Our first summer on the river arrived in fits and starts. One stellar day we strapped on bathing suits and splashed around and then came a week of cold rain during which one of our co-workers brought his canoe for us to use and we let it lay there tempting us gathering puddles. And though we had lived there for nearly five months it still felt like a summer house, an impermanent place. Derek still had his storage in the garage of his old house. Andee spent her summer days at her aunt’s with her seemingly housebound cousins, watching TV and complaining of boredom, and Derek picked her up every day like school was still in session.
“I think Ann has a new boyfriend,” Derek said one day, “She is never there when I pick up Andee.” Diplomatically, the kid said nothing.
Then one Friday Derek came home late and closed himself in the bathroom. Andee was with her mother and I looked forward to an evening of stress-free dinner. I asked what took him so long. As far as I knew Derek had only stopped by his old house to dig something from his storage in the garage. I tried not to pry, since we already had the argument that he couldn’t trust his old roommate Nathan with his stuff however secure Derek thought he set his booby traps. I had a feeling my prophesies had come to pass and now struggled with the temptation to remind him that he should have listened to me in the first place.
“What a tangled web we weave…”Derek mused mysteriously when he emerged and wandered mutely to the kitchen. After ten more minutes of uncharacteristic silence I lost my reserve.
“You need to get your stuff out of that house,” I repeated myself.
“Yes!” he said with a resolve that actually sounded authentic. “Tomorrow we start looking for a storage unit.”
“So the lock “broke?”” I said in quotes.
“No, it’s worse, Nathan is Ann’s new boyfriend.” He described how he found Ann’s car at the house when he got there. “Ann was cooking up some Top Ramen and sweeping the kitchen floor, playing house. She looked real skinny.”
I wasn’t expecting that and asked, “Where was Andee?”
“She was sitting alone in her old room, playing with her old toys.”
“Didn’t Nathan have a girlfriend?” Not to mention kids with said girlfriend.
“They broke up again, and she took the girls to her parents’ house.”
Derek had mentioned how Nathan and his girlfriend tended to have violent fights, during which Derek would take Andee out for ice cream. When they returned, his girlfriend would have left, and she would stay gone for a few weeks, though she always came back. I also know that Ann and Nathan had been ‘friends.’ When Ann heard about Derek and I at the beginning of our relationship, she had shown up at their house with a gun looking for Derek. Nathan had to talk her down. All this was relayed on speaker phone while Derek sat snug and safe at my house. Nathan had called her a ‘crazy bitch’ during that phone call. I wondered what had changed.
“Did he ever get another job?” I asked.
“No,” Derek said, “and I don’t think he’s just selling weed anymore because there were a bunch of tweekers there. Not stoner types. Ann was really skinny,” he said again. ” She was just sweeping the kitchen floor and humming to herself the whole time I was there…”
Though nobody could argue this development as a good thing, it did have a number of positive results:
- Derek rented a storage unit and officially moved out of that house within a month.
- He stopped arguing that I set my standards too high for Andee and instead started encouraging her to live up to what I considered low standards for someone half her age.
- In an effort to reduce the time spent with Ann and Nathan, Derek started planning more activities for Andee, and Ann willingly relented her days, spending less and less time with her.
- I became more interested in leading by example.
Though I considered her Aunt’s house a bad environment with the abundance of loafer cousins hanging around, now, Andee started talking about moving back into her old room, being a sister to Nathan’s little girls, and other such doomed fantasies. It was summer though and she still needed a place to be during workdays and she still spent them at her aunt’s. Derek reported that Ann’s car was rarely there when he went to pick her up, and she said her mom was working different hours these days.
We tried to make our home the ‘normal’ house. We planted potted vegetables on the porch, Derek got the hot tub working and we started canoeing once the weather got nice. Lastly, we enrolled Andee in swimming lessons.
When she came home, Andee always wanted to jump in the river, but this involved numerous security measures. She strapped on her life jacket, and Derek set a loop of floaters off the back deck that set the parameters for her. He also tethered an inner tube to the deck into which she would jump. Then Derek would watch her, throw noodles at her or maybe even jump in and splash her. He would swim around her as she kicked at him, and when done, he would pull her inner tube in by the string and pluck her out of the water. Watching this I thought of all the potential exercise wasted on Andee’s part. So one day, when Derek was off working or something and she asked to go in the water I asked her to go in without the inner tube so she could swim around a little bit. She looked at me and said, “but I don’t know how to swim.”
