths about living in an alcoholic family was that you kept the family secrets no matter what.
Family laundry stayed in the family.
Lois didn’t even talk to her friends about this. She’d tried, but a lot of them hadn’t understood, and even those who had hadn’t had any good advice to offer.
Was she enabling her mother by going out and dragging her out of whatever gutter she’d gotten herself into? Lois wasn’t sure; moving had been supposed to be a solution to this dilemma. But if her mother died in a car accident because Lois hadn’t bothered to look for her, Lois knew she’d never be able to live with herself.
Lois began making the calls. She had a list of all the local bars already written down, but some of the numbers she knew almost by heart. Despite living in Midvale, her mother preferred to drink in Lois’s neighborhood. In part it was because these were the bars she knew from before she’d had to move.
The other part was that her mother had gotten a job as a nurse in Midvale and she didn’t want any of her coworkers or patients to know what she was doing on weekends. There was much less risk of running into someone she knew in her new neighborhood when drinking in her old neighborhood.
Of course this made her risk of having an accident while driving drunk much higher; it was at least a thirty minute drive from Lois’s neighborhood to Midvale, and that was at night when there wasn’t much traffic. During the day it became a two hour nightmare, more sometimes.
It took almost ten minutes to find the right bar; Lois had made a point of getting to know as many of the bartenders personally as she could. It hadn’t been hard given that her mother hadn’t always confined herself to weekends when Lois had been there to clean up her messes.
“I found her,” Lois said after Lucy picked up the telephone. “She’s at Kavanaugh’s.”
Her sister sighed. She was almost as familiar with the bar as Lois was; she’d had to sit outside in the car, and had even been brought inside a couple of times before the owner had threatened to not let Ellen back in if she continued.
“Bring her home,” she said.
It was Lois’s turn to sigh. It was never easy to get her mother to give up the keys; getting her to leave before closing was even harder.
Life in an alcoholic family was a laugh a minute.
******************
Lois could feel the music from Kavenaugh’s pulsing even as she sat in the parking lot in her car. Her entire car vibrated from the noise.
She hesitated, her hands on the wheel. Did she really want to go through this again? She’d done everything she could to get out, even moving away, yet somehow her mother kept pulling her back in.
At least she could see her mother’s car parked somewhat awkwardly two rows away. More than once she’d driven to a bar only to find that her mother had already left to find another. Of course, this close to closing time that was unlikely.
Ellen Lane liked to stay until last call.
Lois looked at her watch and wondered if it would just be easier to wait until last call. Ellen would make a big scene; she always did, and she’d be easier to handle once the alcohol stopped flowing and the bar closed.
She thought for a moment, then grimaced. There was always a chance that her mother might end up going home with someone. While Ellen wasn’t normally loose, once she got blackout drunk, her judgment went out the window.
It was better to nip it in the bud now, before things got too out of hand.
Sighing, she pulled her keys from the ignition and she pushed her door open. She really didn’t want to do this.
The twenty yards to the door felt like two hundred, and Lois found herself dragging her feet reluctantly. In front of anyone else she had no fear, but her mother knew her buttons, and she was an old hand at exploiting all of them, every lingering piece of guilt and vulnerability that Lois had left.
Lois reached the door and saw the doorman.
“Hey Tim,” she said.
He’d given her hell the first few times she’d come to collect her mother. State law sad that sixteen year olds and younger had to be accompanied by a parents to get into a bar, although some bars refused to let anyone in under the age of twenty one. Trying to come in without her mother had been a problem for him.
Of course, now that she was seventeen he was much cooler about it, especially as he’d had to help escort Ellen out of the bar on more than one occasion.
“How’s she doing?” Lois asked.
The beefy bouncer shrugged and gestured toward the bar.
Ellen was already slumped over her drink, laughing loudly at her companion, a swarthy Hispanic man. Long experience told Lois that Ellen was seriously drunk; her body language was unmistakable.
Sighing, she muttered a thanks to the bouncer, and she headed for the bar, skirting the dance floor with the dancers.
