Home Is Where My People Are: The Roads That Lead Us to Where We Belong (6 page)

I wasn’t related to them. Not even a little bit.

But they were family.

And it occurs to me that God has a mysterious way of giving us homes in places where we don’t necessarily have an official return address.

It’s funny, because when you’re a kid, you don’t really have an awareness of other people’s brokenness. I guess it’s because you don’t really have an understanding of your own. And from the time we were six until we were about ten, I’d say that Kim and I had a pretty carefree go of things. We considered a sleepover a total success if we got to slide down her stairs a bunch of times and play sisters for several hours.

(My pretend name was Holly.)

(I worked in a pretend clothing store.)

(My pretend boyfriend’s name was Scott.)

(As in Baio.)

We also liked to play Bill’s favorite country albums and pretend like we were competing in pageants as we belted out the most dramatic songs we could find. Evelyn’s heaviest glass candlesticks were our microphones, and there were several country hits in our repertoire: “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man,” “(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song,” and “Don’t Come Home A’ Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind),” to name a few.

You should know that the subtext of those songs was completely lost on us. Plus, it never really occurred to us that no one had ever been crowned Miss Mississippi after singing a song about adultery during the talent competition.

But somewhere in between the time when I started riding my bike to the Clarks’ house and the time when I started driving, something changed. The best way I know to explain it is that there were glimpses of brokenness I hadn’t noticed before, even if I wasn’t exactly sure how to label it. Maybe part of the reason was because Kim and I were getting older and were a little more aware of what our expectations were in terms of “normal” behavior from our parents, but there was no question that Bill’s drinking had escalated
 
—and there wasn’t much about it that seemed “social” anymore.

In the summers I spent most Mondays with Kim; it was Bill’s day off, and since the Clarks had more cable channels than we did (plus Atari!), Kim and I tended to gravitate to her house instead of mine. Most of those
Mondays have blurred together as sort of a collective happy memory, but there’s one that was a watershed moment for both of us, I think.

One Monday when Kim and I were twelve, Bill asked us if we’d ride with him to the store
 
—in his sah-weet green Camaro, no less. I thought that I’d seen him drinking earlier in the day
 
—I wasn’t completely sure
 
—but I figured it was safe to get in the car with him (keep in mind: I was twelve; plus, Kim and I always loved riding around in that Camaro). But about a half a mile from their house, I realized that something was wrong. And no matter how many jokes he cracked, no matter how loud he turned up the radio so we could sing along, no matter how fun and carefree I tried to pretend like the car ride was, there was no denying that he was drunk. Not tipsy. Not buzzed. Drunk.

It was the first time his drinking had ever made me feel scared.

And sometimes, when I think about Kim and me in the backseat of that car, trying our best to find something to laugh about as we swerved back and forth along the road, my heart hurts a little bit. When he was sober, Bill would have never dreamed of doing anything to put us in danger; he looked after us and tended to us and loved us like crazy. Kim was his beloved, brilliant baby girl, and it was his great joy to dote on her. He thought she was the absolute best at everything she tried, whether it was ballet, piano, flute, or tap dancing; no daddy could love a daughter more. In fact, one time when Kim accidentally pinned Evelyn between her car and the garage door (it’s a long story), Bill was so worried about Kim’s emotional state after the accident that he bought her a purse. Evelyn used to laugh and say that if Kim had actually succeeded in injuring her, there’s no question that Bill would have bought her a new piece of luggage.

But that’s what stinks about the parts of us that are broken and hurting. We try our best to keep all the pieces and shards gathered and contained, and we trick ourselves into thinking that they’re not affecting other people. Eventually, though, our need to feed what is broken starts to overpower everything else, and those hurting places make us careless and reckless. Before we know it
 
—and sometimes after it’s too late
 
—we look around and see that the people we love the most have been wounded in the collateral damage.

And listen. I certainly don’t mean to imply that my own family was so
full of awesomeness that I had to go visit somewhere to see some dysfunction at work. Heavens, no. But the thing about your own family’s dysfunction is that typically you’re so immersed in it that you don’t always see it for what it is. When you’re with someone else’s family, though, you haven’t spent a lifetime conditioning yourself to look past the unhealthier stuff.

(That last paragraph sounds like I have somehow confused myself with Dr. Phil.)

