Birth Mother (excerpt)

excerpt from Birth Mother, by Shelley Stoehr


PART I
chapter 1


         I stood at the mailbox outside my house, staring at the re-turn address on the envelope.  “Mary Rowe,” it said, with an ad-dress in New York City.
         My mother’s name, my real mother, my birth mother, who’d left ten years ago, and now here was a letter, addressed to Ma-rissa Sinclair.
         Me.
         I felt sweat dripping down my back, and not only because it was June, and hot, and I had a lot on my mind already, but be-cause now this.  My brother Tyler and I hadn’t seen Mary in the whole ten years since she’d left, what could she have to say to me now?  What could I have to say to her?
         I knew one thing, no one was going to find out about this letter, not yet, if ever, so I folded it and slid it into the side pocket of my black jeans with the zippers on them that my stepmother and father hated so much (“It makes you look so hard, do you want to look hard?”)
         Yup.  I had to.  I’d had to be hard for the past ten years, or I would’ve cried every night forever.  And I couldn’t do that.  There was always Tyler to think about, and the how hard he cried, and how I had to try my best with him, although the way things were now, I didn’t think I’d done such a good job.  Certainly no one else appreciated all I’d done to try and make a motherless infant feel wanted.
         Oh Fuck That.  I hated when I got wishy-washy.  Sucking back a tear, I went inside, and, passing by the kitchen, dropped the rest of the mail on the counter. 
         “I brought in the mail,” I said to Lisa, my stepmother, whom I preferred to think of as stepbitch.
         “What do you want, a medal?” she said, not looking up from the little flatscreen she kept next to the blender, over the dishwasher.  It was set to the same channel as the TV in the living room, and probably the one upstairs in her bedroom too -- we even had a TV in the bathroom, a little four inch, so Lisa wouldn’t miss a minute of the endless courtroom dramas she watched all day while she did whatever else she did all day -- cooking, polishing, painting her nails, feeding the baby, think-ing up ways to make life hell for me and Tyler.  Anyway, you see what I mean by stepbitch.
         “Whatever,” I said, and headed for the stairs.  I didn’t like it, but I could be a bitch too.  (“Do you want to be hard?”)
         “You’re late,” Lisa said, still not looking up, but almost chewing on one of her manicured nails.  You could see her frus-tration rising as she reswtrained herself, and put her hand back in her lap.  “Your brother keeps asking for you.”
         God!  She’s his mother now!  Why does he need me all the time?  Still, after all this time.  Little bloodsucker.
         Even so, I said, “I stayed afterschool in the art room, sorry,” and then I headed upstairs to Tyler’s room.
         “Make sure you’re both clean and neat by six, we’re going to the Abbott’s for dinner.”
         “Sure,” I said.  She didn’t ask what I was doing in the art room, so she didn’t hear about the mural my teacher had asked me to do on one wall.  That was okay.  For one thing, Chrysta Ab-bott was my best friend, and I was staying over and going to parteee tonight, and for another thing, there was Tyler, wait-ing...
         “Tyler, guess what?” I said, bouncing down onto his bed next to him, “My art teacher said I’m the best artist in the whole school, and he asked me to paint a mural in the art room before I graduate!”
         Tyler was all blond curls and frowns.  Still, he said, “That’s great Marissa.  Lisa smacked my hand for taking a cookie without asking.”
         That really burned me up.  Lisa was the only mother he ever knew, and she always did shit like this to him, and I was so pissed, I did what I told myself I wasn’t going to do, which was take my birth mother’s -- our birth mother’s -- letter out of my pocket and open it up.  “This came today, from Mary, remember I told you about her?  Maybe she’s going to rescue us.”
         Tyler looked hopeful.  I had a feeling I was doing some-thing stupid, but I just wanted him to feel wanted, a feeling I’d never had.  I opened the envelope carefully, so as not to tear the address, and pulled out the letter, written with fiery blue ink on yellow parchment paper. 
         It felt so real.  It felt exactly like what my real mother would write on, and write with and I read,

