Justice For Mama

By Meg Ryburn

Madison Woods is an exceptional police detective in Atlanta, Georgia who watches out for her elderly wealthy mother in their hometown. Vista, Georgia is a charming tree-lined southern town where Jane Roberts has alienated everyone throughout her long life. When pillars of the community cozy up to her prickly mother, Madison becomes suspicious of their motives and launches her own unofficial investigation of the people her naïve mother trusts too much.

Madison’s friend, Billy Manning, still lives in Vista. They team up to figure out what these people want from Jane Roberts. Are they just being thoughtful, or do they see dollar signs in her mother’s eyes? They’re asking Mama about her will. They have a key to her house. Are they planning to fleece her? Why do they want control of her healthcare? When Madison learns her mother has terminal cancer, their unofficial investigation becomes a race against time.

Justice For Mama is an eye-opening novel that will prompt protective instincts for every older person you love. It questions who we really know and who we should trust. Sometimes fine upstanding people are neither FINE nor UPSTANDING! Elder fraud and elder exploitation crimes have skyrocketed. Read how to protect people you love and maybe even yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781304598578

Book preview

COPYRIGHT

Justice For Mama is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual locales, businesses, companies, churches, events, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

Title: Justice For Mama

First edition February2024

Copyright © 2024 by Miriam Oliver Ryburn

ISBN: 9781304887269

Ebook ISBN: 9781304598578

Published in the United States of America

DEDICATION

For Deb Ryburn … always.

ONE: START EARLY

I was six years old the first time. It wasn’t long after midnight when Mama came and got me out of bed. She dragged me into the kitchen. Poised and waiting for me were the bucket full of soapy water and a scrub brush. They had been set there locked and loaded for me to use. The kitchen stretched out before me like an overwhelming expanse.

Grab that brush, Madison Roberts. Start scrubbing, she commanded. My mama stood over me like a guard on a chain gang. Even though Jane Roberts was only five feet tall, she seemed tall to me as she stood over me while I scrubbed. The perspective of a child framed my views of her. Fifteen minutes later, I got my footed pajamas wet. That made me cry. She noticed that I was crying when I stopped scrubbing to wipe my tears on my sleeve.

You mustn’t ever wipe your nose on your sleeve, she admonished, as she handed me a Kleenex. That’s boorish. At the time, I wondered what ‘boorish’ meant, but I didn’t dare ask. She always made me go look up words in the dictionary if I didn’t know what they meant. Even though I was only six years old, I was expected to have the vocabulary of a college graduate. As I stared at her wondering why she was so mean, she tapped the bucket with the toe of her shoe and ordered me to keep scrubbing. She noticed my manners while excusing her own. It would be considered rude by most people to make a little kid cry. It’s also universally deemed to be abusive to drag a child from her warm bed in the middle of the night and force her to scrub the kitchen floor. But Emily Post’s books had no chapter on child abuse. Pity.

My pajamas are wet, Mama, I whined. Can I go change ‘em?

You may not! Your job is not finished, young lady, she chirped emphatically. Even in the middle of the night, she corrected my grammar.

As I looked over the mop bucket and into her eyes, I saw some sort of anger. As a child on the wrong end of a power dynamic, I felt like a convict at the wrong end of a loaded gun. I scrubbed, and I cried, and I bit my tongue. When she wasn’t looking, I blew my nose on my sleeve.

After an hour, I told her that I was sleepy, and I wanted to go back to bed. She answered flatly, I don’t care what you want. Keep scrubbing. After another forty-five minutes, I asked again. This time, she gave me a choice: You can either change your wet pajamas or go back to bed. Not both.

I chose to go back to bed. On my way down the hall, I blew my nose on both sleeves of my flannel pajamas. Rebellion. In my wet footed pajamas, I burrowed my tear-streaked face into my down pillow and escaped into the ether. I escaped each night after similar abuse. When I was ten, I was taller than she was. So, one night, when she commenced this nightly ritual by handing me the scrub brush, I looked her in the eye for a long time. Then, I threw the brush in the bucket. It splashed water all over the terrazzo floor. As I wheeled around, I drew in a deep breath. Do it yourself. I’m never doing this again! Under my breath, I called her a bitch, too, and I wondered if she’d come after me. She didn’t. And she never came to get me again in the middle of the night.

She just drank more which made her meaner. At the time, I didn’t know her meanness was the result of alcohol’s insidious influences. I just knew she was mean.  Mama also became possessive and paranoid. She bought hundreds of large safety pins, which she used to pin the curtains together top to bottom in every room of our house. She wanted to be certain nobody could see inside. That was strange to me since our house was on a secluded wooded lot filled with one hundred ninety-seven pine trees. I knew; I counted. Hardly anyone drove down our road since it was off the beaten path and near the outskirts of town. But nobody could see in our windows. Nor did the light of day ever enter our house…figuratively or literally. I was never allowed to unpin the curtains much less open the windows they shrouded. The light had also left my poor mama. Many nights I heard her crying in her bed. Something sad was growing inside her. I suppose it was what is now diagnosed as ‘Depression.’

My solace was school. Every day when I went to school, I escaped our dark dysfunctional house. I was able to see my friends. More importantly, I was able to run and play. When I was playing, I felt free. During recess, I played football with the boys. I liked learning in school, but when I got to play organized sports, my life really began. Basketball, softball, tennis, and track dominated my thoughts and provided me with outlets to blow off steam.  Competitiveness oozed from my pores.

I was quick and strong, and whichever sport was in season was my favorite one. When I got home from school, I headed over to the Chester’s yard to play. Their yard was spacious with big open areas for playing football or baseball. Plus, they had a trampoline. If we didn’t have enough people to play a game, we would shoot hoops or jump on the trampoline. Mike Chester was my age and my good buddy. Every now and then, we would get into a fight, and his mama would call my mama to complain that I had hurt him. I got scolded. We never stayed mad at each other overnight. Every new day promised a new game in the South Georgia sunshine.

