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

drinking. His sentences were choppy and nonsensical. He asked Mom to send him money to take the three-day train back home. And when she did, he came back to us.
    For one full year, from that summer of 1995 straight through the following spring of 1996, Dad kept leaving for and returning from Arizona. Every month or so, I’d hear Mom on the phone with him, agreeing to send him whatever money we had. Each time he returned to us, he’d inevitably find that staying sober in Medfield was worse than drinking alone in the desert. He convinced Anthony to apply to Arizona State University, saying that the Southwest was going to be a great place for the two of them. And despite Mom’s pleas and tears, Anthony went with him in the fall. I hated that part of the country, if only for the reason that it had lured them both away. I realized that their leaving took Mom away, too—to work. I kept the televisions on in every room of our empty apartment to combat the loneliness that comes with silence.
    When the next June came, and I was a blink from finishing sixth grade, Dad called. I knew from Anthony, who saw less and less of him the longer he was there, that Dad was drinking heavily. I even knew that Dad had, on more than one occasion, drunkenly humiliated Anthony in front of his friends.
    And now he needed money again. He needed to come home, I heard him tell her over the phone. She didn’t have a dime. Part of her knew that it was best for Anthony, who had decided to take a semester off from school, and me that we not live with an alcoholic, albeit our dad. The other part of her loved him fiercely and wanted him home, safe and sound regardless of sobriety. She also remembered the three previous times she’d sent him that same money.
    “Rob, I’m sorry, I can’t.”
    With that, she passed me the phone. My heart raced, not knowing whether to support her decision and act like a grown-up,or to tell him that I missed him and wanted him home, which was the truth. He asked me to convince Mom to send him money. He told me how much he wanted to come home, how different things would be this time.
    “But Dad, you never change … you never get better. Mom’s right.” I choked on my own words. “You shouldn’t come home.”
    And through the spiral telephone cord, I felt his eyes close. A nod. I heard what he didn’t say:
I can’t believe you said that, Andrea. I hate you for saying that, Andrea. But … I know. I know
. And as I told him I had to go, I felt my throat close up. I felt as though I’d swallowed my heart.
    On Sunday, November 23, 1997, the night before I was supposed to have read all of Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
for English class, the phone rang. I sat on the edge of Mom’s bed as she picked up her bedroom phone.
    She turned to face the wall, and I stared down at Dickens. I heard the phone click back in the receiver.
    I looked up at her, ready to tell her that I hated reading and Dickens and seventh grade, but her eyes stopped me. They said it before her mouth could. “Dad’s dead.”
    I ran to my room and sobbed into the clothes hanging in my closet. I hated the feeling of the fabric against my face. I wanted to tear all the clothing from its hangers. I hated my First Communion dress and how roughly the coarse white material rubbed against my wet cheek. I hated Mom for wanting me to save it, since she’d had a wedding dress cut down to fit me. I hated that since the dress was a women’s size twelve, she thought I could probably wear it again when I grew up. I knew how impossible that was—andhow no one wears their First Communion dress again after second grade. I thought of how everyone just gets bigger as they grow up. And then I hated that, too.
    When I search frantically through my memories of the rest of that night, I can only hear two sentences: the ones Mom said to Anthony and me in her bedroom. “Dad died last July in Arizona. He had a stroke, and they found him at the train station.”
    I scan the