With Interest

Perhaps my father was a good man, once. I don’t remember him much.

I remember my mother. She was timid and deathly afraid of crowds and change.

She was a dressmaker. I remember her hands smoothing folds of fabric and the momentary pause and sharp intake of breath when she pricked her finger on a pin.

I remember her standing before a completed dress, hands on hips and head tilted considering her work and the pride that she felt when she knew she had done her job well.

She raised me on her own in her slow, quiet way and I am forever grateful to her.

My father appeared sporadically, expecting a hot meal on a weeknight, never on weekends. My mother prepared enough food just in case, but she was relieved when he didn’t come home. She told me sometimes, that he’d been different before the war. The war had changed men and not for the better, she said.

I heard them talking sometimes, very late at night. She would quietly ask where he went when he was away and he always said, working darling. Out working.

But he never had any money.

One night she finally said, “I don’t know how much working you can be getting done out at the speakeasy.”

He didn’t answer her, but then we didn’t see him for weeks.

———

We carried on this way for years until December 5th, 1933. If I’d ever been at risk of forgetting that date, it’s remembered now as the day that prohibition was lifted.

On that day it snowed and my father came home carrying with him a suitcase full of cash and a bottle of whiskey.

My mother asked him where the money came from, her hands twisting in the fabric of her apron, knuckles white. I understood that the money scared her but I didn’t understand why.

“I told you I’ve been working,” he said.

She swallowed and nodded and put dinner on the table while he drank and spun tales of what this money was going to do for us. When I went to bed he was snoring, using the kitchen table as his pillow.

———

My mother woke me up sometime in the night. She put a finger to her lips motioning to keep quiet and then handed me a bag that was already packed. She gave me my heaviest coat.

In the entryway, she picked up a bag of her own. She cast a glance around and her eyes hesitated on her sewing machine and dress forms but she shook her head and we left.

I could hear my father, still snoring. We closed the door behind us and I couldn’t hear him anymore.

We went to the train station and my mother bought two tickets. I saw in her bag that she’d taken a bit of the money. Not a lot, just enough.

Once we were settled on the train, I finally asked her why we were leaving. She considered me for a while before answering. “Will you allow me to just say that it’s not safe there anymore? That we have to go? That I’ll tell you when you’re older?”

I thought about the crowds we’d had to wrestle through, and how different everything was going to be and I remembered her fears. “But aren’t you afraid?” I asked.

“Some things are scarier than others,” she said with steel in her voice.

We headed out to California. She changed her name and claimed to be a widow. She bought a new sewing machine and dress forms and even opened her own store.

———

When I was older I tried to find my father. He had disappeared two weeks after we left him.

I told my mother this and the old shadowed look she’d left behind when we’d run away came back for a moment. “I’d assumed as much,” she said. She glanced down and fiddled with her measuring tape before kneeling to adjust a hem.

“He stole the money,” I said. I knew that. I’d known for years by then, but she and I had never discussed it.

She nodded and said, “And then someone stole it right back. With interest.”



Prompt ▼

The Twenty-first Amendment repealed the Eighteenth Amendment, thereby ending Prohibition. Write a story or poem about the effect of Prohibition's end on one family. Use DRAMA as one of your genres, and make sure your static item is rated 13+ or higher.