the habit of being

My mother tells me that my father is in jail again. Six counts of robbery in 2 weeks, since he last got out on bail. Among others, he robbed my mother’s house twice, making off with her pocketbook and my stepfather’s case of beer.

“I think there should be some sort of drug that makes alcoholics get really ill if they drink,” I say.

“There is,” she says, “a pill, but you can just stop taking it anytime. There’s no anti-crack pill.”

I can’t believe they even have crack in my hometown. It seems like you should have to at least go to Savannah, maybe even Atlanta, for anything stronger than pot. Part of the reason my father was able to rob my mother’s house twice is because we never lock our doors.

According to my mother, Miss Diane, the woman whose in-home day care center I stayed in as a child, knows all about the Statesboro crack scene. She and her husband own the rundown place my dad lived for a while. Apparently, my father’s “crack friend,” Sheryl, gives old men blow jobs for beer. ONE beer. Miss Diane - freckly, bosomy, daycare lady who came to visit my single mother at home to ease her fears about having someone else take care of me while she worked - told my mother this.

“Maybe they’ll send him to treatment again?” I ask.

“Maybe.”

We change the subject to our family cat-history:

Bob who sat under my mom’s hair and ate my throw-up off the floor when I was tiny.

Piffy who waited for my bus after school.

Blue, Piffy’s scrawny stray mistress.

Spike who was bitten by a rabid raccoon.

Peli, the Russian Blue we adopted too old - she straved herself to death.

Isaac, a kitten we gave away to the mother of a girl I knew in middle school. In highschool the woman was getting married to a man who didn’t like cats and gave him back, crying, to us. After I left for college, they got divorced and we gave him back to her.

The three kittens my little brother stuffed into a tennis ball can, the one he accidentally drowned in the tub, and the one whose ear he cut a triangle out of trying to give it a haircut.

Hershey, the Himalayan matron of our many litters, coveted throughout town for their long hair and colorpoints. (People called us to ask when the next batch was due.)

Scout, who had a rare blood disease as a kitten and underwent 3 transfusions. As an adult, she got pregnant and had one kitten in the middle of the kitchen floor and then just walked off and left it there. One of our other cats adopted it, and then Scout decided she wanted it back so they took turns stealing it back and forth and hiding it.

Andy, whom we gave to my great grandmother when I was still a child and who still lives with her to this day.

Franny, the Siamese who bit me all the time…