My Own Ever After: A Memoir

by Heather Huffman

  Throwaway, especially, gets hammered because my main character is a prostitute, but she seems so “normal.” I did that on purpose—because prostitutes are humans. Beneath all the things that might make her different from me, there is a common thread of humanity that makes us the same. No person is a throwaway. And, not surprisingly, that was a message that resonated with my new friends. I would take their approval a thousand times over the approval of a critic any day.

  It became a fairly regular occurrence that Adam would bring Shelley and JR home with him for dinner. No matter how broke we were, I tried to make their visits special. I brought out my A-game with the cooking. Sometimes, my mom and sister would come, too. There was a festive air to those dinners.

  Our guests would quietly slip away to shower when they first arrived. After the first dinner, they stopped feeling so out of place and started to relax. Sometimes I would cut or style Shelley’s hair. Being the youngest sister and not having daughters, I am probably the most ill-equipped person on the planet to fix another woman’s hair, but I managed.

  Once, I bought Shelley tinted lip gloss on a whim. I never saw her without it on after that. Sometimes, I buy myself a tube of that exact brand and color just because it makes me think of her. It's not a particularly flattering shade on me, but it keeps her memory alive.

  In so many ways, she was probably one of the closest friends I’ve ever had. If I listed off my dearest female friends on one hand, she would be on the list. We talked about anything and everything. I would take her to Wal-Mart to get her essentials, and we’d just chatter the whole way. Sometimes conversation was light. Sometimes it was not.

  She told me about being raped in a port-a-potty during an event downtown. Some man, drunk and downtown to celebrate a sporting event, had cornered her in the chaos. There was nothing I could say to make it better, but I could tell she just needed to say the words. She needed another human to know what had happened and to care.

  JR, on the other hand, was an overgrown child. I’m sure that, at least in part, contributed to his homeless state. But it also gave him a rather delightful innocence. He loved to play video games with my boys. He could for hours on end. My boys unanimously agree that he was terrible at said video games, but they also agree that they loved those times. It didn’t matter that he was bad; his joy was contagious.

  That Christmas Eve, we celebrated at my sister’s house. It was a big, scrumptious meal, and we left with our bellies and hearts full. We also left with a trunk full of carefully packed leftovers for our friends. My sister had, I’d noticed, started cooking more than we could possibly eat so there were always leftovers to take to our friends.

  We didn’t have long to stay at the camp; the sun was setting as we arrived, and I didn’t like having the kids downtown after dark. But Shelley and Dave insisted I stay long enough to open my gifts. Somehow, they’d each managed to get presents for us. Shelley gave me a watch with interchangeable bands. It didn’t fit or work, but I gushed over it and I meant it. I treasured that gift and I still do. Dave gave me the softest gloves I’ve ever owned.

  One of the things Adam did during his time as the Sandwich and Bible Guy was try to work with the homeless people he’d befriended to get whatever they needed to get out of homelessness. He’d spent a lot of time talking with JR about what it would take to get himself on the right track again, and it was decided JR would study for his GED.

  I feel like I should pause my story here to say that Blake, who had been released from rehab in September of 2011, got it in his head to try Irish dance because a friend of ours owned a studio in town. We got approval from his doctor and decided to let him give it a whirl. He was actually pretty darned good at it, and by November of that year, he was in Chicago for a national competition, where he placed 17th.

  I had also pulled the boys at the beginning of the year to homeschool, each for different reasons. With Blake, it was because his teacher assured me he was excelling at school even though he admitted to me he was struggling because when he tried to read, the words would move around the page.