News to me, I confronted Derek when he got home.
“Andee told me that she doesn’t know how to swim.”
“Yeah.”
“You told me she did.”
“When did I do that?”
I thought about it and rephrased my statement, “While looking for floating homes you told the landlords that she swims like a fish.”
“Of course, they wouldn’t let a kid who didn’t know how to swim live on the docks. But you’re right, she needs to take swimming lessons.”
I found swimming lessons available through the community center out by her Aunt’s house and also conveniently near Derek’s mother’s apartment. The available classes were on her mother’s weeknights so I thought it might be easy for her to go to and fro. Instead, her mother just opted to give up those weeknights and let us drive across town to pick her up.
The swim lessons provided some insight into why Andee had such a limited exposure in life. Nobody wanted to drive her to or pick her up, Derek complained that it was a pain in his ass, and when the class stint ended nobody answered me when I asked if we should sign her up for the next step class. It occurred to me that while other parents planned their lives around their kids, Andee was an afterthought to hers, like a cat who they pet if she rubs up against their legs, which explained why she went to such extremes to get attention. For this reason, I too found her an annoyance, the exact reason why I never wanted kids, yet the necessary price for a relatively convenient life.
One Sunday morning Derek had been out running errands when he called me at home. “I’m bringing Andee back with me,” he said.
It was her mother’s weekend and usually we would not see Andee again until much later in the day, after dinner at least, but his voice sounded like she sat beside him and he didn’t want her to hear what he had to tell me so I didn’t ask. A few minutes later the two of them arrived carrying luggage and sleeping bags.
“Hey, what’s up?” I said not inquisitively.
“My aunt kicked my mom out.” Andee said without any emotion.
I felt compelled to hug her. “I’m sorry,” I said.
She shrugged her shoulders, “it happens.”
After she settled in, Derek and I went for a paddle and he gave me the lowdown. “Turns out that for the last three Andee weekends, Ann went MIA. She would dump Andee with the cousins and then go out saying she was working weird hours. Debbie called me about an hour ago telling me to pick up Andee before Ann got there because she was kicking her out. When I got there, Debbie and Ann were on the front lawn surrounded by all of Ann’s stuff, Debbie was holding Ann by the hair with one hand and punching her with her other hand screaming, ‘you are a terrible mother,’ with Andee standing right there.”
The situation degenerated rapidly. Ann moved in with Nathan, took Andee over there on her weekdays but the next one of her weekends she didn’t show up. Her phone only went to the default voicemail, not too unusual since she would only buy prepaid phones and often ran out of money. The next day she came to pick up Andee and told Derek that she and Nathan had been arrested at a traffic stop. “It was only a little pot,” she claimed, though even in the days before legalization in Oregon the punishment for pot amounted to losing your stash. Nathan was sentenced to prison for three months. She then left with Andee to spend what was left of the weekend at Nathan’s house.
“Lots of people go to jail,” Andee said when she came back. “It doesn’t mean they are bad people.”
Derek agreed with her. “You’re right, you don’t want to judge people for their mistakes.”
“But sometimes mistakes are caused by a lack of good values or judgement and you don’t want to get mixed up with people with bad values or who make bad decisions or else you could be the one who gets hurt,” I had to interject.
“Uncle Berk goes to jail all the time,” she said. “And he’s my favorite uncle.”
I looked at Derek. “Ann’s brother,” he told me.
The situation only took a few weeks to get more ridiculous. Andee came home after a weeknight at her mom’s telling us that her mom needed some time off. She had moved out of Nathan’s house and now slept in her car in the truck stop parking lot. From Andee we learned that her mom ran into Nathan’s ‘ex’ girlfriend when visiting him at the prison. She then checked his phone history, (she had his phone since her’s died and he wasn’t using it) and found messages dating back throughout their relationship, arranging to meet when Ann was at work.
This all came to pass Labor Day weekend, when filling out the paperwork for school. We decided that, as her only address now, Andee would move to the school near us, and we would have more oversight and responsibility.