The Bernice L. McFadden Collection by Bernice L. McFadden

Author:Bernice L. McFadden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2014-02-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

I was still thinking about Delia’s drinking problem when I arrived at Kings County Hospital the next day. She no longer had one, thank God. The hardest thing she drank now was coffee and Pepsi. Delia was the only one of us who had just stopped—no therapy, thirty-day detox, or court order. She just woke up one morning and decided she’d had enough. Delia was the strong one, although it had taken me years to realize that.

She had never really been a drinker, not even socially, but being around Hy-Lo made you do things you would not normally do.

I don’t know when she started, but it wasn’t long before she needed a drink to get her going in the morning and one to settle her down at night.

“You think it’s easy dealing with your father?” she would spit at me every time I walked in on her taking a drink.

Our lives were already hard dealing with one drunk and I wanted to ask her how it would get better with her drinking too. But the alcohol had sharpened her tongue and her patience was wearing thinner each day.

She spent most of her time in bed staring at the television, refusing to take phone calls from the small circle of friends she was able to maintain over the years. When she did happen to answer the phone she lied her way out of a conversation, claiming she was just walking out the door or had only just come in from work.

Our diet had moved from full-cooked meals to TV dinners, Chinese takeout, overcooked burgers and undercooked fries from the diner.

Sunday was the only day she cooked and then it was something that didn’t require a lot of time or energy. Those meals were bland and tasteless and usually ended up in the garbage beneath the tin cans and the plastic bread wrapping.

The bickering and fighting continued, and as nasty and violent as I had thought it was in the past, that was no comparison to what it had now come to.

For years my mother accused my father of seeking his courage from a bottle. If I had not believed that statement, Delia’s transformation would have proven it without a shadow of a doubt.

She no longer backed away from Hy-Lo’s words or his fists. They pounded on each other as often as newlyweds made love. While both of them walked away with battle scars, Delia was the one who took the brunt of the beatings.

Her arms and legs held nasty purple-blue marks that swelled and bulged through her clothes. Her face had been slapped and punched so many times that it started to look lopsided.

Her screams and his heavy breathing broke my sleep as he labored with the strength it took to throw her up against the walls of our apartment.

The Lowe family had become the talk of the building and our neighbors began to look on me with even more pity, if that were possible.

“Pinky said maybe it would be

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