RE: Trailer Trash 48 pt C (Patreon)

// Picks up right after that pt A bit, this time. Sorry I can't post anything in order! My writing process bounces all over the place worrying away at sections until they hit the way I want them to, and stuff never finishes in order.

   “Your aunt Lisa wouldn’t steal anything,” Mr. Moore shook his head in disbelief.

  “Dad—how or why would you make that assertion with such confidence?!” Tabitha blurted out. “On what basis are you willing to vouch for the quality of her character? If you’re aware of something that I’m not, by all means please—”

   “Because I know Lisa, and she’s not that kind of person,” Mr. Moore replied with an expression that indicated he was explaining the obvious. “She’s not a thief, she wouldn’t—”

 “Oh? She’s not a thief? Not like uncle Danny?” Tabitha countered.

  “—She—Tabby, stop,” Mr. Moore blustered. “She wouldn’t be up to any of that kind of nonsense, and honest to God I still don’t think she was doing heroin, either. This is all some sort of big mix-up, and once we can get this sorted out—”

   “But, she was doing heroin,” Mrs. Macintire’s eyebrows went up. “That’s what was found, when everything was sorted out. Just what in the hell have you done towards sorting any of this out? It seems to me—”

   “Well, I don’t know anything about that,” Mr. Moore shook his head, stubbornly refusing to believe it.

   “Dad…” Tabitha found herself at a loss. “I know you don’t like it—I know you don’t want to accept it. But, when you look at all of the facts together? They illustrate a pretty damning picture about them. Uncle Danny is a criminal. Trying to steal a pallet of computers—an entire pallet wasn’t some random whim. It was planned, premeditated, thought out; he chose to break the law. Aunt Lisa was in full support of that, grandma caught her over and over again, telling the boys that their daddy didn’t do anything wrong. But, he was.”

   “It was stupid, an’ he made a mistake,” Mr. Moore shrugged. “S’all there is to it. People make mistakes.”

   “Uncle Danny was working,” Tabitha continued to spell it all out for him. “He had steady income, he and Lisa shared a comfortable apartment, and with grandma Laurie’s help and support with the kids? They had a comfortable life. Why would he jeopardize that, why was he suddenly so pressed for money that he turned to crime? Why was Lisa so eager to sell off the Cutlass Supreme for cash? Wouldn’t she have needed a vehicle to get around? Where did all of their money keep going, dad?”

   “Heroin,” Mrs. Macintire chimed in. “Obviously!”

   “I don’t know where anything like heroin even came from,” Mr. Moore said, putting both hands on the table in a gesture of finality. “But, what I do know is that every a one’ve y’all is sure damn quick to condemn someone before we know what’s what. Yer uncle Danny has his court date, an’ Lisa has hers too, and this is America—so as far as I’m concerned, she’s innocent until proven guilty! An’ that’s up to judge and jury. Men and women under oath—under God—to decide, once all the evidence is figured itself out and everyone’s had a chance to have their say.”

   “Mister Moore,” Karen Williams sighed. “From late that night when I picked up Tabitha to when we got her inside and my husband had a chance to see what it was in that purse, no one else touched any of that stuff. Are you suggesting Tabitha, your daughter, planted four grand worth of illegal narcotics in that purse?”

   “Of course not!” Mr. Moore appeared outraged.

   “Your daughter voiced her suspicions to you,” Mrs. Williams said in a calm voice. “You disregard them as impossible, and went on about your day. Your daughter goes and takes the purse to us, and her suspicions are confirmed—because we find a whole bunch of heroin in said purse.”

   “In a Batman thermos, actually,” Tabitha remarked. “The plastic kind that comes from a child’s lunchbox. Perhaps from one of the boys?”

   “Does one of those four kiddos have a Batman lunch pail?” Mrs. Macintire asked grandma Laurie.

   “Well—” Grandma Laurie paused. “Batman? Yes, I know they do, I send them to school with it every day.”

   “Is it missing a thermos?” Mrs. Macintire pressed.

