Normal Family by Chrysta Bilton

Author:Chrysta Bilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

Camarillo

Mental Institution

While I’d been immersed in the drama of junior high school, another drama had been secretly unfolding in my mother’s life. In February 1998, the FTC had filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of Los Angeles against my mother’s employer, Futurenet, claiming the company was a pyramid headhunting recruiting scheme. Though there was no evidence of this, Mom was positive Bill Gates was behind the lawsuit. If people used their television as their monitor, her theory went, then nobody would need his personal computers. Futurenet battled the case in court, and for a year, Mom stayed optimistic, but eventually it became clear that the business and my mother’s latest dream of financial freedom were dead.

Mom was apoplectic at the unfairness of it all. The lawsuit represented, for her, all the injustices of capitalism. She would shout, or cry, and then shout again, irritable at the smallest provocation. Then she’d watch the news, and whatever was happening around the globe was more evidence of what a terrible, horrible world we lived in.

As Futurenet quickly disintegrated, my mother did what she often did when she saw no way out and a terrible financial crash approaching: she decided not to think about it.

Instead, one day she came home with a distraction: a woman named April, who she had met in the audience at one of her motivational talks.

Kaitlyn and I were playing video games on our mother’s bed when she brought April over for the first time, entering the room with a look of excitement as she introduced us to her new “friend.” I observed April’s short black hair, which was styled in a sharp bob, and her plump lips covered in poorly applied maroon lipstick. She had a loud, unsettling laugh. As I took in her appearance—her white leather jacket with rhinestones and tassels and her matching white rhinestone-covered cowboy boots—every intuitive nerve ending in my body set off alarms.

As soon as April left our house that night, I told my mother we needed to sit down for a serious talk.

“I don’t like her,” I said.

“Oh Chrysta, you are so judgmental,” Mom replied. “What’s wrong with April? Tell me. She makes me laugh.”

“I just don’t like her,” I repeated sternly, trying to be intimidating. “You will not date her. Do you understand?”

I watched and felt helpless as the look on my mother’s face said she would not be abiding by my demand.

Mom had been single since Sable, and I preferred it that way. There were too many variables that came with Mom’s relationships. I had no idea that Futurenet had fully crumbled, or that my mother was already running out of the money from the last check that would ever arrive in our mailbox from Futurenet—she hadn’t wanted to worry me, and she certainly didn’t want to say “You were right all along.” Mom’s problem wasn’t making money—she was very clever at finding ways to make money; her problem was keeping it. I suspected that things were amiss, that my mother was in a particularly vulnerable state, and the appearance of this new woman rattled me.

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