Page 24 of Too Old for This

When I was eight years old, my schedule was pretty much set. School Monday through Friday. Saturdays and Sundays were for chores and playing. I also slept later and ate big bowls of sugary cereal. The kind that turned the milk sweet.

But one Saturday, my mother woke me up earlier than usual. She yanked open the curtains and pulled back the bedcovers.

“You have to get up,” she said.

No further explanation. I got up without asking for one.

My mother was a brisk, efficient woman who didn’t have time for questions.

She had lots of schedules—cleaning, cooking, shopping, paying the bills.

The problem always came at the end of the month, when there wasn’t enough money to pay all the bills, which in turn screwed up the shopping schedule, then the cooking schedule, and so on.

But theoretically, her lists had our house running smooth.

This morning, I knew something was wrong when she threw my clothes on the bed. The socks didn’t match.

She didn’t tolerate things like that, but I kept my mouth shut. She wasn’t in the mood to answer questions.

A few minutes later, we were in the car. Our town was small, and there weren’t too many places to go. One of them was the police station.

I couldn’t think of anything I had done wrong, except sneak a few extra cookies after school and not keep my room clean. But, honest to God, I was positive she was bringing me to jail. I thought about refusing to get out of the car but figured that would make everything worse.

The windows of the station were covered in dust. Some kid was cleaning them with a bucket and squeegee. Not unusual for our town, which was basically in the desert. It just depended on the wind.

My mother walked right in and up to the counter. She announced her name and said she was there to pick up Ray Lansdale.

My father.

I watched everything from a bench in the lobby. A big man in a uniform came over and talked to my mother like he knew her. They spoke in low voices, and I couldn’t hear everything, but I knew it wasn’t good. None of this was. The mismatched socks had already told me that.

But we didn’t get my father right away. First, a trip across the street to the bail bondsman.

Another man I didn’t know but my mother did.

A fast and furious conversation took place; it almost reminded me of the arguments she and my father had.

This one was about money. Eventually, she pulled out her checkbook.

It took most of the morning to get my father back, and he didn’t look good. His shirt was ripped, he had a big red eye, and he smelled like sweat and booze. I already knew those odors.

Nobody explained to me what was happening.

All I knew was that my father had been arrested and we had to pay to get him back.

I didn’t know he had gotten into a bar fight, didn’t know he had been so drunk and so angry that it took half the customers to calm him down until the police arrived. I learned all that in school.

My best friend was a girl named Molly. A couple of days later, when I asked if she wanted to come over after school, she shook her head. Her springy curls bounced against her shoulders.

“Can’t.”

“What about tomorrow?” I asked.

“Can’t.”

Right then, another girl walked up. Her name was Diane, we’d known each other since kindergarten, and her dad was a lawyer for the county. She lived on the other side of town. The nice part.

“Your dad was arrested .” She said it in that hushed, awful way that was reserved for things that were either evil or sexual. “He went to jail .”

Jail was a big, scary place at the age of eight.

My friends and classmates were torn between being fascinated and scared.

So was I. But asking about it at home wasn’t an option.

My parents had started fighting every night.

My father was drinking at home now, too.

Within a week, I learned he had lost his job at the auto body shop.

“Your dad is unemployed .” Diane said this in our classroom, where everyone could hear.

I knew what the word meant. I don’t know about the other kids, though.

At the time, I didn’t realize that the things Diane said were coming from her parents.

She was repeating what was being said about my family.

More big words were thrown around, things about paying the bills, collecting unemployment, being homeless. Other kids joined in, no doubt hearing the same sort of things in their home.

Like I said, the town was small.

It didn’t make sense to me. I was the same Lorena, and I hadn’t changed since my father had gone to jail. I still liked to play with my favorite doll and my favorite stuffed animal, and I still coveted Molly’s fancy pencil box.

But something had changed. My friends didn’t look at me the same way. Judgment is one of those things you can feel before you know what it is. Kids I had known basically since birth had cast me aside. I had been dismissed.

It didn’t end there. Everything got a lot worse when the police were called to my house. My parents had argued many times before, and it never became violent. But one of the neighbors got nervous. Because of my father’s arrest, they thought he might get violent.

After that, things were never the same in town.

The kids at school were bad enough, but they were also easily distracted.

The adults were so much worse. The way they looked at me, the way they whispered.

I was branded, so to speak. The Lansdales were that family.

The one you talked about but didn’t talk to .

Being judged is bad enough when it’s correct. But being wrongly judged is the worst.

Eventually, I started going out to the backyard and using my dad’s batting cage. The anger had to go somewhere. It couldn’t stay inside; that was impossible. The problem was when it stopped working, which I think is what happened to my father. He replaced it with drinking.

I did not.