In My Father's House by Fox Butterfield

Author:Fox Butterfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

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For Kathy, living this way had never had severe or painful consequences. But after years of hard drinking and heavy drug use, not to mention the physical and sexual abuse by Rooster, Kathy was having more and more trouble managing her everyday life. Each morning waking up was like living in a thick fog. She now had to wear false teeth because of the ravages of meth, and one day her son Michael stole her dentures. Her dog chewed up another pair. “Some days I just forget where they were,” Kathy said. “I’d put them in my lap and get up, and unless I heard them fall, they’d just drop to the ground or the floor in the car and get lost.” Kathy roared with laughter at these memories. She had been wearing false teeth for two years and had broken or lost so many pairs that she was now trying to glue some back together.

By 2008, with Kathy living in the small trailer, she had seemingly lost almost everything in her life. The probation department had already taken away her rent-subsidized apartment. Her trailer was too small for her furniture and clothes, so she had thrown many of her possessions away. Because of all the probation violations, she lost her Social Security payments as Rooster’s former wife, her only legitimate source of income. “For Kathy there is no need to plan,” said Linda, who stayed close to her, despite, or because of, all their years together with Rooster. “She has no real house, no furniture and no income, so everything is spur of the moment. She is living on the edge. And the funny thing is, it fits Kathy because she never grew up,” Linda said. “She’s real trailer trash.”

It hardly seemed possible, but in August 2008 things got worse. Kathy’s daughter with Rooster, Vickey, and granddaughter Robin, and great-granddaughter, Divinity, were arrested at Kathy’s trailer home in Salem for possession of meth. Vickey, Robin and Divinity had been living out of Vickey’s old Subaru and panhandling at rest stops on Interstate 5 between Salem and Eugene, fifty miles to the south at the bottom of the Willamette Valley. Vickey, who was forty years old, looked like Kathy had when she was younger—very short, very thin, her face still childlike. Vickey often wore a short blue denim jumper over a pink low-cut T-shirt with a Playboy Bunny symbol. She spoke in a little girl’s voice, but in staccato fashion, like rapid bursts of machine-gun fire, so she seemed sweet and manic at the same time, perhaps a consequence of too much meth. Like most of the women in her family, Vickey had numerous arrests, but they were all for petty crime, like shoplifting at a Walmart, or drug possession or speeding. She never got more than a few days in jail.

But when Vickey and Robin were arrested in Kathy’s trailer that August, it meant another probation violation for Kathy—who was not allowed to have drugs at her residence.

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