The Last Housewife by Ashley Winstead

Author:Ashley Winstead
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2022-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

Transgressions Episode 705, interview transcript: Shay Deroy, Sept. 9, 2022 (unabridged)

SHAY DEROY: When I was ten years old, my dad left us. It might have happened before then—he might’ve always been leaving—but ten was when I knew. I think it was the worst night of my life. I know that’s strange to say, compared to what happened in college. But when I look back, that night is the dark hole. Just skimming the surface triggers this exquisite pain, like the hurt’s been preserved, living raw under my skin.

JAMIE KNIGHT: Like a festering wound.

SHAY: Sometimes I think it’s a shrine.

JAMIE: To what?

SHAY (clearing throat): You know my dad was in the army.

JAMIE: I used to think it was cool you lived on base.

SHAY: He was deployed a lot, sometimes for months. By the time I was ten, I’d gotten used to it. Dad being gone was normal. He was going to stop traveling once he climbed rank. We used to talk about that a lot: our wonderful future, right around the corner.

The night it happened was about three months into one of his deployments. I was waiting for my mom to come home, sitting alone in our duplex—you remember the one with the crazy wallpaper—doing homework and listening to the neighbors have dinner through the walls. I was determined to catch my mom as soon as she came home because Mrs. Carroll had stopped me in the cafeteria that day and told me I couldn’t go to the lock-in. I needed my mom to fix it.

JAMIE: Lock-ins were the only fun thing to do in school. Why couldn’t you go?

SHAY: They made a rule that year that students could only participate if their parents volunteered a certain number of hours in the PTA.

JAMIE: Huh. I bet my mom was all over that. She was queen of the PTA.

SHAY: I remember.

(Silence.)

JAMIE: Why was your mom out so late? At the shelter?

SHAY: This was before that. In elementary, she worked retail—Payless, then Walmart, too. Looking back, her getting a second job should’ve been a clue something had changed.

JAMIE: What happened when she came home?

SHAY: She was tired. She came home with her clothes wilted, carrying weight in her shoulders. It made me nervous right off the bat. I should’ve listened to my instincts. But instead, I followed her. That annoyed her. She stopped in the living room and snapped, “What?”

I said, “Mrs. Carroll says I’m not allowed to go to the lock-in because you haven’t done your PTA hours.”

I knew immediately I’d said the wrong thing. She slammed her purse on the coffee table and said, “Is that right? I dropped the ball, huh?”

Her tone was the one she used whenever she argued with my dad—Nina, the self-righteous martyr. I said, “I’m the only person who can’t go.”

She rolled her eyes and said, “I’m trying to make rent, Shay, so we’re not sleeping in the street. Trying to keep you in clothes when you grow like a weed. I have to take care of you all by myself, since your father decided we weren’t worth his time.

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