you going to wear for your first day of school? Where were you thinking of applying to college? Why do you think your father would go and do something like that? That morning she asked me where I was planning on living now that Ted was gone. “Not in Boston, of course,” she answered before I could. “I know that already.”
“Boston, probably,” I said in response.
“Faithy, don’t say that. After what happened. Your neighborhood is obviously not safe. I never really thought it was and I was right. I saw that movie with Matt Damon about Southie—”
“Mom, I live in the South End, not South Boston. They are entirely different neighborhoods.”
“Clearly they are not. Or if they are, they are both violent and dangerous. You could move up here, show everyone in Orono what you made with your life. With your money you could buy the biggest house here.”
“Mom, I don’t want to talk about it—not right now, okay?”
To her credit, she nodded solemnly and began to wash dishes at the sink while making little sighs for my benefit. I forgave her for her bad manners and her selfishness. I always did. People say that personalities are formed and set by the time we hit the age of five, but Sandra Roy’s personality, at least for the second half of her life, was entirely formed by the day my father, head of the history department at the University of Maine, lost his tenured position for coming on to a freshman girl. Until that moment, my mother thought she was living a life of luxury. I guess she was in a way—she’d been raised in a tenement in Derry, and she’d made it all the way to the University of Maine, where she met Alex Hobart, a grad student from a middle-class town in Vermont. She dropped out of college her junior year to marry him, and a few months later she gave birth to my brother, Andrew, then a year later gave birth to me. When we were both young, my father secured a tenure-track position in the history department at the university. He excelled, becoming the youngest department head in the school’s history; his yearly-increasing salary was practically a fortune in Orono, and my mother, happy with just the two children, turned our custom-built Colonial into her special project. When I was nine, the family traveled to Europe, and my mother came back with a new way of speaking, sounding like an American actress in the 1950s, all clipped words and vaguely English vowel sounds.
Then it all fell apart the year I started high school. A freshman girl taking my father’s seminar on ancient Egypt taped him soliciting her for sex in exchange for grades. The situation went public, and my father was immediately fired. My mother threw him out of the house and filed for divorce. I remember that year as one long rage-fueled monologue from my mother, who seemed to blame my father more for losing his well-paying job than for his attempt at sexual blackmail. These monologues were directed at me. Andrew had discovered pot, then Phish, and spent all his free time in his bedroom, his head encased in large headphones. There were no savings; all of my parents’ money had gone into house furnishings and vacations, and two years after the divorce, my mother sold the Colonial, and we moved into a three-bedroom attic apartment normally rented to students. Andrew, a senior at high school then, stayed in the apartment for less than a month, before moving into a friend’s house. My mother protested, but I knew she didn’t really mind. She’d turned against all men, and that included my shiftless brother. “Just us girls, now,” she’d say, insisting that the apartment was temporary. But we stayed there all through my junior and senior years of high school. My brother graduated, then spent a year following a Phish tour around the country, ending up in San Diego, where he still lived. Last I’d heard, he was working at a brewpub and shacked up with a woman he’d met who already had four children. He’d called and left a message on my phone after Ted had died but I hadn’t called him back, and probably wouldn’t.
After the divorce, my father moved to Portland, where he got an adjunct position at a community college. My mother got work as a receptionist in a dentist’s office, and between her salary, and my father’s meager child support checks,