Every Christmas when someone got a new bicycle, we would all meet up and ride around the circle like we were cowboys on our new steeds. We never wore helmets, and we always fell off and skinned things. I never hit my head when I fell. Neither did anyone else that I remember.

Some women get divorced and re-invent themselves. My mother was not one of those women. She had no solace from that pain. Ever. She just drank more. She drank at night after I went to bed. Every morning she had a hangover. Yet she got up and put her face on, as she described it. Then Mama drove us to our school where she taught. I loved to spring from that car and run away from her to my real life. I ran everywhere I went. In looking back, I wonder if I ran because I was athletic or if I ran in order to put distance between Mama and me. Even if it was only for a day, it was a respite.

I once asked my father why he never introduced me by name. His answer stung: I never use your name because you don’t matter. I began to realize that both of my parents were mean heartless people. I tried for years to understand them. I hated them both for so long that it became a part of my psyche. But fortunately, I sought therapy. I never wanted to embrace and replicate their dysfunction.

When I was a teenager, I had a Snoopy sweatshirt that pictured the cartoon character dancing on his tiptoes and read, ‘To Live is to Dance and to Dance is to Live.’ That’s how I felt about sports, my solace. I gave my all to being the fastest, the strongest, and the best. My body grew stronger, and I was a natural leader of most of the teams on which I played.

During summers, I worked at the local country club as a lifeguard. Coated with Hawaiian Tropic Dark Tanning Oil, I soaked up the sun every day while I worked. One day my boss took me aside to ask me if I would start sitting under the umbrella when I was lifeguarding. People visiting from out of town didn’t know me, and they thought a ‘colored girl’ was working as a lifeguard at the lily-white country club. That just would not do. I tried to do what my boss had asked me to do. I couldn’t sit on that hard, wooden lifeguard stand very often though. My tan continued, and so did my development.

During ninth grade, I also met my first real boyfriend. His name was Manny Ricks. He was a tall good-looking football player with an ever-present smile. He was two years older than I. He also had a vastly different sort of family. His mama and daddy were uneducated blue-collar types. They loved to cook, and they loved Manny and his brother and sister. I envied them. Fortunately, I had my grandparents, Papa and Gigi Woods. Nobody ever called them by their real names, William and Annabel. My grandparents were unfailingly kind to me. Their home was my haven. My granddaddy took me fishing and taught me how to ride a horse; my grandmama taught me to cook and explained the art of arranging flowers. Papa and Gigi’s home was a respite antithetical to my mother’s house. I spent many nights there over the years. Papa would always wake me the next morning with a smile that characterized his sweet face.

Rise and shine and be bushy-tailed, little squirrel, he admonished. Your Gigi’s cooking hotcakes just for you. Papa facilitated such a happy way to wake up; Gigi always treated me with gentle strength. Even when my behavior warranted a spanking, my grandparents spanked me with love. People might think that’s a contradiction of terms. Those spankings were rare, once from him, once from her. Before and after each one of those spankings, my grandparents explained why they were disciplining me. They reminded me that they loved me, and each urged me to trust authority. In general, I did tend to trust authority. My parents were the only exceptions. Neither of them ever earned my trust.

My high school years were dominated by sports. I excelled at each sport. Chemistry class nearly did me in though. My best friend, Barb Brown, helped me study. I never cheated, but I never would’ve passed Mrs. Smith’s class if it weren’t for Barb’s tutoring. There were two highlights of my teenage academia: (1) Mr. Learner’s Creative Writing and Literature classes and (2) Mrs. Andrew’s History and Government classes. We watched the Watergate Hearings on TV during government classes. Even though I was young, I knew that we were watching history-in-the-making. I have always loved history.

I almost loved Creative Writing class more than competitive sports. Mr. Learner would tear a picture from a magazine and pass it around the classroom for all to see before he taped the picture to the chalkboard in front of our classroom. Beside the picture, he would write our assignment on the chalkboard. Most of the time, it would read: Write A Three Page Essay About This Picture (Double-Spaced). My classmates groaned and complained upon receiving that sort of writing assignment. On the other hand, I adored doing that. I also adored running suicide drills in basketball, though. Maybe I was an anomaly. I’ve been told I was weird, and the people who said that were probably right.

During my senior year, I applied to three colleges: Auburn University, Florida State University, and the University of Florida. I had gotten accepted to all three schools, which was probably remarkable considering the way I behaved during my SAT exam for college admissions. I got tired of sitting still about three fourths of the way through the test and just randomly marked my way through the rest of the questions without reading any of them. Amazingly, I scored 1350 on the test anyway. After all, the test was multiple choice.

Eventually, I decided to go to the University of Florida. I couldn’t wait to leave home and get away from my mother.  Like a convict awaiting release from prison, I counted  the days until September. I rented an apartment near campus. I would finally be free.

TWO: COLLEGE DAYS

Before I drove away from home, my mother had a talk with me. She told me that I would learn all sorts of things in college. Much of it will be in books, but a great deal won’t. You’ll learn about people from other cultures all over the world, she conveyed. She philosophized that I would come to the realization that there was more to life than the day-to-day life in a small town. I rolled my eyes and willed her to stop speaking. She hugged me goodbye and admonished me to drive safely. She told me to call her when I arrived safely at my apartment.

When she finished with her ‘Going-Off-to-College Speech,’ she hugged me tightly. She reeked of cigarette smoke. When I drove away, I felt omnipotent. Never again would the mean ole mama stand over