My phone reception is better outside the laundromat, so I spend most of my time waiting for laundry on the bench near the door. I don’t talk with my friends, but I surf the news. I like to know what’s going on. I don’t like people to know about me, though, even if I have known them for a while. Even my daughter doesn’t know much, but maybe it’s just because the drugs made me distrust her.
I’m reading about changes in EPA guidelines for wetland preservation, which might affect Indiana, when my daughter’s name appears on my screen. She’s calling me.
When your daughter is a drug dealer, you don’t pick up, especially when you’ve gotten rid of a ten-year addiction to meth. Just recently, I checked out of rehab. Proud to say, I never bought drugs off her, but she was into coke, and I just stayed out of her business, out of her room. Most seventeen-year-olds have their moms on their backs, telling them to clean their rooms. Even though I know this isn’t a good thing, I didn’t tell her shit. I was a cool mom. School, homework, boyfriends, the Pill, whatever—I left her alone, and I thought we had a good relationship. Anyway, it gave me more time to work on myself. Which is what I need now.
Two weeks ago, my dentist was going to prescribe me an opioid for getting a tooth removed, but I said no. Apparently, too many young people are going around getting prescription painkillers just by purposely getting perfectly good teeth removed. And now we’ve got the young-adult population of our southern-Indiana county walking around with gaps in their mouths. That dentist isn’t going to be trusting no one. Not for some time, at least. I don’t need to get mixed up in nothing like that.
“Mom?” my daughter had asked, kind of pitifully, when her stepfather and I kicked her out of the house.
“I don’t need a drug dealer living in my home when I’m trying to stay clean,” I said, and Bill, my husband, silently backed me up.
