Rain Falls by Kelli Jae Baeli

Author:Kelli Jae Baeli [Baeli, Kelli Jae]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lesbian Literati Press
Published: 2014-01-13T23:00:00+00:00

Relieved that her mother was not in the kitchen when she made her way to the basement stairs, Tegan began the slow descent, equal parts thankful for the crutches and loathing them. She needed to lie down for a while before dragging her bags from the car.

The basement door, though, was locked. She didn’t know this until she had painstakingly traversed the stairs down to the lower-level door. Crutching her way painfully back up the stairs, she found her mother at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette and leafing through the National Enquirer.

“Why is the basement locked?”

“The new tenant probably didn’t want you barging in.”

Tegan felt her carotid artery throbbing in her neck. “New tenant? What are you talking about?”

“You’ve been gone for almost a month. It’s not like you’re paying rent, Tegan. I needed the money.” She watched her mother draw on the cigarette, and thump the ash in the tray, missing with a few flakes that drifted down onto the table. The table that was piled with unopened mail, dirty dishes and unidentifiable dried food stains.

“And so you’re just putting me out in the street?”

“Well, have you been out in the street this last month? You look well-fed and dry. Maybe you could just go back there.”

I’d love to, but I can’t. “That was temporary, Mom. It was a sort of writer’s retreat…I was working on my book.”

“Well now, I guess you’d better work on finding your own place.”

“Mom. How am I going to do that without a place to stay?”

“You can sleep on the sofa until you find a place. I’m not heartless, for fuckssake.”

How does one define heartless? Tegan thought. Was it the way India had trouble showing affection to anyone except Quasar and her dead father? Or was it a woman who would rent a room out from under her disabled daughter?

Joan Crawford-Lowry lived up to her namesake, though Tegan had never written a tell-all memoir about her abusive mother. Mommie Dearest pretty much covered it. Tegan could have put her own name on the cover of that book. “I can’t believe you did this…”

“I can’t keep supporting you.”

It was never clear to Tegan why her mother felt she had been supporting her, since she had her disability money and the royalties, bought her own food, helped with utilities. At some point, she knew her father sent money for that purpose, but the first time she discovered the envelope addressed in her father’s handwriting, her mother appeared and snatched the mail out of her hand. She should have hidden the envelope and checked the mail every day, but trips up the stairs were exercises in endurance and pain-management.

Finally, after months of this went on, Tegan became resentful, after she never saw a dime of the money she knew her father must have continued to send. So Tegan had begun to horde her own money, refusing to pay her mother the rent she demanded.

“Where’s my stuff, Mom?” Please don’t say you threw it out.

“In the garage. And I didn’t enjoy having to pack up all your shit, mind you.

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