It was just a thought.

Until I was about four years old, I rarely saw my mom. She was someone I knew of, someone I knew to love, someone I knew to miss, but I didn't ever see her. So when I heard her stumble in the front door late one night (early one morning,) I was afraid. I was up in my white metal bed upstairs, down the hall from the dilapidated bathroom with the hole in the ceiling above the toilet-the wooden beams exposed, closing my eyes but evading sleep. The screen door squeaked and then rattled as it was slammed carelessly shut. It was summertime so the front door was never closed, let alone locked. The August wind whipped through the screen, sending the rusting metal of the door into a bout of shivers. The jingle of keys clanked to the kitchen table and I heard the wooden kitchen chair creak as my mom slumped down onto it. Muffled sobs resounded from the kitchen up to the top of the stairs where I stood frozen, listening, barely breathing, my toes gripping the blue shag carpet, my knees felt like Jell-O. My tummy in a tangle of knots, I stood there, listening to her cry. Inaudible words mingled with sobs creating a chorus of drunken gibberish. Courage welled inside of me from a place I didn't know of and thinking nothing other than she needs me, I bravely took each step, one by one, legs vibrating, down to the kitchen. The cold linoleum floor sent shivers up my bare feet and to my neck, raising all my little baby hairs, and though my skin was cold, I was sweating. Fear revisited as I saw her, her head rested in her folded arms on the kitchen table, muffling her sobs just slightly. Her body moved up and down, riding the waves of hysteria crashing over her, causing her to heave uncontrollably. Thick, curly, brown hair was splayed across the table, spilling over the edge in a cascade of soft tendrils. I crept slowly closer to her, longing to touch her hair, it looked softer than my Silky. She raised her head, letting a series of loud wails escape as she wiped drool dripping from her lower lip. Now that I was closer and her words weren't muffled, I could hear what she was saying. She was talking about her dad. Poppy. He died when I was two and Mom was pregnant with Autumn. I have one very faint memory of Poppy showing my mom a dress in a store window he said he bought for me. For as long as I've known my mom, she's always talked about Poppy. I wish I had a buck for all the times I've heard the story of how she buried Poppy all by herself, not a single other person there. As I got older, I came to understand that crying about Poppy was something Mom  did when she was drunk. This was the first time I saw her cry about Poppy. This was the first time I had seen her in a long time. Especially when you consider kid time. Kid time is the slowest form of time ever. And so it felt like forever since I had seen her. She had a job during the day, I went to school, she was a stripper at night while slept and so was our life until Andy.