As I stepped a bit deeper into our home, I found my mom sitting at the kitchen table. Her chair was facing out into the family room. When she saw me, she sat up straight, her face red, her eyes out of tears. Marcus had left the house already—likely to walk Texas’s serpentine drainage ditches alone and in quiet anger, a habit that would become increasingly common moving forward. I did what I still do when there’s trouble: I took a closer look. I knelt down in front of my mom and gazed into her eyes. But I was unable to recognize her pain. Although I was best at being silent, in this moment I needed words. “What’s wrong?” I asked her.
She looked back with more love than I’d ever seen, and said, “My baby…” Then she took a breath, steeling herself so that what came out next might not sound like the end of our world. “Your daddy has gone away.”
The thing is, he was always going away for work, so what the heck was all the drama about? “Where did he go now?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” That was new. Now I worried. “Someplace else,” she added. Then finally: “He’s not coming back this time, Lancer.”
She was in incredible pain. I could feel it like it was my own. This family she had wanted more than her education, more than becoming a doctor, more than staying close to the mother and siblings she loved had just been ripped in two without warning.
I had to protect her. No one had ever told me that was my job; I’d just known it by instinct since the day I was born. So I said what I thought might help fix things: “He’ll come home…I promise you.” I was already well aware that a promise was a very big deal in our home. My mom and our church had both taught me that “a promise is sacred,” something I still believe today. And right there, at the age of six, I had just made a whopper of a promise.
My mom didn’t have the heart to argue or a clue how to explain what had happened, so she just held me. I didn’t have time for that. I wrestled free and ran into the room that held her craft box and a rocking chair piled high with homemade pillows. I knelt down in front of that chair that only a few years earlier had rocked me to sleep, and I folded my arms, bowed my head, and prayed the way I’d been taught to by all the kind, white-haired Mormon men in our church.
“Dear Heavenly Father,” I said as I began to shake with tears. “Please bring my daddy back home. I promise I will be a good boy. I’ll do my chores. I’ll listen. I’ll do as I’m told. I promise I’ll be the best boy ever if You bring him back to me, and Marcus, and Todd, and my mom. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.”
I let my tears dry and waited for the trembling to stop. Then I made myself get tough. I’d just made promises to my mother and God that were far too weighty for a six-year-old. Only as I look back now can I say with certainty that when I left that room to face my mother in her chair again, I left my childhood behind for good. I was now one of three small boys abandoned by their father with a paralyzed mom. For survival’s sake, it was time to man up.
Weeks later, I was putting warm, freshly washed sheets on my bed when I heard my mom shout for me to grab Todd and run out into the backyard. I could hear a shiver of fear in her voice. That lit up whatever fledgling paternal instincts I had: I grabbed Todd and hit the gas. When I passed our mom in the front hallway, it was clear she was covering up real panic.
“Lancer, whatever happens, no matter what, I don’t want you to come back inside until I’ve come out to tell you it’s safe. Okay?”
I nodded.
“Say ‘okay.’ ”
“Okay.”
She kissed my head and Todd’s, and I ran out back, closing the door behind me. Marcus was already out there. With Todd in my arms, the three of us tucked ourselves into a corner beside the glass door so we could just see inside. We watched our mom walk to the front door on her crutches. Soon we could hear screaming, back and forth, but I didn’t recognize the voice of the man outside. It sounded sick, deranged.
Marcus told me to stay where I was, then ran as fast as he could, jumping the back fence. I sat frozen. Marcus was the eldest, and he knew that came with some responsibility. So I’d like to believe that he wasn’t running away, that he was trying to find help. And I bet that was true, but I never got the chance to see help arrive.
Seconds later, boom! boom! boom! echoed from inside. My ears rang with the frightful sound. My mom began screaming but even that didn’t satiate the monster outside. Then again: Boom! Boom! Boom! Now she started moving away from the door, quickly. With one last colossal boom! the lock burst free in a shower of splinters and the door flew open, smashing into our mother’s steel-braced back and sending her crashing to the floor inside.