  So, to fully paint the picture, I was homeschooling three children, one of which had to re-learn EVERYTHING he’d been taught during the first half of his elementary school education. I had a son in Irish dance. I couldn’t bring myself to deny him, but it was a skosh expensive and time consuming. My books were being polished and re-published, and I was suddenly expected to actually market them. We were trying desperately to hang on to Dylan’s horse and dealing with that drama. My youngest was slipping further and further into an anger I couldn’t understand or seem to help. My kids and I were desperately longing to leave suburbia and return home to the Ozarks. Medical bills were piling up, and the house was becoming ever-more of a millstone around my neck. And in the midst of all of this, we had our homeless friends coming to visit. It was an odd year, to say the least.

  If there is one thing you can count on in a homeless camp, it’s that there will usually be a bit of drama happening. Another man moved into the camp for a while. Sometimes JR would put Shelley in danger with his choices. Sometimes she put herself there. At one point, she disappeared for a while, and I made myself crazy worrying about her while she was gone. When she returned, I went to visit her at the camp. The moment she heard me coming, she came running.

  “I found him!” Her face was positively glowing.

  “Who did you find?”

  “Jesus! I know what you were talking about now.”

  “You found Jesus?” I clarified.

  “Yes, while I was in jail. I found him!”

  “Wait… what? When were you in jail? You had better start from the beginning.”

  She filled me in on a rather convoluted story that involved visiting family, having a falling out with family (there was a long line of dysfunction and brokenness in her world), and somehow ending up in jail. One of the women she met there had talked to her about the Bible, and something in what she said made it click—all of the things I’d been trying to tell Shelley, about God loving her enough to send his son to reconcile her to him, about what Jesus meant to me, how he had impacted my life—it all clicked into place in her talks with a fellow inmate in a jail somewhere in Illinois.

  And when she’d gotten out, she’d gotten on a bus and come straight to St. Louis because she wanted so badly to tell me she understood, and she had peace.

  I could see it, too. She was still homeless. Her life still royally sucked and most of the people in it would continue to let her down. But I could tell by the joy I saw in her face that night that she would never be alone again. Whatever life would do to her, she had someone a whole lot more competent than me in her corner now.

  I don’t begin to understand how God can love someone as deeply as I know he loves us and allow us to go through the things we do. But I am sure he is there, and he loves us, and I believe him when he promises that somehow, some way, he will work even the worst of it for our good in the long run. There are times I cling to that promise because I feel like it’s all I have left.

  By the time spring of 2012 rolled around, what we had suspected would happen was rapidly becoming a reality: We were losing our home. I became so embroiled in trying to figure out how to keep my own family from winding up in a tent next to Shelley and JR that I didn’t put up much of a fuss when they dropped off the radar again. They’d done it before, more than once. I was sure they would turn up again. I just hoped it was before we left the area. I remembered worrying about what would happen to them when we were gone.

  As it turned out, I would not hear from them. When JR did turn up, it was his body. Shelley was never seen or heard from again. Maybe she found her way out and is living a happy life somewhere in this great big, wide world. I have seen enough of this world to doubt that, though.

  Most days, I keep her memory tucked away safely. Sometimes I come across the watch she gave me, or I wear her favorite lip gloss and it resurfaces. There are times the memory is something pleasant and passin
g, like a summer breeze. There are times when it chokes me; the weight of it bears down like an anvil on my chest.

  I don’t know if there is more I could have or should have done. I try not to dwell there. I prefer to remember the laughter, how bad JR was at video games, how much Shelley loved that stupid Chapstick or the haircut I gave her. And I remember her smile the day she told me she’d found Jesus, and I tell myself that I will see her again someday, even if it’s on the flip-side of life.

  Chapter Seven

  Shortly after Blake got out of the hospital, once the decision had been made for me to stay home with our son until he was out of rehab, I called our mortgage company. After being passed around half a dozen times and sitting on hold for a couple of hours, I got a real live human being willing to talk to me on the line, and I explained our situation.

  “Are you currently behind?”

  “No, but our payments have doubled in three years. We’re barely scraping by; I know we can’t make the payments for long on one income. I just want to know if there is anything at all we can work out.”

