Keeping Families Together
You can say what you want about my father, but he was a good man.
He drove a truck, you know, long distance, so that he wouldn't come for weeks at a time. He usually worked in the western states, but that didn't matter because he was still gone. My father could even be in the same state that we lived in and still be hundreds of miles away. He complained about his schedule a lot, but the best he could get from his company was a schedule where he drove for three weeks, followed by one week off. He complained about that too, because sometimes his days off started when he was clear across the country. It would take him three days just to get back home. He hated it, but we needed the money. We always needed the money.
My mom worked as a nurse at a hospital, and she had it bad sometimes, too. She was one of those odd people that actually cared about her job. She did her job so well, that people on the other shifts didn't clean up after themselves. Often, they would bullshit away for their entire shifts and not do a fucking thing. My mom would come in and do her job and everybody else's job, too. She got rewarded for that, when the hospital put her on third shift. That's right; they made things worse for her, not better. If she didn't get her work done on time, she was the one that got bitched at, and not the people that hadn't done their job before her.
You can call what happened in our house fate or whatever.
I didn't even know what was happening at the beginning. My father would come home for a week. For the first day or two he would fight with my mother, because she didn't have any days off anytime soon, and because she had to sleep all day and work all night. They hardly went out. They hardly did anything fun.
I had my own shit to worry about. I'd been trying to balance out a schedule where I could go to college here in town, while at the same time helping my mother out with my two little brothers. It was a bitch for me too, because I was the one dropping off and picking up my brothers from school. I couldn't work, because who would take care of my brothers when my mom was sleeping or after she left for work? Everything was fucked, and none of us knew how to fix it.
My little brothers had it easy. They went to school, and when they came back home they ran all over the house without any real care in the world.
I remember one night, when my father was sitting in the living room, after my mother had gone to work. He was just sitting by himself, all alone and watching TV. I'd already put the boys to sleep, and I went to sit in the living room with him.
I guess he needed someone to talk to, because he started rambling. He complained about how things were going. At the same time he kept saying how things were going to get better. Maybe he was trying to convince himself about that. He said he hated being two or three states away from home, especially when there was something going on in the house. Like when I would fight with my mother, or when the boys would get into trouble at school. I listened, but I didn't have any answers for him.
My father started telling me about how it got so lonely on the road. He would drive hundreds and hundreds of miles every day, for days on end, stopping only once or twice a day to eat and to fill up on gas. He said women truck drivers who were also driving through the western states would sometimes talk to him on the radio. They'd met my father a couple of times, at truck stops, so some of them knew who he was. My father said they had their own little thing going, these women truck drivers. If they saw a guy they liked, another truck driver, they would take him out to dinner or a movie, or buy him presents. The guys that drove trucks did the same to the women that drove trucks, and almost all of them were married. That was how things went on the road, he said. He also told me that he'd never cheated on my mother before, in the whole time they'd been married. If something didn't change in our house, my father said, something might happen out there on the road. I thought about that a lot, that night.
The next day, things should have been better, but they weren't. My mom slept all day. She was supposed to have the next couple of nights off, but she got a call in the afternoon. Somebody from her job had gotten hurt. They would be out for the next few days, and couldn't my mother come in and cover for that person? How screwed up is that, to work in a hospital and end up getting hurt anyway? I don't know if my mom was too afraid of her boss to say no, but then again she was always saying no to my father, wasn't she? Maybe she was just kissing up to her boss, but you can guess what happened. My mother said yes and she got into a big argument with my father. They didn't talk to each other for the rest of the evening. My mother didn't even say goodbye when she left at seven, and she wasn't going to be back until six in the morning. My dad wasn't only going to be home for two more nights and then he was going on the road again.