And there stood Raul, his eyes blazing. Beneath him, my mother, splayed out on the floor, afraid for her life. But she didn’t scream for help; instead, she screamed for me to run. And I did, Todd gripped in my trembling arms.
That was the last time I would see my father for decades.
* * *
—
Many years later, I found out that my mom had walked in on Raul “laying on top of” my “aunt” Louise the night after our trip to the zoo. Propositions had been made for my mom to join their incestuous dalliance, and when she had denied her good Mormon husband’s desires, he had left a note saying that he was leaving her for good.
Raul would never write us a single letter, call to see if we were alive, send any gifts at Christmas or birthdays—or the child-support checks he would soon be ordered to pay by judges. He never again acknowledged that we existed. As my uncle James had feared but never voiced to my mom, she had likely been Raul’s ticket out of Vietnam. Now that threat was long gone, and so was he. We had no idea where he’d gone, and when I eventually tried to track him down, I couldn’t find him. Decades later, with the help of a private investigator, I finally learned that soon after abandoning us, Raul wed Louise, his first cousin, in Colorado, one of the few states that would allow such a marriage. Step-by-step, he was creeping dangerously close to fundamentalist LDS culture: an officially long-disavowed, slippery slope into incest and polygamy.
* * *
—
Gauging by their reaction to Raul’s misbehaviors, it began to seem to me as if even our mainstream version of the LDS Church blamed only the women for any troubles at home. When my mom had begun to suspect that my father was interested in more than genealogical study with his cousin Louise, she had gone to our church’s bishop for help and guidance. She had hoped he would talk some sense into Raul, or at least play marriage counselor. Instead, he told my mom that in our religion, it was the wife’s responsibility to create a home suitable for her “priesthood holder,” the designation used for the husband or dad. The whole cousin-as-possible-mistress thing didn’t seem to raise the bishop’s alarm. Not yet, at least. For now, he worried more that if Raul was showing interest in other women, there was something my mother was doing wrong, and she’d be wise to change her home environment to suit her priesthood holder.
Hopeful (if not a bit excited), my mom had taken the bishop’s words to heart, and in her floor-length Mormon dress, she’d braved an adult bookstore to purchase The Joy of Sex. It was filled with graphic illustrations of men and women doing all kinds of things with each other’s bodies. But when that book’s lessons didn’t help matters either, she quietly blamed her twisted-up body for Raul’s lack of interest. I wouldn’t learn most of this for many years, but what I could see then was that my mom’s once inextinguishable flame was beginning to dim.
My aunt Josie stayed with us for a time. My mom was especially vulnerable now. It had only been a few years since my grandma Cokie had failed to get to the pills in her heart-shaped locket in time and her real heart had given out for good. Her death still affected my mom deeply. My mom would break into tears when certain songs came on the radio. I would hold her, and she would tell me colorful stories about the strong-willed mother she loved and missed so much. Jo
sie worried that this double loss might permanently break my mom. So Josie took on the role of de facto matriarch of our family. She was a good bit older than my mom, and she became like a grandmother for my brothers and me. I loved Josie then, and I treasure her even more now that I realize what her larger fear was: that the state might swoop in and take her little sister’s boys away if they deemed her physically and emotionally unfit to raise us alone.
Marcus was by far the most injured by Raul’s vanishing act. He would soon fall in with a group of feral neighborhood boys who called the drainage ditches their refuge. And soon he began disappearing too, his new clan discovering cigarettes, shoplifting, and worse. His search for an escape, any escape, had begun, and it would lead my kindhearted big brother down a tragic path of self-destruction.