(I do apologize.)

(All those psychology classes that I took in college just ROSE UP AND DEMANDED TO SPEAK.)

Now. As a bit of a history lesson for the young people, I will point out that before there was any such thing as a cell phone, people had to call each other on a telephone that was connected to all the other phones in the house. What this meant was that your privacy extended only as far as your parents allowed it, and also, your parents did not care one iota about your privacy. They could pick up the phone at any second and (1) listen in on your conversations, (2) tell you to get off the phone, or (3) some combination of 1 and 2.

Maybe that’s why one particular phone call from Kim stands out so much in my memory. I was a sophomore in high school, and she was a freshman, and one Wednesday night she called and asked if I could come over right away. At the time the driving age was fifteen in Mississippi, and please know that now that I am an adult, I share in your early driving-age horror. Anyway, I was standing in the kitchen when she called, and as I started to respond to her story, the tone of my voice got my mama’s attention. Mama stopped cleaning up the kitchen, and as I tried to create some privacy by stretching the phone cord into the dining room (Here’s another fun fact, kids: phones had cords. And the only people who had phones in their cars were detectives on TV shows.), Mama followed me step for step. Her maternal radar was pinging like crazy
 
—and for mighty good reason.

It took Kim all of about fourteen seconds to break the news: Bill had gone to rehab.

Keep in mind that back then the whole idea of rehab (or “treatment,” as some people called it) was mysterious and vague
 
—something that seemed reserved for rock stars or characters on
ABC Afterschool Specials
. I don’t think I’d ever known anyone in real life who had gone away to deal with an addiction.

But that night on the phone, Kim told me how a series of events had convinced Bill that he couldn’t get better on his own. Bill finally realized that he was desperate for some intervention. Evelyn had driven him to Jackson late that afternoon, and since she wouldn’t be home until very late that night, Kim called to see if I could spend the night so she wouldn’t be by herself while she waited for her mama.

Of course my parents said yes
 
—they didn’t want Kim to be alone and understood why she wanted to be at her own house
 
—so I hopped in my burnt sienna 1978 Chevrolet Impala (jealous much?) and drove those three miles that I’d traveled hundreds of times before.

Everything was the same.

Everything was different.

If the
Afterschool Specials
had prepared me for anything, it was that my time at Kim’s house that night was going to be filled with all manner of earnest conversation. Kim had never been much of a crier, so I didn’t really anticipate that there would be tears, but I imagined that she’d need some encouragement. I felt certain that I would need to comfort her with some very deep thoughts
 
—perhaps even a brief reading from the Psalms.

Oh, I was going to Be There for Her. Yes, I was.

But once I walked into Kim’s house and we worked through a few initially awkward moments of “So, how about that rehab business?” it became crystal clear that there was one very valuable lesson that the
Afterschool Specials
hadn’t taught me: when a loved one finally acknowledges a struggle and bravely asks for help, it feels like
relief
more than anything else. It feels like
hope
. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be uncertainty and difficulty in the process, but, oh have mercy, there is the most glorious reality in the wake of it all: it is
forward progress
.

Kim and I didn’t say that out loud, of course. We were fourteen and fifteen years old, for heaven’s sake. What we said out loud was more along the lines of this:

“So, are you, like,
okay
? Because we can, like, go to, like, Wendy’s, and get, like, a Frosty if you’re not.”

“Like, I think I’m fine? Because I’m, like,
sad
, but, like, in a good way, you know?”

Feel free to memorize our conversation so that you can call it to mind when you’re in a situation where you need to offer someone a little encouragement.

We ended up not going to Wendy’s after all. I had a poetry portfolio due in English the next day, so I really needed to manufacture some Deep Thoughts and then put them to paper in the form of loosely connected sentence fragments. Kim couldn’t get the Prince song “4 the Tears in Your Eyes” out of her head (it was 1985, y’all) (Prince was epic), and eventually we started making up motions to the lyrics.

     
Long ago, there was a man

     
Change stone to bread with the touch of his hand

     
Made the blind see and the dumb understand

     
He died for the tears in your eyes.

I mean, it wasn’t a John Wesley hymn or anything, but now that I think about it, it sure did put the focus where focus was due.

Everything was different.

Everything was the same.