Jean · But It Still Doesn't End

But It Still Doesn't End

Once in California, I ended up rooming with a family that had been friends with my mother and father. I spent the first night at their house. Wayne was on the fire department with my father, and I learned later that my mother had been caught in a a car with his teenage son while they lived on the same street in California. (More of that same well documented pattern with younger men.)

After that first night, other friends of the family offered me a room if I wanted to say. I moved in with them, two houses away from house I grew up in, and started work and college.

Whereever I was, Jean made sure to contact the family and peddle her sob story. I know it was the same with each, as each one I stayed with eventually told me. First, that I hadn't "run away", but that she had been forced to tell me to leave because I was "beating her". She thought, in some part of her mind, that I must be telling these people the truth about her. In fact, she was never a topic of conversation. She was a cancer I had removed from my life. And yet, she still kept coming back.

When I hitchhiked to California, I had left my car at Dave's house, and the key with my girlfriend. I didn't have enough money for gas for a cross country trip, but I knew I needed to get away. I also knew if I left the car at home she would get her hands on it. Even with it at Dave's, Jean contacted my girlfriend and told her I wanted her to give her the key. Could she stop by and get it? What normal person is going to expect your boyfriends mother to call and lie about getting the key to his car? My girlfriend knew very little about the situation with Jean. Seventeen year old guys don't usually tell their girlfriends that their five foot zero mother regularly beats the shit out of them.

She gave Jean the key, that was the last I saw of the car. By the time Dave told me, it was too late. She'd picked it up from his house, was driving it around, and told me on the phone there was nothing I could do about it.

Two years later, Jean upped and moved to Cape Cod. She waited until my brother finished high school, and with no regard for my sister, uprooted and moved half a state away. Once on the cape her and Dick had a break-up, and she found herself unable to pay her bills. In a remarkable and sickening turn of events she asked my father to move back in with her. That lasted until she reconciled with her old boyfriend. In the meantime, my father had given up his apartment, and was without a home again. Twice in one lifetime she managed to screw him out of his place to live.

Worse, before the boyfriend moved back in with her, when the living arrangement with my father was no longer to her liking, my father found himself sleeping in his truck. At the time, he was doing painting and contracting work on Cape Cod with two of his young nephews. In perhaps the most disturbing example of her infatuation with young men, my mother seduced one his nephews while my father slept in the truck. My sister saw him leaving her room in the morning. I'm sure if Jean knew we were all aware ofit, she would make up some story claiming it was an complete lie, or that my cousin was the one trying to seduce her. Just as if she knew if was common knowledge that she was found in a compromising situation in the car with the teenage son of one of our neighbors, there would be another lie and excuse as well. It really doesn't matter - what matters is the underlying sickness that leads her to do these things, then lie to cover it up, instead of seeking help for the behavior.

Later, on the Cape, when things didn't work out with "Dick", she met the younger brother of one of her new friends on the Cape. Yes, one more much younger man. He was barely four years older than me, and lived in California. Shortly thereafter she packed up and left for California. Remember my sister? Well, apparently Jean didn't. She left her there, entering her senior year in high school, to fend for herself. Not because Jean had a job to go to, or anything else, but because she had a whim. And nothing, not even parental responsibility, was going to stop her from doing what she wanted.

And how did Jean afford to live in California, with no job? Well, Heather had been in a schoolbus accident. Jean found an attorney to take the case. They worked the bus company, and reached a settlement. A settlement that went straight to my mother, not to my sister. A settlement she conveniently accepted before my sister turned eighteen. Even though she was an emancipated minor, this money went to Jean, and not into a trust, and by dribs and drabs disappeared. To this day, my sister suspects, with good reason, that there was more to the settlement than she was told.

That, and by falling on her back once again for the new boyfriend in return for a roof over her head.

< - Previous | Next - >