Me? I had made promises to God and to my mother, and now I was determined to keep them—even if God didn’t seem all that interested in holding up His end of the bargain. With Marcus mostly missing, and my mom out looking for work, I was tasked with caring for Todd, who was still too young to do much but fall down. I loved this new role, and I set out to play it to perfection as well, so that God might finally give a damn and force my father to return in a hailstorm of apologies. But aspirations toward perfection come with endless lists of responsibilities. My chores would never be done now. There’d be little time left for play, or to paint red gorillas black, because at the age of six, when Josie returned to her own home, I became the undisputed man of our house.
III
In the months that followed our familial upheaval, I started finding small envelopes in the mail hidden among the overdue bills. No stamps, no return addresses. My mom opened the first with caution. Inside was a stack of cash, just enough to pay for our mortgage and food for the month, enough so we didn’t have to apply for the government assistance that would have alerted the authorities that three boys were living in perilous circumstances with a paralyzed single mom who’d never driven a car or held a job. We later figured out that those envelopes had been placed in our mailbox by the same bishop who had failed to intervene months before. To his credit, since Raul’s incestuous affair had been confirmed, this bishop had worked to ensure that Raul was excommunicated from the mainstream Mormon Church. Now that same church would quietly protect us from government intrusion until we could get on our feet.
Many of my friends who grew up outside of our Southern corner of the country, my arguably more progressive friends, are quick to dismiss organized religion as purely repressive or entirely outdated. But the honest-to-God truth is that despite its faults and blind spots, our church was the only family we had in San Antonio after Raul left. In the months and years to come, in ways big and small, the Christian values, tight-knit community, and care of our mainstream LDS Church were what we depended on.
When danger drew near for my Mormon forefathers, crossing the American frontier in the 1800s, they’d circle their wagons for strength and safety. Over a century later, when the rank and file of our congregation learned that our family was in danger, they “circled their wagons” around us. Without them, my mom likely would have lost us three boys to foster care. That would have killed her. And our family isn’t unique in this respect. Putting arguments of scripture aside for a moment, there are many places in our world where a church isn’t just the house of the Lord, but also the power center of community. To be barred from the chapel is to be excluded from society’s protections; to be allowed in is an earthly kind of deliverance. We were lucky to still be in our church’s embrace.
* * *
—
The Mormon Church’s aid also helped buy us time so that Aunt Josie’s daughter, my cousin Debbie, could source hand controls for the goliath Malibu Classic that Raul had abandoned in our driveway. Debbie was just a bit younger than my mom and tough as nails. She came to town and rounded up ten-year-old Marcus. “Grab yer screwdrivers, Marco, ’n get yer tail out to the driveway.”
Marcus knew better than to disobey Debbie. He climbed down onto the Malibu’s floorboards to help secure clamps to the gas pedal and brake. Then he and Debbie twisted, bolted, and secured chrome-and-black-rubber hand controls to the steering column. That day, Marcus discovered he loved working on cars. Debbie was convinced that these controls would allow my mom to become independently mobile. Like her father, James, Debbie didn’t think there was anything she could do that Anne couldn’t. She was determined to teach my mom how to use her new hand controls so she could get a license, and then a job.
Disability aside, my mom was a terrible driver. It didn’t help that this car was far too big for her. It was like turning a cruise ship just to get out of the driveway, and Marcus had to stack up all of our rocking chair pillows on the driver’s seat so she could see over the steering wheel. Beyond size challenges, it turns out our mom also had a lead hand and a surprising need for speed. So for the next week, Debbie and Marcus would come home from their amateur driving lessons with my mom looking like ghosts on life support.
Month after month, Anne failed her driving tests in epic fashion, returning home to hide her tears in a cup of hot chocolate in her lonely bedroom. Until that one miraculous day arrived when a single-mom driving instructor took pity on our mom and gave her a barely passing grade. In terms of wider public safety, it was decidedly irresponsible of the woman, but for us, it was family-saving.
