Missing a User

As soon as we returned from taking Jenn to the airport, the phone rang.  “I haven’t answered the phone for the two months she lived with us, and it’s too early to answer it now,” Charlie said.  “It’s probably for her anyway.  She’s the one with friends who call at six in the morning on a Sunday.”

I answer it, trying to get back into the habit.  It’s Jenn’s Mom.  Charlie’s even happier he didn’t pick up when he hears who it is. 

The last thing Jenn said was, “Promise you’ll talk to my Mom about my semi-ex.  You guys don’t hate him; make her realize he’s doing everything he can.”

“I promise I’ll talk to her,” I said.  “I can’t promise I’ll change her mind.”

“Try, please?”

We may not hate the semi-ex, but this is a guy who dumps Jenn every two weeks.  She cries by the phone until her next payday when they’re somehow ‘good’ again.  She’s worried more about this guy in a day than she’s worried about her unborn baby in a month.  She left because we told her we thought she was heading for a train wreck and we didn’t want front row seats.

“I’m just calling to see if she got on the plane okay,” Jenn’s Mom said.  “What really happened?  What’d she do?  She’s made enemies of everyone here, friends, too.  Why is she coming back?”

She’s called me three times to ask me this same question.

“It’s the boyfriend’s fault, right?” she says.  “He’s the reason for everything wrong in her life.”

“Not really.”

“Around here we don’t say his name.  We refer to him as assh*le.  Did he tell you he was dying of cancer?  He’d get sick and he’d say he’s got cancer because the antibiotics didn’t work.  They didn’t work because he was drunk or high all the time.”

“I don’t think he’s an assh*le,” I said.  “He’s an addict.  Addicts use people.”

“She said he’s going straight,” she said.

“She had me buy a bus ticket for him online.  She found some guy they used to party with who’s been straight for a while.  She says he goes to AA meetings and has a good job.  He agreed to take the boyfriend in.”

“The boyfriend’s own Mom called me up to apologize.  She said, ‘I’m sorry my son got involved with your daughter.’  He’s the only reason Jenn was on drugs.  She wasn’t an addict before.”

Jenn told me she was an addict since fifteen, my own daughter’s age.

Words don’t convince people who need to believe a lie.  She wants to believe the semi-ex boyfriend is the reason her daughter has twenty tattoos, has been a meth and coke addict, and has no other hobby than getting so drunk she can’t remember what she does.

“She taught the skateboarder not to be such a fence-sitter,” I said.  “She helped work on our house.  She helped me reconnect with my oldest son, telling me what a gentleman he was by calling to see how she was doing and taking her to shows.  She learned her Dad isn’t some assh*le Cop like she assumed, and she went to church with us.”

Jenn’s Mom hung up quickly after that.  No dirt, no reason to talk.

“I waited for a long time to tell my Mom I was moving back,” Jenn told me.  “I asked her to pick me up at the airport.  She said, ‘And then where am I taking you?’  I told her I was staying with a friend. 

“She said, ‘For how long?  I’m not picking you up if you think you’re living here.  Because of you I have a lien on my house, I owe almost a thousand dollars to the phone company, and the cable company wants to know where you put their box.’”

Jenn started laughing.  “When I lived with her, she got mad at me for getting cable.  She told me to get rid of it, so I did.  I threw the box through an abandoned factory window downtown.”

What do you think when someone tells you something like that?  I’m not a possessive person and living in a fixer means there’s nothing much you could throw in an abandoned factory window even if you wanted to.  Still, I had visions of power tools tossed in vacant lots.  I told her, “I hope you don’t do that with me.”

“My Mom’s a control freak,” she said.  “You’re not.  I wouldn’t do that to someone I love.”

That’s just like Jenn, I thought, turning something that could scare you into something to make you feel special.  She noticed I was fixer-stressed one day.  I got in the Jeep, to go far away from nail guns and 2x4s and she yelled out the window, “Come back soon, I love you Jill!”

You can’t think bad about anyone who yells that for all the cul-de-sac to hear. 

You can have your moments, though.  One day she decided to cut her hair.  She found the fancy kitchen scissors I bought in an impulsive spending mood and used those.  I know this because her hair was shorter by the exact length of the hair pieces all over the bathroom sink and counter, and my fancy kitchen shears sat there among Jenn’s make-up also all over the counter.

I couldn’t stand it and cleaned up the hair snow before I went to bed.  I left the shears, thinking she’d act twenty-five and return them.  They were still there a week later.  So was all her make-up, which was an amount greater than the amount of power tools Charlie has in the garage.  Even the General, who’s fifteen and collects all her friend’s leftovers, has less make-up than Jenn.  The General puts hers away.

“Jenn cleaned the bathroom,” Charlie told me after another week had passed.

“It smells lemony,” she said.

I looked.  All her make-up was put away and the counter was clean.  Nothing else in the bathroom was touched, but at least my kitchen scissors were gone.  There’s a big boundary between things that belong in the kitchen and things that belong in a bathroom.  Even though I live in Camp Kosovo, I can still get grossed out.

I use kitchen shears for everything.  I cut pizza with them, open packages, slice fruit, and fix things with kitchen scissors.  It wasn’t long until I needed them again.  I went to where they once had a home.  They weren’t there.  I looked all over the bathroom and bedroom.  I couldn’t find them anywhere. 

I found a lot of other things previously mine and previously the General’s which found a new home in Jenn’s cupboards and drawers, but no kitchen scissors.  I still don’t have kitchen scissors.

The General called and I answered the phone again.  I like doing this now.  You can talk to people without having to look up their numbers and dial or leave messages.  I might get into a good habit here.

“Is she gone?”

“Jenn?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “She’s gone.  We miss her already.”

“I’m coming over.”

Thirty seconds later, the General opens the door holding at least five big bags of clothing.  I hadn’t noticed until now that for the past two months, she’s been at her Dad’s more than usual.  Now she’s moving back in.

The General keeps her room spotless and well-decorated, even if she doesn’t have trim around her closet doors or carpet.  She brought over a bagful of things to put up around her room now that it’s hers again. 

“Do I have to clean all this up?” she says.  “I don’t know where it should go.”

Jenn left books and papers and Zoloft all over everywhere.  You couldn’t walk in the General’s room for all the clothes and boxes and garbage.  I guess I didn’t notice the amount of stuff Jenn had accumulated in two months’ time.  We spent a good hour cleaning and re-bonding.  Finally, the General could unpack.

“I knew it,” she said.  “You know that skirt Jenn borrowed of mine?”

“That was nice of you to let her wear it.”

“Yeah, whatever.  It’s gone.”

“Are you sure?”

“It was hanging on the first hanger in my closet yesterday.  I knew I shouldn’t have left it.  That skirt and half of my new school clothes are gone.  Clothes I earned, clothes I borrowed from friends are gone, too.”

“She didn’t like you, did she?”

“She stared at me and my friends.  I tried to talk to her but she just walked away.  She used my make-up and ate my food.  She should have liked me; she took everything good I had.”

I was really missing Jenn.  Now I realize how much I missed the General.  You expect fifteen year-olds to use people.  You don’t miss people so much when they use you.

A little help? [] 3:41:49 PM