  “Sorry. If you’re not behind, we can’t talk to you. Wait until you miss your first payment and then call back; we can work with you then. There are programs in place.”

  Now, an intelligent person would have hung up the phone and called a real estate agent to put the house on the market then and there, while our credit was good and we weren’t behind. But, in my defense, I was a teensy bit overwhelmed and not making the most reasoned choices. At that time, taking care of my children took every available brain cell. I made a stupid choice, and I will pay dearly for it for a long time to come.

  Fast forward a year, it went by in a blink, and I call the mortgage company when we are now behind on our payments, only to be told they wouldn’t work with us and would be foreclosing. An acquaintance from church caught wind of it and told us in no uncertain terms that the only godly thing to do would be to do a short sale on the house so we could at least come to a compromise with the mortgage company. It just so happened she worked at an agency that handled short sales and she’d be happy to help us out.

  Side note: something we didn’t realize at the time was that while the mortgage company would get the money from the sale of the house and the government bailout money and FHA, the amount of the loan forgiven would be credited as income against us. I recall them mentioning tax implications, but my brain did not process what exactly they would be. We would later be hit with a tax bill that was over 50% of our actual annual income. Yeah, that one still hurts each month as we make the payment.

  Going from the information he had at the time, Adam was strongly in the short sale camp, so the appointment was made. I remember being absolutely mortified when her boss pulled up in his expensive car with license plates that read, in effect, “Short Sale.” The sign was put in the yard and it was out there for all of our neighbors to see that we were losing our home. I know pride is bad, but that stung.

  The house sold within a couple of weeks and the buyer, who was paying cash, wanted to close in two weeks. As soon as the decision was made to put the house on the market, the kids and I had known right away that we would use it as our opportunity to move home to the Ozarks, to start fresh. At that time, it seemed especially important to Blake that he go somewhere where no one knew about the accident. I think all of us were ready to get out from under it, really.

  With just two weeks to find a place to rent and to organize a move, the boys and I did a lot of traveling back and forth between St. Louis and Springfield. I had an aunt in Marshfield, a small town just northeast of Springfield, who was kind enough to let us stay with her. That became our base of operations for our search.

  Dylan has this odd little quirk–he tends to transpose numbers when he copies them. This made driving around writing down numbers from “For Rent” signs especially fun. There were times the search got tense. Sometimes we got lost (no GPS, not that it works reliably in these parts, anyway). Sometimes we had grand adventures, discovering new towns and interesting places.

  Eventually, we found the perfect place: a three bedroom, two bath house on ten acres with an address in a little bitty town we’d never heard of. If you were to look up Elkland on Google, Wikipedia would tell you that they have seven churches and one serial killer. Armed with this knowledge, we went to check out the house we’d found. Just Dylan, Blake, and I made that trip. I remember the daisies were in full bloom in the lower pasture, and I fell in love. We signed a lease that day and plans were made to move in. We’d found our “farm.”

  We asked where the nearest actual town was and were told Buffalo. On our way home, we stopped by the little hamlet to drive around and look at schools. We ate lunch at Dairy Queen and talked about how strange it was that this would be our hometown. It was all so new and exciting. We instantly adored the tiny town of 3,000, with its town square and minuscule Wal-Mart, which we later learned is the second smallest in the country. Up until then, all I knew of Buffalo was that it was the only cell phone reception in between Lebanon and Stockton Lake. I would later learn that my great-grandmother was from here.

  The day of the move, Adam had made a dentist appointment. For whatever reason, no one from my family could be there, either. So, the boys and I loaded the truck by ourselves, with only one incident—I fell off the truck, backwards. I remember lying there with the wind knocked out of me, thinking about how thoroughly pissed at life I was, while my boys hovered nervously over me, unsure if their mom was okay.

  I have to give all three of my boys credit: They know how to work. At the time, they were seven, eight, and eleven and they worked as hard as any grown man loading our boxes and furniture on that truck. In fact, my boys and I usually get called in to help people move—friends, family, relative strangers. It’s something we hate to do but are absurdly good at.