         Dear Marissa (the light of my life!  I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you that before now!  I’m so sorry I left you there!),
         I want you to know what happened to make me leave.  It wasn’t your fault, or mine.  I know you love your father, but there are some things you should know about him.  Like, he’s a selfish bastard.  He never understood how hard it was for me to be a mother.
         Not that you weren’t a darling little girl!  But then Tyler came along, and it wasn’t me who wanted him, it was you, and it was your fa-ther and your grandparents, and then when he came, I didn’t see what a cute little guy he was, I saw a crying, needy creature, which I now know was probably post-partem depression, but anyway... everyone who’d wanted me to have a baby disappeared after the first couple weeks, and you wanted all of me, and he wanted all of me, and even your father expected all of me.
         Have you read your Hemingway?  A Farewell to Arms?  There’s a line in there, “There isn’t any me anymore,” and that’s all I could think about.
         I started drinking again.  I wasn’t taking care of you or your brother.  Or myself.  I had to get away, from those horrible little suburban boxes with no life in them -- to find my life again, to reach inside and rediscover the artist in me.
         You may remember, when you were little, we used to paint to-gether all the time, and I painted every free moment I got, and then it stopped.  My soul was replaced with formula and dirty diapers for the second time in my life, and yes, a deep bottle of vodka cut with despair.
         I had to go.  I am sorry.  I hope you’ve grown up healthy and strong, and that you still have an artist in you, and that living out there in the suburbs has been better to you than it was to me.  I just wanted you to be safe, and you couldn’t be with me, not then. 
         I hope you still have the soul of an artist, and I hope to meet that soul again.  I have never stopped thinking of you.  Every morning, I see the scar from my c-section, and I cry a little from missing you.  You may not remember, but you were my “mini-me”, we did everything together and we were crazy about each other, and do you remember lying in bed with me watching a tape of Maisy Mouse over and over when we had the flu? 
         I do. 
         If you can ever forgive me, please come see me.  Please let me back in your life.  I hope you’ve been raised well, but there must be something I can still offer to you.  Never forget -- I am your mother.
         And I love you.
                                                          Always,
                                                               Mary

         “Why does she call me a creature?” Tyler wanted to know.  “Wasn’t I the light of her light?”
         “Life,” I corrected, holding the letter tight, but feeling bad for Tyler all the same. 
         Even so, part of me said inside, “She wanted me”, and that part of me didn’t care about Tyler, it cared about my mother, loving me, and wanting me, and it was like I always thought -- she left my father and Tyler, not me.
         Why didn’t she take me with her?  Why didn’t she keep me?
         “Oh baby, I’m sorry, I don’t know.  I’m sorry.  I thought this would be good news for both of us...”
         “It’s not.  It sucks.”
         “But I love you,” I said without hardly even knowing what that meant -- love.
         What I couldn’t say was that I felt horrible.  I shouldn’t have read that letter to him.  So I tussled him and played with his Ninja Turtles for awhile, until he for-got, forgot that his birth mother didn’t love him like she did me.  She didn’t even know him.
         Still, I wished he had a real mother, someone to love him like Mary said she did me.  I had to deal with Lisa, but he had to deal with her, like she was his only Mom, and she wasn’t so great. 
         I hated Lisa, and I hated my father, for all they did to Tyler, that’s what I told myself -- to Tyler, even though it was to me to.  But, according to the letter, I had an es-cape.  I was loved.          

         Back in my own room, I got out my paints, and put a new, prepared canvas up on the easel in my room.  In a fever that took me out of this world, I mixed and merged and melted and painted.  Whatever you wanted to call it, I was just trying to paint my mother.
         Her portrait.
         When I didn’t even -- or hardly even -- know her.
         I painted fiercely, the fire burning behind my eyes and in my heart, thumping there like an old-fashioned bellows, making me breathe funny. 
         When I finally came out of the fire, the painting was done.  But it didn’t look like my mother.  It looked like me.

         “Marissa!  We’re leaving!”
         It was my father, with his commanding voice that left no room for my angst.  “Coming!” I called back, and I headed down-stairs, though truly, it felt like part of me was being left be-hind.

