Chapter Five

And then there's mom. You know when mom shows up because the volume goes up too. She's a talker and she always has something to say. It doesn't matter what the topic is, with mom it deserves a full and complete exploration. I think that explains a lot about the strays she's always brought home from her job. Even though they've been a varied bunch, and this stretches back as long as I can remember, must have been forty or more in that time, they all had that one thing in common. They were talkers. Most of them were fast talkers too, like mom, although they didn't all have as much to say. Maybe it's because my dad is just the opposite - a slow talker and a long talker. Dad will take all day to get around to the point, if he ever even gets there. He just likes to "take it slow" (one of his favorite expressions).

It works like a charm with customers, who love the attention he gives them. Most of his job consists of hanging around and chatting. These people come back again and again, and do all of their music business with dad. The customer is always right, the customer is always king, the customer is what it's all about. Dad repeats these mantras every opportunity he gets, and it works. You can't argue with success. You can't even argue with my dad, which drives my mother crazy sometimes. He's just so agreeable, and mom likes a good fight every now and then.

She gets them with her strays. These are young people, anywhere from fourteen to twenty-four or thereabouts, who are down and out on their own. Sometimes they come from troubled families. Sometimes they have no family at all. A lot of them are runaways but just as many are just out of luck, got no job, got no home, got no one to give them anything, not even the time of day. Our house always has an extra kid or two or three staying there. I don't have any actual brothers or sisters but I've had a ton of temporary siblings. Most of them I haven't cared for very much. There's been a lot of stealing, a lot of lying. They use us, especially my mom, but she doesn't care. She knows it's coming.

"It's my job to give them a chance", she says. "It's their job to take it".

And they do take. They're good at that. Boy or girl, woman or man, fast talkers every one of them, they sit down to dinner and they eat. They make some excuse and they leave before they might have to do a thing like dishes. They make a mess of their room and sneak out at night. They act like mom is their mom. They yell at her and apologize. They cry on her shoulder then steal money from her purse. This one girl, Rita, stole one of my guitars and tried to sell it to my dad at the store! She didn't realize, didn't recognize the man at the counter was the same man who'd just made her breakfast that morning. These were not the smartest people in the world.

I was pretty used to it. My mom never bothered to ask my dad if it was okay if she brought home another stray, and he never let on that it did. Bother him, I mean. The chaos at home was just another good reason to spend more time at the store. At home mom had her rules, and the strays ignored them at their peril. One of the rules, you already know. Peace and quiet. If they stray made too much noise they were gone.

"I don't ask for much", she would yell at them, "just a little peace and quiet when I get home".

"You're not my mother", they'd yell back. There would be a brief scene, sometimes with things being thrown or trashed, and then the stray was gone for good. This has happened so many times, it's just predictable. There were only two or three strays that stuck and stayed awhile. Those were good kids. I even liked them. They still write letters to mom every now and then, and she is so proud of that. Two or three (I'll make it three, counting Morris, because he really tried hard even though he's back in jail again) out of maybe forty isn't the greatest winning percentage in history, but for my mom it's total vindication. She'll never give up, never stop trying, never lose hope, never fear for the worst always hope for the best, is what she says. It's never a surprise when she drags on in from the cold. This last time it was another fast talker, another part time charmer, an older kid, mid twenties, a hot-headed, scrawny and scraggly loser who went by the chipper name of Bobby O'Bannon.