It Was Me All Along: A Memoir by Andie Mitchell Read Free Book Online

focused on the cereal box, the milk, and my bowl until all that was in the cabinet was gone. I ate until I felt so full, I couldn’t move. Until I couldn’t think of anything but the churning of my stomach as it digested Lucky Charms and Frosted Flakes and Trix.
    The court took away his license. For two months the state held him in a rehabilitation facility three towns away from where we lived. When we visited him on weekends, he gave me art projects that he’d made during his free time—a painted ceramic Christmas ornament and a notebook of black-and-white sketches. He had us in stitches as he told stories about the various people he’d met in group therapy, using unique voices and gestures to mimic each. And when he finally came back to us, he seemed a stable man. He rode his bicycle around Medfield. He got a paper route. He helped me with my homework, and we played video games for hours on end—while Mom found a third and fourth job, trying desperately to make ends meet. From the way she seemed panic stricken all the time, I should have known that things weren’t going well. I should have known that something was wrong when I tagged along withher on our weekly Sunday grocery shopping trips, and she told me our budget was twenty-five dollars. But somehow I still felt blindsided by the news that we had to leave our new home. Nana and Papa had lost patience with Dad, with our missing rent for a few months, and two weeks before Christmas 1994, they told Mom we had to leave their house by the first of January. There was no negotiating, no convincing them, even when Mom pleaded with Nana, “But, Kay …, we’ve got nowhere to go. Please.” We packed all our belongings in trash bags and liquor store boxes and moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Wilkins Glen, Medfield’s low-income housing, by the start of 1995. The second of January, unbeknownst to us, my grandparents changed the locks and trashed all our remaining possessions there.
    Three weeks later, just after my tenth birthday, Mom signed me up for a bowling league. All my new friends had joined. Thursday afternoons after bowling, the bus dropped us off in front of the school, and I’d look out the frosted window to see the usual caravan of Caravans. Parents lined up to greet us. With a quick scan, I knew which parent belonged to which kid—and that in the whole crowd, no one was searching for me.
    Most weeks I’d catch a ride from someone, saving me from a two-mile walk home. One of the parents would be kind enough to shuttle me, even though I lived farther away than they’d like. No one ever said it, but I sensed the silent sigh in the “Sure!” I noticed the brief flinch as we bounced over the speed bumps leading into my apartment complex. They’d smile into the rearview mirror as they remarked, “How nice they keep the grounds around here!” I’d smile back, feeling momentarily lucky that the low-income housing we moved into at least looked respectable.
    One particular Thursday, I hopped off the last step of the busand saw Dad there. He’d stopped drinking and had taken to riding his bike again. I noticed how cold the air was that hit me. The temperature bent as low as New England weather knew to limbo. He was wearing a puffy down jacket, so loud in color that I could practically hear it shout “I’m royal BLUE!!” Snug on his head was a ski cap that some company must have been giving out as promotional swag at a conference years ago, when he held a job. It was obnoxious in its green, tan, and mustard glory. Brown, deconstructed. A pom-pom made of cheap yarn flailed from its top.
    I gasped at the sight of him. Worse than his clothing was the old mountain bike. I was certain that it had rotted for years in someone’s garage before it finally hit the lawn of a yard sale.
    “What are you doing here?” I said.
    He smiled. He must have assumed that as a kid who rarely had a parent to pick her up, I would be thrilled. Instead, I was aghast.