chapter 2



         “Marissa, will you please try and participate in the con-versation!”  said Lisa, with her shoulders back and her long neck stiff as usual, like there was a rod stuck up her butt that continued all the way up to her bleached blonde brain.  Aside, to Cheryl, Lisa’s friend and Christa’s mother, she added, “You know if she were really my kid, I mean, if I’d had her from the beginning... well I’m sure you count your lucky stars that your daughter...”  her voice trailed off in my head as she flung her hair back, discarding me -- and I blanked her out like usual -- it was the only way to survive around here, I mean her. 
         I thought of the letter I’d left hidden at home, and how for a moment, reading it, I’d felt understood and loved, and not so scared of doing the right thing all the time.  But then I felt a clutching in my heart, like someone had squeezed it for a second, and I why I had to be mean whenever I thought about Lisa.  Because if I didn’t make her my step-bitch, I’d have kept wanting her for my mother all these years, and then my heart would’ve been squeezed to about raisin sized by now.  I had to be tough. Life was hard out here in the suburbs, living a fake life in houses with fake, vinyl exteriors and fake plastic trees inside, doing drugs because everyone else was and dressing in a sort of costume that didn’t really describe me, but gave me some identity.
         Anyway, participate in what?  I wasn’t even listening to them.  Why would I?  What did I care about nail colors and Audi’s and homeade babyfood?  I cared about art, and college next year, and escaping, and my real mother -- who she was, how she was like me.  Anyway, why didn’t they participate with me?  I picked at my peas, rolling them around the edge of the plate in a race.  The littlest one was winning.
         Christa, my best friend since even before my real mother left us ten years ago -- rolled her eyes at me, but not so any-one would see.  Christa was the best friend anyone could have, and I was lucky she chose me.  Everyone thought so, even though she didn’t really “choose” me, we chose each other.  Every par-ent wanted Christa -- with her darling upturned nose and zitless skin and social skills that could stun any parent.  Everyone wanted her to be friends with their kids.  She had perfectly highlighted hair that looked natural, always wearing it in a neat ponytail except when she was high (but they never saw her then). 
         They saw what she wanted them to see, what she needed them to see -- like, the white teeth and pale lip gloss, her picture in the newspaper for winning a dance competition or starring in the school musical... and they never imagined her on her knees, sucking off a queue of guys, or with her legs spread open and her head tilted back, ponytail released and... well, you get the picture.  Or maybe you don’t.  Maybe you don’t know why anyone like Chrysta would need to have that other, sordid life. 
         But I got the picture, and that’s really why we’d stayed friends all these years.  I got how sad and lost she was under those long, perfect eyelashes, and I understood that she didn’t really fit in with the jocks and pretty people she was supposed to be a part of, no matter how much she wanted to fit in.
         No matter how much sex she had and with whom.
         Still, she kept trying.  She had to fit in, if she didn’t want to get the belt from her Dad, or at least that’s the way she thought.
         Like me, well not the belt part, my father would never hit me, only bore me to death, or leave me alone.  That’s what he mostly did, left me alone like I was a dust bunny Lisa was sup-posed to have vacuumed up before he got home, or even more likely, like I was the woman who left him.
         My birth mother.  My real mother, though I was almost afraid to think of her that way, in spite of the letter.  It made my skin tingle and my heart quiver in my chest, and sud-denly, I couldn’t stay at the table without exploding into a million pieces of someone I hardly knew, that is, Me.  I felt like I was about to become a Marissa-stain on the wall and pud-dle on the floor, all that would be left after I exploded. 
         Which Lisa would want me to clean up, which would be hard since I’d be all exploded and all.  Ha ha.  The irony of my life.
         “Excuse me,” I said, and hightailed it to the bathroom, where I looked in the mirror and didn’t see myself.  I mean, I saw the dyed black hair with muddy red roots showing through, and the ugly black clothes, and the hard, “can’t make me” ex-pression, but did you ever look in the mirror, and it looked like someone else?  Like you were totally objective, and this was some other person, and you didn’t know how you got from playing with fingerpaints to this?
         She loves me, she loves me not.
         I always thought that, and sometimes I meant “she” my birth mother, but sometimes, when I looked in the mirror, I think I meant “she” me.
         I looked like a monkey.  Tyler and I argued about that not too long ago.  See, I stopped plucking my eyebrows and shaving my armpits and legs, because I was preparing for college at NYU, in New York City, and I felt like I had to remake myself -- to be ready, to be right -- a new me for a new place.
         Tyler was jumping all over my bed, pissing me off.  I told him he was a monkey, and no monkeys were allowed in my room, so get the hell out.
         “You’re the monkey,” he said.
         “I’m not a monkey,” I said.  “You are.”  I couldn’t believe I was arguing with a ten year old.
         “You look like one,” he said.  “Hairy legs.”
         “You are one, stupid,” I said, getting more and more angry that he was making fun of who I was trying to become -- which was definitely not a monkey -- and yet trying not to laugh at the same time.
         “Monkey!”  Bounce, bounce on my bed.
         “Monkey!”  Approach the bed and prepare to tackle him, drag him off to his own room.
         “Monkey!”
         “Monkey!”