From then on, we three boys buckled in tight, scared to death whenever it was our turn to sit up front with our mom and help navigate to church or a store. And with her confidence—if not her skill—quickly growing, we embarked on our first major road test: a Christmas trip to our aunt Martha’s house, 265 miles away in Fort Worth, Texas. My mom was sure she could make it in record time.
* * *
—
Having spent too many of her own Christmases strapped to a hospital bed or in cut-rate hotel rooms with her mom and Martha, my mom had always made certain that the holidays in our home were more extravagant than we could possibly afford. Baking and handcrafting all of the youthful magic she felt robbed of, my mom declared Christmas the one day of the year the other 364 had been created for. Constructing and shopping for decorations and presents were yearlong tasks. The moment the Thanksgiving turkey’s bones hit the trash, lights went up on the house and pine trees were cut down, hauled home, and set up—a main tree now bearing a decade’s worth of ornaments personalized for us boys, and a little tree in our bedroom covered in homemade aluminum-foil decorations. There were lists of treats to be made: Tom Thumb cookie bars, coconut cherry bars, my grandmother Cokie’s chocolate fudge, and sugar cookies rolled out with Cokie’s red-handled rolling pin, then cut out with cookie cutters far older than I was. The dinner table was covered in newspaper, icing and decorations were laid out, and half a day quickly vanished as we frosted those cookies.
That year, there was no father in sight to help cut down and put up our Christmas tree, so we went to a tree lot by the gas station, where we discovered that our mom couldn’t afford a tree nearly as tall as the ones we were used to. And each time Marcus and I broke a bulb hanging lights on the diminutive tree we’d dragged home, my mom choked back tears. Then “Silent Night” came on the radio, and my mom had to leave the room so she could cry out of our sight. Evidently, it was her and our grandma Cokie’s favorite carol. We were doing our best to keep Christmas alive, but our family and our treasured traditions were in real peril.
Over the next day or two, the decision was made that we’d spend Christmas with Martha. Marcus loved this idea as much as he hated going to church. For him, this sounded like a “get out of jail free” card. As converts, we were the only Mormons in my mom’s family, so none of her siblings would be dragging us to services. Marcus helped put the few wrapped gifts our mom could afford into the trunk of the Malibu, and we got on with the four-hour drive through the heart of San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas. My mom perched atop the tower of pill
ows on the driver’s seat and worked her hand controls. Marcus proved a master with the map, and somehow we never got into the twenty-car pileup I had anticipated, or got pulled over, or even lost—a little Christmas miracle.
Aunt Martha met my mom at the curb, and one by one our other aunts and uncles emerged. They enveloped my mom. I watched her turn into a little girl, exhausted and afraid, but in their arms, seemingly safe from the storm. I had never seen her look so young and frail. It gave me real pause. They quickly got her inside.
It was Marcus’s idea for us to bring in all the bags from the trunk. I didn’t disagree. Who else was going to do it? So we pulled out our mom’s baby-blue suitcase, the same one she’d cheerfully packed to take to college so long ago. Our own clothes followed, neatly folded into paper grocery bags, my Texan snakeskin cowboy boots sticking out of one. Next we unloaded the few wrapped presents that had made the journey. I carried each into the house and put them under Martha’s towering tree with its bubbling oil lights, all perched atop her bright red shag carpet. Her house was a sight to behold, an honest-to-God ’70s playground.
I emerged with a face-splitting grin, and shared the news with Marcus: “She has a hanging egg chair you can sit inside of and swing in, and a red carpet like on Mork and Mindy.”
Marcus didn’t react. He wasn’t listening. He was staring down into the trunk. I followed his gaze. Just below where the wrapped gifts and clothes had been was our baby blanket, spread out the width of the trunk, clearly placed to conceal something. Curious, Marcus had pulled it back to expose what lay beneath: a brand-new, unwrapped Lego kit, a puzzle for a two-year-old, and the candy-apple-red plastic-and-steel Mustang I had begged Santa for all year long.
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