Lil Bit has always been flypaper for freaks.
(I told you I wasn't a nice person; a nicer person would have said a magnet for unique individuals," but we've already established that I'm not a nice person.)
The eccentric. The down on their luck. The weird. The broken. The downright batshit crazy.
They all come to her like the lepers in Calcutta to Mother Teresa.
And she welcomes them with open arms.
Into her home. Into our lives. Into her care.
Intent on fixing them.
The more broken the better.
Loud kinds. Crazy kinds. Emotional Kinds. Sick kinds. Kinds who make you question your own sanity when exposed to them in large doses.
Kinds of folks who would yell YeeHaw at the top of their lungs while standing out of the sunroof of the Expedition as you tried to pull into the nursing home to take Lil Bit to see a past patient of hers.
Momma would call you at work and then she would hand the phone to the kind of friend who would proceed to ask you to help them figure out how to get to their parole check in.
The kind you would find going through the dumpster as you are cleaning out Lil Bit's garage. Pulling broken things out as quickly as you can put them in.
Folks who would tell Momma that she could pay for the Lakehouse mortgage by saving coke and cat food cans. Then storing the cans in sacks in the garage, letting a squirrel nest in them, loading all the cans AND the dogs into the car and proceeding to set off to drive to the city because they pay more for cans there. Only to make it two blocks down the road when the squirrels decide to come out of the sacks of cans and run around the car with the dogs in it.
It's been this way most of my life. But more since I graduated college. And if you can't tell from the opening line of this post - I've resented the shit out of it for most of my life until I began to care for Momma and really, REALLY understood what was going on.
The folks who Lil Bit has attracted aren't bad people for the most part.
It does in fact all kinds of kinds to keep the world a turning.
It was their presence combined with their strangeness and neediness that just plain rubbed me the wrong way. Just more people in a long line of folks who I had to share my mom with.
But for some reason the people Momma was trying to help pushed me to see red.
Why Momma, why? Why are you always trying to save the ones who appear to be unsaleable?
The puzzle was quite easy once I got past my childish anger and approached it like a medical case.
The kinds of folks weren't a disease. They weren't bad. They were a symptom.
THINK I would tell myself. It's so close.
At her core what is my mother? A healer.
What does a healer do? They save people. They put people back together.
What would cause a healer to bring the hardest cases to themselves? Pride? No, my Momma is humble to a fault and in fact suffers from the same confidence problems that I do.
She had something to prove? No.
She had a failure that she was trying to make up for? That sounds more like it.
She wanted to save the unsaveable.
Who did these kinds of kinds remind me of?
Who hadn't she been able to save?
Who?
WHO?
Like a cryptex the kinds of folks who Momma attracted spun faster and faster around my mind until coming to a screeching halt. Spelling out two words.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
It had been right in front of me.
YOUR SISTER.
Your sister.
The kind of person Momma couldn't save.
The kind of person who led to her biggest regrets.
The kind of person who led to what Momma felt was her biggest failure.
The kind of person she wouldn't talk about for a decade.
The person whose name still draws tears all these years later.
Gina.
Because like I told you dear reader, all the skeletons come out of the closet at the end.
And that is a secret that we will dig up later.
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