  I will say that when we bought new furniture for the house, my uncles on Mama’s side showed up to help unload it. I think my kiddos were slightly put out to be treated like kids after they’d worked so hard to load and unload the truck alone on moving day, but I was willing to roll with it just to not feel like a pack mule at least once. Sometimes I want to shout at the world, “I’m a freaking girl; treat me like one!” Then when someone treats me like I can’t do something because I’m a girl, I get mad at them. I’m a fun little mystery like that.

  As much as I would miss the house in Eureka, I adored our new house in Elkland. The plan was to lease it until we could buy it, and I had every intention of staying put until they carried me out in a pine box or shipped me off to a home as a little old lady. I was so proud of and happy with that little gray house.

  We hadn’t been there long when two boys started hanging out at the end of the driveway on their bikes–one was a redhead about the age of my younger two, the other was a younger blond. After several days of staring at each other with a driveway between them, the two groups worked up the nerve to introduce themselves.

  It turned out they lived right next door, and my boys were pretty impressed to find out that the older boy’s mother worked at Pizza Hut. My kids were fairly certain that made her the coolest mom ever. They were jealous. The kids became fast friends, and to this day, you can usually find the gang of them at either family’s house. In between then and now, there have been lots of trees climbed, creeks explored, and games of football.

  Adam was nervous about moving his city kids to the country. I’d done my best to prepare them for the differences. For me, it was like finding a favorite pair of jeans that I’d thought were lost but had only been tucked away in a drawer. I was made for this life, this place. And as soon as I returned to it, I wondered how I survived so long away from it. When I was young, I had itchy feet. Now I have to tear myself away for even a weekend. These hills are my oxygen.

  Despite the preparation, all the talks about how things are done down here and about things like snakes and poisonous plants and all that jazz, my children had a bit of adjusting to do.

>   We had a creek that ran through the middle of the property, but the kids had to climb a hill to get back if they went there, so they tended to go down the dirt road a bit to play in the creek at the low-slung bridge. There was no hill to climb that direction. One particular morning, they’d asked if they could play in the creek before breakfast. I said sure, but to come home soon because I was getting ready to start cooking. When breakfast had grown cold and they still weren’t back, I hopped in the car to go get them. (Hill or no, I was feeling kinda lazy.)

  The boys were actually on their way back when they saw the car coming. They reverted back to the Eureka way of doing things and jumped to the side of the road. (In the suburbs, if a car comes, they were taught to step into the grass and wait for it to pass.)

  I stopped the car in the middle of the road, irritated and crabbing at them. Then I realized they were standing in poison ivy. So, I crabbed at them about that as I went to retrieve Blake’s bike, which he’d tossed to the side in his “oh no, a car” panic… only to realize he’d thrown his bike on top of a copperhead snake.

  “Let’s not tell your father about this,” I told them. In fact, I didn’t tell Adam that story until much later. I was afraid he’d whisk the boys back to St. Louis. To his credit, Adam did a lot of his own adjusting after we arrived. A suburban boy born and raised, he hadn’t even really been down to visit the Ozarks more than a handful of times in our marriage. He stepped into a completely foreign world and made it his home.

  Despite the rocky start, my boys adapted quickly. It’s as if they had been made for this life, too. To the families who have been here for 200 years or more, we’re transplants. Newbies, city slickers, and–honest to goodness, Dylan got this his first year–“from the hood.” We’re outsiders, welcomed by some, resented by others.

  My boys are all three big guys, something they inherited from my Mama’s side of the family. (Which is funny, because she’s tiny.) The football coach took one look at Dylan and said, “Please tell me you plan to be on the football team.” I couldn’t in a million years imagine my gentle giant trying out for football, but I think he was ready to be something new here, too. He agreed to try out and, as it turned out, was really good at football.