Uncle Dan
My deadbeat father abandoned my mother when I was two years old, leaving her with a pile of bills, a ten-year old car with 170,000 miles on it, and a daughter that he never wanted. My mother was already working as a server in a restaurant, but took a second job working in a bar to try and cover the rent of a crappy little one-bedroom apartment and raise her daughter alone. After six months, we were evicted and she ended up moving back to the small farmhouse where she grew up with her older brother Dan and younger sister, Meryl.
Uncle Dan was a confirmed, lifelong bachelor who did construction and general contracting work while living out of a camper that he towed around with his work truck to go from job to job. He was three years older than my mother and a huge bear of a man. He was 6'5" tall with a deep, low voice and a bellowing laugh. I used to think he was a giant when I was little. Underneath his rough exterior was a man with a heart of gold who cared about everyone, especially his younger sisters. As I grew older, I envied his nomadic lifestyle.
Aunt Meryl was married, but didn't have any children. From what I heard when no one knew I was listening, she married her husband for his money and a ticket out of the small-town life she grew up in and hated. We never saw her very much, but when we did, she was always so well-dressed and manicured, that I thought she was a movie star or something. When I was old enough to notice, I saw that her well-coiffed exterior was just a poor cover for the snobbish, icy person underneath.
My mother was a tall, quiet, tired-looking woman who worked her ass off to give everything to her only child. Her own childhood wasn't easy, but she learned the value of hard work at an early age and never felt comfortable just sitting around. Despite a diet consisting primarily of fried food and cheap carbohydrates from the restaurants and bars where she worked, she remained wiry and strong. When I saw pictures of her in her younger days, I couldn't help but admire how beautiful she was. In middle age, she was still attractive and had a nice figure, but her eyes and face made her look years older. She was kind and generous to a fault, even though she had almost nothing to her name. I seldom heard her complain about anything or disparage anyone, not even my absent father. My mother carried herself with an elegant grace that made me think of how a princess would move about. When I got older, I would describe her as "classy". She was my idol.
When my grandparents died, the old family home passed to their three children, none of whom wanted to be saddled with fixing it up. It was a small, simple wood frame house that had been slowly falling apart. It had three bedrooms and one bath, limited electrical distribution and no central air-conditioning or heating. Heat in the winter was provided by the large fireplace in the living room and a pot-bellied stove that was moved from the kitchen to my grandparents bedroom at some point in the distant past.
The structure was generally sound, but still needed some serious repairs, including replacing the sagging roof and repairing or replacing most of the wood plank floors. After our eviction from the apartment, my mother had nowhere else to go and Uncle Dan suggested moving into their old home. He had been trying to fix things up when he had time and had just finished reinforcing the roof and replacing the shingles to keep the rain and weather out. Mom and I moved in with her meager possessions and she started sprucing the place up as best she could while working days at a small department store and nights at a local bar and grill.
Over the next year, Uncle Dan brought his small team of framers to tear down the interior walls and redesign the house to provide more usable and comfortable rooms. He did all the finish trim work and I marveled at the intricate woodwork he created. He combined spaces to go from three bedrooms to two, and he added a half-bath in addition to replacing the electrical panel and putting in a lot more electrical outlets and ceiling lights throughout the house. Mom showed me pictures of what the place looked like in those early days, including several of me as a three and four-year old girl wearing my uncle's hard hat and carrying around a small hammer or some other tool as I "helped" the grown-ups.
After getting the house into a more livable condition for Mom and me, Uncle Dan went back on the road to work and showed up sporadically to fix anything that was broken or to resume the long-term rehab of their parents home. Without a mortgage or rent to pay and almost non-existent utility bills, Mom was able to scrape by at a level somewhere between abject poverty and almost comfortable. I thought it was the best life ever.
Growing up, I had few friends in school. This was due, in part, because I was rough around the edges and viewed as "white trash" by the kids who lived in more modern, suburbia with pretty houses, nicely landscaped and manicured lawns, white picket fences, and all the electronics that their parents could buy. Our home didn't even have a TV because cable service didn't extend out to our part of the county and over-the-air broadcasts contained few programs of interest. I spent most of my time outside and went to school dressed in clothes more suitable for working in a warehouse or farm. I never thought about using make-up except for a brief Gothic phase I went through, and even then, my make-up was sparse and stark.
I was never very socially out-going, but did develop a few close friendships with other girls who were similarly ostracized in school. Most of my life, I grew up with only my mother around and intermittent visits by Uncle Dan, when his work allowed or a crisis at home called. I had few social skills and somehow ended up with more of Uncle Dan's gruff attitude than my mother's more engaging demeanor.
In middle school, I "bloomed" early, which captured the immediate attention of several pimple-faced boys trying to cope with their own raging hormones. For the first time, boys started paying attention to me, but I quickly found out that they were more interested in whether I would "put out" or not. Since I steadfastly refused their physical advances, my extracurricular social life quickly tapered out, reinforcing my earlier solitude except for my few girlfriends.
Starting high school, I was a tall, spindly girl with long dark hair that was usually in a ponytail. I dressed more like a tomboy than a girl and hung out with three or four other outcast girls. They, like me, were viewed as coming from the wrong side of the tracks. By the time I was a sophomore, I had filled out some missing curves and sported a pair of very firm and perky 36C boobs that looked even bigger on my thin frame. To the irritation of some, my tits were the envy of most of the girls in my gym class who saw me changing or in the shower. Out of spite or her own inadequacy, one of my detractors even accused me of having a boob job. I was so naive, I had no idea what she was talking about, but took offense anyway and was ready to punch her out before a friend stopped me.
When I was eighteen, I came home from school one day to find Mom's car and Dan's truck and camper in the side yard. We hadn't seen Dan in several months, so I ran over to the camper and knocked on the door. When no one answered, I opened it and looked inside to find that nobody was there. I went into the house wondering why Mom wasn't at work and found Uncle Dan laying in her bed in obvious pain while Mom flitted around to get him comfortable.
As it turned out, he fell and broke his back on a job site. The break wasn't severe, but it put painful pressure on his spine. He was wearing a hard plastic shell around his torso to stabilize his back and keep him from moving while the inflammation slowly subsided and the cracked vertebrae healed. He wasn't supposed to get up or move around for three months, so he came to stay with us until he recovered.
Mom put him in her bed and said she would sleep on the couch. Whenever Dan visited us, he would usually stay in his camper, but more and more often, opted for our couch because it was more comfortable than the thin, narrow mattress in his trailer. Dan wanted to argue, but given the size of the house, there weren't many options. I told Mom she could use my bed and I'd sleep on the couch, but she wouldn't hear of it, so the matter was unilaterally settled by her.
School was almost over when he arrived for his recuperative stay and I tried to spend as much time at home as I could to look after my uncle so that Mom didn't have to miss work. There was a small ray of light from my uncle's extended visit. He essentially paid rent to Mom to offset any loss of pay from her having to reduce her work hours to take care of him. Once the new schedule settled out, she was home about four hours more each day. When school finally did end, I was pretty much his full-time caretaker, but didn't mind a bit. It gave Mom more time to actually rest at home herself and Uncle Dan's care didn't really take that much time. By then, he had settled into a routine that consisted mostly of reading books, doing crossword puzzles, and running his business from his cell phone. A couple times I surprised him, when I showed up at his doorway and he would hurriedly shut down whatever he was doing on his phone.