   “Oh, they all are,” Grandma Laurie shrugged. “We stopped puttin’ them in there, on account of the one of them makin’ an awful mess the one time when a lid wasn’t screwed tight. I just put in a little juice box for each of them instead and they’re fine. The thermoses would be—somewhere at Danny’s apartment in with their things, I suppose.”

   “Can we check up on that?” Mrs. Williams asked.

   “Of course, I have a key,” Grandma Laurie nodded. “I can have the boys hunt through all the stuff over there.”

   “Mom—you don’t seriously believe that Lisa had heroin, do you?” Mr. Moore shot the middle-aged woman a look of surprise. “That she’d not only have heroin, but put it in one of the kid’s thermos? C’mon, now.”

   “I don’t know what you expect from me,” Grandma Laurie said after a moment of consideration. “She had no problem drinking or smoking around the boys. The outfits she wore—nothing was appropriate, and then all the foul things that came out of her mouth! I don’t rightly know what to think. Would it really be all that shocking if she was gettin’ herself into drugs?”

   “That’s,” Mr. Moore frowned, staring down at the table. “That’s jus’—completely different. That is that, and then this is this. I don’t see what—”

   “Are you willing to stake this family on that?” Tabitha delivered the ultimatum she felt they were all waiting for. “Because, that’s what this is, dad. I won’t be a part of this family if she is, and I won’t allow her to hurt the boys any more than she already has—she’s done enough damage!”

   “You can’t—”

   “So, it’s very simple: you need to choose, right now, between me and her. You either believe in her innocence, for whatever unfathomable reasons you might have, and think that I somehow framed her, or you believe in me, everyone else, and all of the evidence when I insist she’s a drug addict and a threat to this family.”

   In the moment she was delivering those words she felt a rush of power and conviction because she knew she was right—but, locking eyes with her dad and seeing his irritation and refusal to accept the reality in front of him instead filled her with a gut-wrenching sense of loss. It was as though the unstoppable force of her argument simply met the immovable object of her father’s stubborn mind, and that was that.

   In which case, nothing I could ever say will matter, Tabitha felt totally defeated. In a movie, IN A STORY, this is where I had my moment to shine, and I had all the right words, and everything I had to say was just going to be so compelling that he’d have NO CHOICE but to accept what’s going on here! He’d be, he’d be MOVED, his mind would be changed, SOMETHING WOULD CHANGE, but instead—

   Instead Mr. Moore simply appeared annoyed, because he hadn’t wanted to hear her say anything like that. Tabitha watched with plummeting spirits as he turned his stubborn infuriating look of consternation from her over to Mrs. Macintire and Mrs. Williams in turn, as though they’d been filling his poor daughter’s head with nonsense. As though these two meddling outsiders had clearly been trying to set members of his family against one another. The realization was so deeply, personally exhausting that Tabitha felt too tired to even be angry anymore.

   I’m just done. I’m done. Take me home, I want to—I’m just gonna curl up under the covers and be done with today. This was pointless. What a fucking waste of everyone’s time. Shouldn’t have even tried! I’m done. I’m done. Check, please?

*     *     *

   “You okay, kiddo?” Mrs. Macintire asked, stepping into the ladies’ restroom of the Applebees where Tabitha had been staring vacantly into the mirror for somewhere upwards of five minutes.

   “I’m… here,” Tabitha reported.

   “I, honestly I think it went about as well as can be expected,” Sandra said, joining her at the mirror. “You okay? Was worried you’d be in here crying.”

   “You know?” Tabitha stared. “I wish I could cry. That would be—something. A thing. A release, I guess. I just feel nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing, about anything. I feel like I’m just done with all of this? Can we just leave?”

   “He did say that if it came down to it, he’d side with you instead of Lisa,” Mrs. Macintire pointed out. “That’s something.”