         Monkey, I thought, seeing myself in the mirror.  It oc-curred to me that Tyler was right, and maybe I’d always looked like a monkey, and wasn’t changing myself at all.  although I also , sadly, that maybe him teasing me -- and my impatience with him -- came from us not being quite ready for me to go away to college.  It made my monkey face grimace, as I thought of us apart, and yet it also made me feel free, and I felt horrible about that.  And now, after the letter from Mary, I was thinking of leaving even sooner!
         But Whatever.  I always told myself that when my thinking got too intense.
         I went back to the table.  I went back to being the kid every parent didn’t want their kids to hang out with.  I was the kind of kid you crossed the street to avoid, because of the black clothes and zippers and chains I’d adopted this past year.
         I was the kid no one knew was a virgin.
         But Christa saw me, and she got me.  She didn’t call me a monkey -- Christa saw the artist in me, trying to fit in too, but having nowhere to go.  At school, Christa and I had to roll with separate groups, just as part of the regular order of things, just to prevent chaos from erupting in a carefully con-structed house of cards, web of lies or just plain bullshit sce-nario.  So I hung with the extreme goths whose only real member-ship requirements were that you wore thick black eyeliner, and said “fuck” a lot.
         At the table, Christa rolled her eyes again, smirking a little at our parents.  I grinned back.  I mean, our parents’ lives were all such a stupid joke.
         Across the table, this time my father did see Christa roll her eyes, and he slapped his fork down so hard, cheese sauce spattered the placemat.  Everyone shut up for a second, and then kept talking.  I tried not to care that they didn’t appreciate me.  That they didn’t see that I’d cut my hair into this angry shag in a rage the night my parents didn’t show up at my art show at school -- or even care when I showed my blue ribbon at home because painting wasn’t worthwhile, I guessed.  They didn’t see that when I cut my hair and wore these clothes, I didn’t really want to be ugly.

