Almost Brown by Charlotte Gill

Author:Charlotte Gill [Gill, Charlotte]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

How does an epiphany occur? In our world, not as a thunderclap, but like an avalanche waiting to let go.

One day our mother decided to move in closer, to finally get down and dirty with the particulars she’d been too overwhelmed to truly examine, the ones she’d always sensed were there. During her investigations, she found out that her nemesis had a name, but it wasn’t Candace or Linda or Stephanie. In the end it was American Express, the little green plastic card with its trusty helmeted centurion, which in her case was like an express ticket to somewhere interesting, all right. Our father never left home without it.

One day my mother’s eye fell upon a credit card statement whose left-hand column of entries contained a puzzle of unknown names, places, and things. And on the right-hand side, a dizzying cascade of digits and zeros all the way down to a vertigo-inducing number at the bottom line. She pulled at this thread, and before long the rest unraveled. The initial discovery sent her down a forensic accounting wormhole, and if her stomach had dropped at the first sight of dollar signs it continued to free-fall with each page. Billing cycle by billing cycle, each statement she peeled back revealed new layers of intrigue. She added it all up forward and backward and found that our father had spent an eye-popping amount of money, had blown his way through their hard-earned reserves and then some. And then to really frost the cake, he’d enthusiastically splurged some more.

An awareness that had once been amorphous now became concrete. All the tumblers aligned and clicked into place. Our spontaneous, fun-loving, adventure-seeking father, who lacked any sense of fiscal restraint or limit, would keep going unchecked until he drove the family wagon over the cliff—he was well on the way to that end—unless she did something about it. And finally, once she registered this hazardous teetering on the compromised edge, it was no longer a question of marital inconvenience or personal forbearance or asking what Jesus would do. She hadn’t yet reached the bottom of the stack, but that’s when she stopped counting.

After that, she leaped into action. She triggered a chain of tactical maneuvers, a deployment of sorts, whose speed and precision made our dad’s clumsily concealed indulgences look like a clown car circus act. My mother extracted herself, and us by extension, from the precarities of her most important relationship by staging a midnight coup, an operation she carried out with special-ops-level stealth and covert logistics. Overnight, she called a locksmith to attend to the front door of our house, which was seldom even closed during warmer months and had never really required a key. We knew from our own wayward moments that when our mother crossed her arms and pursed her lips, you could beg and cry all you wanted, but there was no penance, no crawling back or any kind of saying sorry. There was just no talking her out of it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.