Throw me Thursday: Move

This belated Throw me Thursday post is written on behalf of my good friend Rebe who spent yesterday moving from one place in Denver to another. Cheers, Rebe!

We had to get rid of the cat and the dog too before we could move from the house to the duplex.  I don’t know when it happened, just one day I came home from school and Ma said and they were gone.

Sherry liked the cat, she tells me now, but didn’t care for Bear left out on a chain most of the time humping at the legs of neighbor kids.  I liked the cat too, the way he had of skulking about inside the house and being soft.  At the time, we didn’t know the cat came from her.

If you want to know my opinion, and even if you don’t, the “other woman” was a spiteful creature.  She was all bone and nose and pointed boots–hard as a mad cat’s tooth and just as nasty.  Like the day in the car when her kids were pulling pranks in the back seat and she just reached her hand back and tugged hard at her boy’s hair.  Quit by tears.

And she got on her girl for huffing her way up the side of a hill on a camping trip.  I wasn’t huffing and that woman would point it out like she wanted her girl to be me and not her own self and what did I care if the girl had more weight on her than I did, she was good company on weekends.  If they weren’t at Dad’s house I had to figure out what to do.  At least they brought chalk so we could draw in the middle of the black-top road, not that Dad appreciated it.  As soon as we were done he got all huffy himself, as if chalk doesn’t wash off in rain.

Someone told me a while after they split up that she was jealous of me.  It had something to do with the fact that I didn’t get in trouble around them.  Well, why would I want Dad’s wrath to come bubbling up around me, I’d heard enough of that voice to do me.

No, she didn’t stick around like she thought she would.  I don’t know who broke it off, but the way I hear things, it didn’t end well.  One day Dad picked me up and that was it, she and her kids wouldn’t be coming around any more.

That was the end of Smurf cereal in Dad’s house.  Back to pancake breakfasts for me, which was too bad because they kind of made me sick.

Dad joined up with a singles group and did things like shoot horseshoes and sit on benches at the roller rink.  That turned out to be a good thing, he met a woman to marry who understood about girls and cakes and when to back off and let me grow up.  She and I even swapped shoes once or twice.