         “You know, when I’m driving up there, I don’t know, I kind of think of moving there, I mean, what it would be like, out in the country like that.  The people seem relaxed and nice, and they know what their kids are into,”  Lisa said, about driving to her mother’s house up north, and not forgetting to give me a good, meaningful stare.  (“Do you want to be hard?”)
         Hah!  I thought, and also Grow up, because Cheryl and Lisa both tried so hard to be like us kids, you know, be cool, so they talked like they were in high school or middle school for God’s sake, and it was ridiculous.  Or maybe... well, maybe I was being too nice, but anyway, maybe that was why Lisa was al-ways on my ass about school, because she didn’t have an educa-tion... no, screw that, I was sticking with the rod up the butt theory.  I noticed my father was about to tell me to stop chas-ing my peas, when Christa’s father asked him, “How goes the fur-niture business?  Like that new ad you got on TV.”
         Meanwhile, Cheryl answered my stepmother, “I don’t know, it’s so out there.  I think I’m really a city girl at heart.”
         “It is rough, it is really rough, Bill, what with the Mall built up now, and two Targets, and especially IKEA just down Route 1.  Us littler folks in the middle are having a hard time not getting squashed...”
         Oh God, not the “Big Box Stores are Destroying My Life” spiel.  Couldn’t he see it drove everyone away?  I wasn’t stu-pid, I knew we were in financial trouble, but he didn’t have to tell the world.  I noticed even Cheryl rolling her eyes a lit-tle, Christa making a miniscule gagging motion only I could see, and my stepmother blanching before starting to turn red, like the rod was screwed in a little bit too tight...
         But I decided to ignore my father, and cheer up that Cheryl had said she was a “city girl at heart”...
         I was a city girl at heart!  As of today, I knew that my real mother even lived in New York City. 
         “Oh, I know,” I piped up, shocking everyone into silence while I said, “I was in New Haven last weekend, and it was out-rageous, I mean, just so cool to be there, and not here, and  everyone was strolling around in the sun, sweating, but it didn’t matter what we looked like.  Most of the Yalies are gone for the summer, and all the shops had racks and tables out, and I almost got a henna tattoo, only I was short on cash and...”
         What?  Why the stares?  Okay, New Haven wasn’t New York, but it was a city.  It wasn’t this, the strangle of gray, white and tan vinyl houses...
         “Anyway,” Cheryl continued, as if I weren’t there, as if I were so embarrassing that she had to make me disappear -- “I like the way we’re all close together here, and my kids could always play with the neighbors out in the street--”
         Oh God.  She meant West Haven. 
         Waste Haven.
         She meant here when she talked about being a city girl.  I was going to die, and not from embarrassment, I was going to puke or burn up or something.  Explode.  Become a Marissa stain on the wall again.  My eyes felt teary, but I would not cry, not about being a misunderstood artist, or a real city girl, or that they totally blasphemed all I stood for just by talking.  I wanted to laugh out loud, but it was my stepmother, I mean step-bitch who got to react first.  She was always first.
         “Stop fucking playing with your fucking food for God’s sake you little witch!” she yelled at me, her face the color of the table cloth, kind of mottled purply red.  Then she started to cry.  and it was like it was my fault!  When all I did was try to participate, like she said.  Like she said! 
         My father slammed down his fork harder this time, and said to Bill, “It’s the Big Box stores.  We can lower our prices, but not that low, and people don’t seem to care that our furniture is made of real wood not just paste and sawdust--”
         “No one fucking cares,” my stepmother said.  Yikes.  So much for the family dinner she’d had planned!  “We’re trying to have dinner.  A nice dinner, Todd!” 
         See?          
         My stepmother was losing it, and Cheryl patted her hand across the table, but looked like she wanted to leave before it got ugly.  Don’t we all, I thought, trying to eat, but the maca-roni and cheese got stuck in my throat, and I couldn’t breathe and it hurt, and I might die right then but would anyone notice?
         “Oh,” said my younger brother, Tyler.
         That could only mean one thing, which my youngest brother, Dylan, the love child of Todd and Lisa, aptly pointed out, with one chubby kid finger and the littlest of kid words -- “Pee pee!”
         It had already darkened Tyler’s pants -- Tyler who was al-most ten for Christ’s sake, and I realize the shrink said he suffered the most from abandonment issues because he was just a baby when our birth mother left, but at the moment I was so mad, I thought I could Goddamned tell him a thing or two about what suffering was about.  At least he had never known her.  And, at least he had me.
         I was so mean inside, I didn’t know myself, only the black shadow of me.  This was not who I wanted to be, but it was like a cloud gripping me from within, squeezing the heart and humor out of me.
         Pee now dripped off the edge of the chair of my ten year old brother who could only say “Oh.”  “Oh” for God’s sake?  Not even “Shit”  or “Holy shit, not again,”  or “What the fuck is wrong with me that I can’t go to the bathroom in the Goddamn fucking toilet like every other friggin fifth grader, and by the way, shut up baby!”
         Because baby Dylan was bouncing in the high chair, setting it rocking on its casters -- he was big for twenty months -- shouting “Pee!  Pee!  Pee!” and laughing in a way that not only wasn’t cute, it was likely to get him thrown in with the lot of us other kids, i.e., the bad ones, if he didn’t chill.
