Chapter 2

Officer McConnell's "accident" finding made it possible for me to collect the money from Mom's life insurance policy. I used it to bury her and pay off the mortgage and credit cards. That left the monthly bills, stuff like property taxes, insurance, utilities, clothes, food...

I forged Mom's signature and deposited the checks that came from our bastard dad by mail, then wrote checks or withdrew money from the joint account in my own name to pay the bills. It paid nearly all of them. We were able to d the rest with money from our part time jobs.

I did math tutoring for kids referred to me by the local high schools and community college, and a couple times a week I filed returned books at the library after it closed down for the night. Math geeks love the Dewey Decimal System, I guess, and Ms. Walker, the head librarian, was a nice lady. She would stop and ask how I was doing, and always waited for me to finish before she left for the night.

Even though Sharon didn't finish high school, she surprised me with her talents when it came to computers. Kind of like me with math I guess — it was hard to say how or why it was second nature to me. I must not have been paying attention before mom's death for it to be so unexpected. She could scan the most arcane product support manual on earth and somehow manage to retrieve the tiny bit of information needed to solve a problem.

One of the local PC support companies hired her as an escalation resource for when their staff couldn't figure out a customer's problem. They didn't call that often, but she still got paid each month for making herself available. So she seldom had cause to leave the house on her own; and the thousand dollars she put into the bank every month really helped.

In the aftermath of Mom's death I used the quiet time at the library to study what had afflicted her. I read a lot of psychiatry books, hoping to learn what symptoms to watch for in Sharon, and prevent it from progressing within her untreated, as it must have inside Mom.

"Psychosis" in Stedman's Medical Dictionary, is defined as "a severe mental disorder, with or without organic damage, characterized by derangement of personality and loss of contact with reality and causing deterioration of normal social functioning."

The problem with a definition like that is you don't know what "normal social functioning" is when you're still a kid.

For a long time I didn't know it was unusual for a mom to do things like write a play about girls at department stores offering fragrance samples but were really aliens spraying us with chemical agents to steal our minds.

Sharon and I used to perform her plays on a home-made stage in our basement, to an audience consisting of our mother, and Ingrid, our confused wiener-dog.

I would always play the villain of the day, which could be anything from a cosmetics salesman to a CIA agent from Area 51. Sharon was always the heroine that miraculously saved the world against all odds; a trauma center nurse, a Navy Seal, the sexy owner of a pharmaceutical company that makes vaccines ... all sorts of things.

Mom would watch our performances with anxious pride, praising us enthusiastically after the curtain came down. Later she would take the script and a red pen to her bedroom. Sometimes she would emerge ecstatic about her revisions. Other times we could hear her weeping through the locked door, and she would apologize for several days afterwards about the screen play that hadn't been good enough for her children to perform.

As I grew up and began to hang out with friends from school, I came to realize how different my home life was compared to other kids; I began gradually opting out of Mom's inspired projects.

I believe Mom let that happen because she still had Sharon. She and Mom were more like best friends than mother and daughter, and Sharon was always willing to go on new adventures with her. We didn't talk about it at the time, but I suspected she did that partly out of love, and partly to ensure Mom didn't do anything to hurt herself.