Day Twenty-Four: Leaving Home

 COMING OF AGE

When I was seventeen I started to count the days

until I could move out of the house.

I planned to leave on the exact day

I turned eighteen, no matter that it was the Midwest

in January, and a record cold snap blizzard

had been raging for nearly a week.

The cold just made my parents crazier,

trapped as we were in a drafty farmhouse

a mile and a half outside of Greenview, Illinois-

a town so small that it had one school

that ran from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

Three days before my birthday,

I walked onto a snowy rural highway and stuck out my thumb,

was picked up by a couple of local drunks

and rode in the back of their long-bed pickup

to the nearby town of Petersburg, where my only friend Rod

lived in a huge Victorian house that he had mysteriously

bought, even though he was only twenty.

Rod wasn't there, so I opened a window

and climbed in, made myself at home for three days

amidst the dusty antiques and photos

of Rod's long-dead relatives, and waited anxiously

for Rod to arrive. When he did, he was stunned

and nervous, because he had just come home

to check his mail, then he had to go back

to his parents' house in Peoria, where he would soon go to court

for writing bad checks.

Rod owned a failed laundromat in town and had a lot of debt,

but he was the only person in town I could talk to.

Suddenly, this was no longer true,

and Rod dragged me with him to Peoria

and onto the doorstep of his parents' house.

His fundamentalist parents were already upset

about the bad checks, and I met with a chilly reception.

After asking to see my ID to prove it was

my 18th birthday, they told Rod I would have to go,

they would drive me to the Peoria rescue mission, and drop me off there.

Rod asked if he could please do something with me

for my birthday, but only for a little while.

He promised his parents that we would return shortly.

We went to Farrell's for birthday cake,

and I sat with Rod at the dingy Formica table,

feeling terrified and depressed, as the bubbling waitress

skipped over with my cake slice, eighteen candles blazing,

and said, “Well! Leah's eighteen! And she's here

with her only friend in the world, celebrating her birthday

here at Farrell's. “ She set the cake down triumphantly

in front of me, stood to the side and smirked

as I blew out the candles, and of course it took me

more than one try, because it always did.

There was no reason yet to believe

that life was ever going to be different from this.