   “Did he?” Tabitha shrugged with indifference, trying to think back to what had been said. “I guess I just sort of started to zone out, there. Wasn’t getting through to him. Even if he did say it, does he even mean it? What does it mean if that’s only a decision he’s able to make grudgingly? What does anything mean? I—I don’t care anymore. I’m done. I’m sorry.”

   Tabitha watched in the mirror as Mrs. Macintire pulled her into a hug and felt the woman run a hand up and down her back in a way that should have been comforting. It didn’t feel comforting, however—she still felt nothing, felt like she’d become the robot she spoke like when she was stressed. Like some worn out part of her mental faculties had failed to continue processing her emotional state and just stopped working. The experience felt neither unpleasant nor pleasant, because she just didn’t feel anything at all.

   I am not confident that this is a positive development for me.

   “I get it,” Mrs. Macintire patted Tabitha’s back and gave her another crushing squeeze. “I really do. I get it, and seeing it again makes me want to just reach over and knock his block off. It was both of my parents, for me. Had a brother, he um, he got into opiates. They tried to help! Over and over again. The wrong kind of help really winds up hurting everyone, but they—they don’t see that, or can’t see that. I don’t know, kiddo.”

   “I’m sorry,” Tabitha’s brow furrowed. “Did he…?”

   “Yeah,” Mrs. Macintire shrugged. “One time too many, and they just couldn’t resuscitate him. It’s okay. Long time ago, I was—I must’ve been nineteen, back then. How the years just fly by, huh?”

   “Yeah,” Tabitha agreed fully, finally feeling a spark of—well, feeling something.

   “Hah, and with your parents, your dad at least, it’s like he can’t even hear a word we’re saying at all,” Mrs. Macintire let out a bitter laugh. “He’s got it bad. This stuff just, it’s just not part of his world view, so to him it can’t be this way, can’t be real. Not with family.”

   “It’s crazy,” Tabitha remarked.

   “It is,” Mrs. Macintire said. “It’s like that for a lot of people, just, it never comes out until things go all to hell. There’s a lot of crazy hidden in people, hon. Sometimes it’s like everyone lives in their own little reality, and anything that pushes too far and challenges that—well. Yeah.”

   “I thought I had him,” Tabitha admitted. “I thought I would get through to him, if it was just laid out in the right way, maybe. Now, it’s like—is it even possible for two human beings to ever fully understand one another? Is there meaning in trying to ever reach anyone? I. I know that’s melodramatic as hell, but Jesus Christ. I’m just so done with all of this.”

   “I know, kiddo,” Sandra sighed. “I know. He does love you. Just, he’s awful close-minded in these certain areas. He’s got a thick head. Nothing we could say I think was ever gonna just… bring him around, and get him convinced all right away. It’s a process, and it takes time. We made some headway, and that’s all we can do.”

   “I guess?” Tabitha tried not to sound doubtful, and failed at that miserably enough to eke another weary laugh out of Mrs. Macintire.

   “Well,” the woman said, taking Tabitha by the shoulders and appraising her at arm’s length for a moment. “We weren’t sure how this was all gonna go… but I think it’s best that you stay with us, for the time being. Rather than havin’ you go back home with your parents. How do you feel about that?”

   “I—please,” Tabitha nodded thankfully. “If you’ll still have me, I’d love that. I’m sorry for, for all of this.”

   “We will be thrilled to have you, for as long as we can keep you,” Mrs. Macintire said with a twinkle in her eye. “I promise. Can you even imagine? Me goin’ back all alone, havin’ to be the one to tell Hannah she won’t be seeing you for a while? Are you kidding me?”

   “Hah,” Tabitha let out a listless chuckle.

   “You’re okay,” Mrs. Macintire assured her. “We’re gonna be okay. Let’s get ourselves back out there, and have the rest of dinner with your parents—I think I saw they had birthday presents for you—and, maybe we’ll wrap up with ice cream for dessert, and then—and then, we’ll take you home to Hannah. How’s that sound?”

   “I… think I could go for ice cream,” Tabitha admitted. “Just for tonight.”