Work In Progress 11

I guess it is time to tell how this leg of the journey concluded.One day I was hanging out upstairs.Yeah I know,after all that talk about the weird sounds coming from up there and actually seeing movement ,always in my peripheral vision.The room that actually creeped me out was the one with the magenta wallpaper.I always made sure the two doors to that room were locked if I was up there.I was a kid. What did I know of the mechanics of it all?You'd be surprised what you can get used to.Anyway my brother came to talk to me about a month before school was out.He told me in this the 14th year of life that we were leaving when school got out.Mom was leaving dad.No she's not,my reply. Yes she is leaving him for a man she met named Sawdust.Now I know your lying,I said,thinking we were playing the "Oh really" game.It was true.I sat in the hallway outside my parents room many nights thereafter and heard this conversation.I'm leaving you Cecil.No your not Betty,your just going through the change.More than once this played out with variations.This is how my mom did the old rug trick on dad. The day we left was my dad's birthday.I did not know this till years later .My mom told him when he got home that night she had a big surprise for him.My sister Mary and I were told to pack that day as my Mom completed the sale of the restaurant she she had aquired.Man she could cook!We had packed every bouquet of plastic roses my dad had ever bought her,but nothing of real value.Hurriedly we did the grab and go and hit the road.My dad's surprise ?A note on the ironing board standing in the middle of the chaos that said I have left and took the kids .Don't try to find us.I heard that he snapped and I guess he did for a time because he did find her and mailed a letter to her written on the packaging of Prince Albert cigarette papers.The writing was microscopic.She told me 20 years later She knew she had made a mistake two weeks into her adventure but was too proud to admit it.The night he died 16 years later I walked in to find her crying and she snapped ,"You think I didn't love him .I had 10 kids with that man."I had to leave to go to carpentry school so I said no problem here and left.The old man who ran the school through the local union told me to come into his office when I told him what I had just learned. He told me to lock his office door and look up in the ceiling for his bottle.We drank and talked about my home area which he knew of.A month later I cried. Violently.