My mother needed to stop Dad from tearing the house apart looking for the twenties, fives, and tens she’d gotten when the bank cashed her paycheck but wouldn’t let her open an account without her husband’s signature. It was the sixties, but in the Midwest, in the suburbs, it was still the fifties.
I’d get home from school and find all my dresser drawers open, askew, as if they’d been yanked out. I shut down the idea that it had been my father. Then I shut each drawer one at a time, as quietly as I could so my brothers couldn’t hear. It wasn’t something you could talk about. Later, much later, I learned that Dad had been looking for money, but I didn’t know there was any money hidden in the house. Mom didn’t trust us to keep it from him, to resist his gentle pleas that he just needed a dollar or two.
Finally, some judge granted her a restraining order.
When I got back from a week with my friend’s family “up North,” as it was called, in the lake country of Wisconsin, I asked Mom where Dad was, meaning asleep upstairs with his clothes on, or had he been missing for a day or two? Mom answered me by saying he was gone. Relief took a trip through my brain instantly, uninvited. I could tell by the way she told me that she wasn’t just saying he had disappeared, leaving me to understand he would turn up sooner or later, stumbling and blurry with his acrid breath. I couldn’t help not caring where he’d gone. I adored my father, but, in that moment, there was just the relief.
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