Bedtime Stories

And that's how the Indians won back their land, my daddy finished, now close your eyes and go to sleep.

The underdog always won in my daddy's bedtime stories, good villains overcoming tragically flawed heroes was a staple of my imagination and he catered to it when he storied me sleep. There were tales of cowboys and Indians,
knights and dragons, good kings and bad. No Cinderella stories for me, no fairy princess awakened by a true love's kiss - my world was far more black and white and real. He would finish the story, turn out the light and then I would hear his footsteps going down the stairs. Sometimes quiet followed, more often an argument broke out and there would be muffled shouting and tears - he was not an easy man to provoke but my mother was drunkenly persistent and never satisfied until she thought she had won. He was prone to giving in to maintain a tenuous peace, almost never seeing the harm in refusing to fight back. He hated taking sides and it was far less trouble and strife to let her have her way. He was too often snared between his wife and his children, forced to try and arbitrate a solution that satisfied no one, to mediate in what had become a merciless war - if the noose became too tight, he fled for the safety of work, drained and out of words. Inflamed by this desertion, my mother would blame us for driving him away, stagger up the stairs and drink herself into oblivion.

Bless the peacemakers, the Bible says, for they shall be called the children of God. I saw little evidence of this growing up. It seemed to be that peacemakers only lost on all sides and that every small victory was temporary at best. The pretense of family was fragile and transparent, held together by the social stigma of divorce and shame.
Even with my imagination, I couldn't conjure up the image of a time when my parents might have been young and happy and in love - it was a foreign thought in a unfamiliar language, almost an obscenity.

My grandmother, widowed and living a solitary life that seemed to please her, blamed herself. My daddy blamed his own failings. My brothers and I blamed our mother for the foolish decision to have children in the first place.
No one blamed the forbidden word of alcoholism.

The house on Lake Street, a modest white two story with black shutters, a fenced backyard and a maple tree suitable for climbing, kept its secrets and its stories. It invited no one in, preferring to stand and wait, perhaps hoping to become a home. One by one, we grew and made our escapes - my mother died, my daddy remarried,
the children moved on and new children moved in. It pleased me to think that different children would be hearing different bedtime stories, that the house had been given a fresh coat of paint, a facelift, and a second chance.
Every house deserves a shot at becoming a home, the neglected ones most of all.