         “My God, I’m so sorry, Cheryl,” my stepmother said in one breath, and in the next, “Get on the fucking toilet you little monster!” to Tyler, and in the next breath, to me, she yelled, “Get some paper towels, quick, you’d think you were raised by wolves, why are you just sitting there?”
         It was my fault.  I hadn’t toilet trained my little brother right, and now I could only watch his retreating self hurry for the bathroom too late, and hate myself for thinking bad things about him, and wish I was better, nicer, changed.  I wanted my sense of humor back, because the whole scene was kind of funny, in a twisted, suburban way...
         “Good thing this floor is hardwood.  Sealed hardwood.  Can’t beat honest to God wood,” my father said, while Christa helped me mop up the pee.
         “Cheryl, I’ll call you,” Lisa said, gathering up her jacket -- even though the school year had just ended, so it was offi-cially summer and like eighty degrees out -- and her purse, a pink oblong thing with a big silver buckle that I couldn’t be-lieve she’d be caught dead carrying -- it was so trashy, if you asked me.
         But no one did.  No one ever did.  I was simply expected to gather my brothers, and pile them into the Minivan so we could drive the half a block back home.
         Except I didn’t have to spend my Friday night caught in the crossfire aimed at Tyler, and have to put the baby in his bath and to bed, and listen to him say “pee”  all night, or even “pee tea whee me bee see...” as he was in the midst of doing now, even though Christa was cracking up, and it was contagious, and soon I was going to start gobbling like the turkeys over in Mil-ford, because everyone said that’s what it sounded like when I laughed and cried at the same time, or when I swallowed after, you know.
         Christa never had to swallow.  She was a perfectly propor-tioned blond, after all, and with that, popular.
         Sometimes I wished someone would see me for who I was.  Then I wouldn’t swallow either.
         But anyway, “I’m staying over at Christa’s tonight, remem-ber?” I said.
         Lisa nearly grabbed me by the ear, but grabbed the baby in-stead -- who was still rhyming words with “pee” -- and whispered so loudly anyone with their windows open on our block could probably hear -- “That was before--”
         “Let her stay,” my father interrupted.  “It’s just one less thing to deal with.  It’s just one less disappointment,” he added, scanning all of us with his eyes before throwing an arm over Lisa and kissing her teary cheek -- Daddy gonna make every-thing all right. 
         If only, I mean I’d be crying if I weren’t laughing -- or laughing if I weren’t crying inside. 
         Christa and I hurried up the stairs, beelining for her room, not about to listen to the door shut, or the humble apolo-gies, or Cheryl rehashing the event to everyone she knew via her cellphone while she did the dishes and wrinkled her nose about my family, while Chrysta’s father, Bill, turned the up the TV so loud he wouldn’t have to be bothered.  Christa’s brothers, the twins, tromped past, talking about a Paris Hilton site on the web, and Christa locked her bedroom door, fishing out the cold medicine bottles from the bottom of her closet, the ones with DXM in them that they still sold in the pediatric formula over the counter.  There’d been some aricle about “skittling” that some idiot wrote, and all the stores put their adult cold medi-cines behind the counter, like they would all fuck you up equally, when, well -- idiots.  There was a drug which came in a packet of eight little red pills like candy -- hence the name “skittling”, and now everyone was afraid of kids getting their hands on any cold medicine, whether it had pseudophedrine or DXM or not.  But no one checked the pediatric formula.
         No one grown-up really knew what ingredients we were after.
         No one knew what we were after.  And that included me.  It was just the suburban thing to do, out here in Waste Haven.  My best friend did it, and so did practically every kid in the neighborhood, and I wanted to fit in.  Birds do it, bees do it...
         I also knew that tripping was a way out, a way to forget that I was miserable half the time, and tonight was one of those halves.
         I drank the bottle of Robitussin, all the while thinking, I hope Tyler never, no he’d better not ever do this, and Christa drank hers, and then scoot!  Out the window onto the porch roof, and down we went before the trip started.  You didn’t want all that negativity around when you were tripping.  We ran through the (ha ha) “city” streets, our rubber soles flapping almost soundlessly, all the way to the baseball field up the road, which had the scariest playground if you were a mother, but was strawberry fields to us.  I liked the Beatles.  Lisa thought they were crap, but my real mother used to play “Cry Baby Cry,” I remembered that.  She used to sing it to me when she was cry-ing.  That and “I’m So Tired.”
         Wonder what she was doing right now?  Painting?  Something wonderful like eating freshly made croissants from an all night bakery in New York?  Anything but this, I bet.  Anything but be-ing all wasted to escape feeling so crappy it seemed like life was never going to change.
         But then, I was past gobbling, and into snorting as I gig-gled from the trip starting.  The escape.  It was dangerous, tripping on cold medicine, but it wasn’t just the in thing, it was the danger that drew us to it.  Life was so ordered and neat, we had to break free. 
         The odd shaped climbing contraption dead center in the playground was already starting to change, and now it looked like one of those spindly trees struggling to grow up in a con-crete city, and the broken glass from many a discarded bottle sparkled like diamonds, like real diamonds, as I threw myself into my trip.  Christa and walked on diamonds into the park, and the sky spun musical notes I could actually see, and it was all good.  I laughed, I actually laughed!  My birth mother and Lisa and my father and Tyler all seemed to far away, I laughed.

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