Sometimes, Dad would travel east to Cleveland, or north to Milwaukee, and ply his trade there for a week or so. Sometimes, he would travel to some warehouse after getting a hot tip about a load of products that were sitting in crates or boxes awaiting some sly customer to buy them up cheaply in bulk. A load of toy ray guns from a warehouse downstate, a mother lode of small rubber dinosaurs from a toy store in Rockford that had accidentally bought three times what they needed only to find that they couldn’t return them.
Mom did the best she could with us. Zoe and I were pretty good kids; we realized that, with Dad gone all day – from the crack of dawn to midnight or later during the workweek – our mom was effectively a single parent Monday through Friday, as well as on the weekends when he took his trips.
We did our part to help out; as we progressed to our teen years, we cooked for ourselves more often than not. Zoe was a year older than me but two grades ahead. For two years, we shared the same high school. While we got in our fair share of minor scrapes with authority, we stayed out of any real trouble.
Trevor was a different matter. Mom sometimes called him her “happy surprise”, born when I was eleven and Zoe twelve. From the time he was old enough to walk, Trevor was trouble. “That little hellion,” Grandma Mable sometimes called him (always when Mom wasn’t around to hear it). He seemed to be in a constant state of warfare with the world at large, eager to avenge some secret grievance I couldn’t begin to guess at.
He was just nine years old the first time the cops brought him home. They’d caught Trev using rocks to break out the windows of the church on First Street. I have no idea how many novelty x-ray specs and joy buzzers Dad had to sell to pay for new windows at the church. I’m guessing it was a lot.
It was during what would have been my third year of college (if I hadn’t dropped out) that Zoe got married. It was nine months later, the gestation period for a human baby, when Zoe’s marriage gave birth to a divorce. Four years later, when I was settling into my new home in a new state, Trevor was sent to his first rehab. A year later, he was sent to his second one.