Her mother had convinced her to try dancing a time or two, but dancing with men in their forties and fifties while they leered at her wasn’t her idea of a good time.
The music was so loud that she had to shout as she reached her mother.
“Mom!” she shouted, touching her mother on the shoulder.
Ellen swung around in a wide, exaggerated arc, startled, and Lois felt the wetness on her shirt as Ellen’s drink splashed onto her.
“Lois!” Ellen said. “Wha-?” Her voice was slurred and her eyes were unfocused. Her breath smelled of alcohol.
“It’s time to come home,” Lois said.
It was only fifteen minutes until last call; maybe Lois would get lucky.
“I’m not gonna…go home with you,” Ellen said. She swayed in her seat. “Pedro’s gonna take care of me.”
“It’s Miguel actually,” the dark skinned man said. He looked embarrassed. “I just suggested that she might want to get somebody to drive her home, and she thought I was volunteering.”
“I’ve got it,” Lois said. She’d already suspected it was something like that even as she’d walked up to the two of them. He’d been leaning away from her with a trapped look on his face; one that Lois had seen all too many times on her own face in the mirror.
Ellen began crying. “Nobody wants me. I gave the best years of my life to your father and now I’m a used up old hag.”
Lois had once heard that there were stages of grief. What she knew was that there were stages of any conversation with her mother. There was self-pity, anger, blame, depression and guilt.
As Miguel rose quickly, Lois settled into her seat. It was going to be a long fifteen minutes.
************
“The bathroom’s back here,” Lois protested as her mother stumbled out into the alley.
This was another, unfortunate part of her mother’s illness. Lois had had to hold her mother’s hair back as her body expelled the poisons she’d insisted on filling her body with.
They’d always made it to the bathroom before, but this time Ellen had taken a wrong turn.
Ellen lurched across the alleyway, already heaving.
Instinctively Lois followed her. It was only when she heard the click of the door behind her that she realized that they were locked out.
Her stomach dropping, she whirled and grabbed for the door. Tugging on it didn’t help; they were locked out.
Even though bar bathrooms were disgusting, they usually had toilet paper for her to wipe her mother’s face with. Out here they had nothing and the bar was closing.
Lois turned her head at the sound her mother was making, and she grimaced. They were going to have to walk all the way around the block to get to their car, and with the way her mother was moving, Lois would be lucky if she didn’t have to carry her.
She saw headlights turning the corner, illuminating her mother and the whole shameful event. Lois winced, squinting her eyes as the headlights approached. She could only hope it wasn’t a police officer out to arrest people.
It wasn’t. It was a battered white pickup filled with Mexicans. None of them were nearly as well dressed as Miguel had been.
The truck pulled up, and one of the men in the truck jumped out.
“What are you putas doing out here?”
“We just…” Lois said, her mind racing. Something about these men made her wary. Before she could come up with a good story, Ellen lurched to her feet and said, “Pedro!”
She staggered over to the man, and before he could react, she vomited all over his white T-shirt.
The man responded by pushing Ellen back angrily and cursing. Ellen fell to one knee. Other men began jumping out of the badly battered truck.
“Hey!” Lois shouted. “You can’t do that to my mother!”
“I can do whatever I want to, pu-“ the man began to say, but he stopped.
His swarthy complexion paled and a moment later he was racing back to the truck. The men climbed into the truck almost as if they were on fire. A moment later the wheels of the truck spun gravel as it spun into reverse, roaring as it moved backward down the alley at a breakneck speed.
Lois winced. Whatever they’d seen behind her couldn’t be good.
“Lois?”
She turned and stared. Clark was standing by the dumpster. His bicycle had a cart attached to it, and the cart was filled with plastic garbage bags.
“What’s going on?”
Before she could reply, she heard the sound of her mother retching again as she staggered to her feet. Lois felt her face flushing with embarrassment.
As much as she liked Clark, there were some secrets she’d never intended to share. This was one of them.
