My Memoir – Where the Dark Things Grow
**The following is part of my memoir. Please go to this page for more information, as well as an easy-access list of each chapter.
“For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.”
Psalm 91:11
Jessie was excited to spend the weekend with her daddy.
Ever since the day she came home with her mom and little brothers to find Daddy moving his belongings out of their trailer, she was heartbroken, and nothing made sense anymore. She loved him so much and couldn’t understand why he wanted to live anywhere but home.
The news that she’d get to go to his new place—without annoying little brothers this time—made her forget about those sad thoughts. Eagerly, she packed a small bag to take with her, and couldn’t get into his car fast enough.
On the short drive, classic rock music played through the speakers from the Magic 105 radio station. They drove past her school, and she told him all about her good grades, tetherball wins, hopscotch, and about a boy who got into trouble for kissing her ankles while her legs dangled from the monkey bars. They stopped at the grocery store and Daddy picked up some of her favorite things: SpaghettiOs with Meatballs, Little Debbie snack cakes, Kool-Aid packets, and a giant bag of sugar to make them sweet.
His trailer was small and noisy, the air thick with cigarette smoke. As the day faded into evening, more of Daddy’s friends came to visit him, too. By the time it was dark outside, Jessie felt that the trailer had gotten even smaller somehow. And noisier. And smokier. But she didn’t care—she was with her Daddy and didn’t want to be anywhere else.
Jessie sat cross-legged on the carpet, a notebook open on her lap. She drew pictures because Daddy liked to draw, and she loved anything that made her feel closer to him. Rock music poured from the stereo while the TV flickered in the background, but the jumble of adult voices swallowed both.
She looked up suddenly, startled by a feeling she couldn’t explain. It was as if she sat inside an invisible bubble that muffled every sound…except one.
Daddy’s voice.
He stood nearby, talking to a tall man with brown-gray hair and a thousand lines carved across his face. The man’s lips moved, but Jessie heard nothing from them.
He glanced down at her…a slow, unsettling glance that made her look away quickly. Something icy slid beneath her ribs. A danger she didn’t understand, but recognized all the same.
Daddy’s expression shifted to something that she had never seen before. His shoulders stiffened. His jaw hardened. The beer can in his hand dented under his grip.
“That’s my fu*king daughter!” Daddy said, voice sharp enough to cut the air.
They were the only words she would hear, the only ones that mattered, and she never forgot them.
I loved my time in Southern Pines Mobile Home Park in Little Rock in the 80s, mostly, I think, because it was the last place my dad lived with us as a family.
But I have so many other memories from there, all of which helped make my childhood wonderful and unforgettable: My friends, Felicia, Brandy, Marybeth, and my best friend, Debbie. I remember waiting impatiently at Brandy and Marybeth’s home for Michael Jackson’s Thriller to come on the radio so we could record it onto a cassette tape. At Felicia’s, we often played with Barbie dolls in her bedroom and made Friendship Books and paper fortune tellers. It was at Debbie’s that I watched my first (and last) horror movie, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We had so much fun—I even went on trips with her and her mom!
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