Found by Jennifer Lauck Read Free Book Online

out of my mouth. Stead. I’m in-stead. I couldn’t say it enough. “I’m here now, instead of there.” In Stead, instead of being retired. I’m in Stead instead of living with Deb. I’m in Stead instead of being dead, which became a mantra sputtered from the mouths of the aunt and uncle who took me in. “If it wasn’t for us, you’d be dead in a gutter somewhere in L.A.”
    They felt I was lucky to be in Stead.
     
     
    AUNT PEGGY WAS almost petite compared to Auntie Carol, but her body wasn’t small, it was sturdy. With wide shoulders, wide hips, and an ample bosom, Peggy could have filled in Wonder Woman’s suit quite nicely. She was solid but womanly.
    Peggy was twenty-six years old and a housewife who stayed home with her one-year-old, Kimmy—a sweet, chubby, angelic child with curls of blond hair and huge blue eyes. Peggy passed her time doing laundry, shopping for groceries, and planning meals. At the end of each day, she prepared dinner for Richard—tacos, enchiladas, Salisbury steak, chicken-fried steak, and something called rigatoni, which was mashed-up beef stuffed into pasta shells.
    Richard was twenty-eight years old and born on September 19, which seemed to be an odd coincidence. How was it that I ended up in the home of a man who shared Bryan’s birthday and the day my mother died? I couldn’t fathom it.

    RICHARD WAS A tall man with long arms and an oddly shaped torso. With no waist and nearly no behind, his pants slid down his narrow hips and hung midcrack. He was forever tugging them up in a distracted, habitual way. He worked as an appliance repairman, and at the end of the day his fingernails were black with the grease of his profession.
    After dinner, most nights, Richard had a ritual where he would turn on the TV, root himself into the sofa and watch episodes of Bonanza and Wild, Wild West. All the while, he would carve grime from under his nails with a pair of clippers. He did the same to his feet, bending his leg wide around his belly in an act of contortion that seemed physically impossible. Toe jamb.
    And Richard smoked. Chain smoker—one after another—all day, all night (until sleep finally made his mouth go slack). When he spoke to me, it was usually to command that I replenish his dwindling supply of smokes, locate his lighter, or empty his overflowing ashtray.
    He’d call out, “Hey, no-neck, get me a pack of cigarettes”; “Hey, no-neck, get me my lighter”; “Hey, no-neck, clean out this damn ashtray.”
     
     
    RICHARD WAS ONE of five children who came from what he would call “mountain people,” meaning hillbillies who (man and woman alike) chewed tobacco, threw back moonshine, grew their own marijuana, and unloaded ammo on empty beer cans shot from rough rail fences.
    Mountain children were raised being called “no-necks.”
Children were “hands,” not people; they were like pesky livestock, best corralled, contained, and trained to do tough homesteading work.
    Richard had had a brutal childhood. He had been whipped more times than he could count. He was proud to have endured—without a whimper—those bloodied beatings. He had gone hungry. He had tasted fear many times.
    Richard felt my past was a holiday in Hawaii compared to his childhood and wanted to teach me the lessons of life that I hadn’t yet learned. He went to work on me immediately.
     
     
    LATER I LEARNED that Richard was not only born on September 19th, he was also born in the year 1945. An investigation revealed that Richard shared both birthday and birth year with my birth father—Bill Wright—the man so eager to give me his name when the story began.
    First Bryan was born on September 19, then Janet died on that day, then came Richard with that day as his birthday, and finally I was able to connect all of this to my own birth father—exact day and year.
    There was no explanation for the synchronicity. The information, once revealed, made me feel as if I teetered on the edge of cosmic