Kristin and Jim lived about six miles away. They entered Mamaw’s dark-paneled living room as night was falling, and things started out awkwardly. In the midst of Mamaw’s fussing over getting everyone soda and a snack, Kim realized that she couldn’t find the nerve to ask. Instead, they sat, Kristin and Jim on the couch, Kim on the piano stool, Mamaw flitting through the room like a butterfly, taking her armchair, rising to the kitchen, and returning. Kim recalls that they “talked, had a few good laughs.” As Kim recalls, the closest she came to asking what she really wanted to know was her question “Why don’t you ever come see me?”
But she knew the answer before Kristin gave it: Annette didn’t want her around. Kim accepted this; the moment passed, and so did the opportunity to ask The Question.
Two years later, Mamaw died, prompting “the funeral of the century. I’m there at the funeral home with my real family, and my bio family is there, every last one of them, including my sister, and my grandma by blood, and this cousin named Dewey, and he was a really nice guy, and you have to remember, I haven’t seen any of these people in years. Once Mom found out about that night at Mamaw’s, we had us a real crackdown. But my mom is upset that her Mama’s dead, and she’s all raw inside, and all she sees is me hanging out with the enemy instead of by her side. Please keep in mind I was only twelve. There were a lotta things I didn’t get then that I can see now.”
Tension mounted. Annette had wanted her daughter to read a poem Annette had written for Mamaw, but when the time came, she told Kim not to trouble herself, stood, and read it in her own breaking voice. From then until Kim left home for good, that funeral became “the festering sore that could not close.” The first insult thrown in an argument, the baseline measurement against which everything Kim did wrong as a daughter was pitted, the yardstick for inadequate parenting: Mamaw’s funeral.
Kim describes her teenage years as “ups and down, just like any teen and her parents.” Options not available to a more traditionally formed family didn’t help. When it became difficult to deal with her mom, Kim had “another mother,” a woman she didn’t think of as Mom but could turn to if she wanted to leave home. Of course, between the normal teen angst and the added weight of “too much family” in a tight geographic space, she inevitably did. One night in the middle of a fight that included the funeral yet again, Kim packed a bag, called Kristin and Jim to inform them that she was on her way, and left.
She stayed two, maybe three weeks in Kristin and Jim’s trailer that first time, until her mother came over and begged her to come home. Annette swore things would be different. Kim’s dad (Rick) was an alcoholic; he never raised a hand to either of them, but he yelled. A lot. Annette was the classic description of bipolar, although not formally diagnosed. Kim had grown adept over the years at interpreting how her mother’s footsteps sounded coming into the kitchen; treads ranging from light to heavy indicated what kind of day Annette was having, and consequently what kind of day Kim and her dad could plan to have.
Kim doesn’t feel victimhood or hold grudges about the alcoholism or the bipolarity. “I knew she loved me, and if it was a different kind of love than I wanted, she was still my mom. I went back, but every time we’d get to fighting, I’d pack or she’d up and tell me to pack. It was like the yo-yo from Hell, back and forth up and down the road between the two of them.”
Crazy-glue families splintered and put back together in mismatching patterned pieces abound in the rest of the world just as much as in Coalton. Adrian LeBlanc’s dissertation-turned-narrative entitled Random Family is set in New York City; it’s an excellent read on the myriad ways people in big cities create affiliations regardless of DNA’s bonds. Paula McLain’s memoir Like Family describes a similar confusion of foster care life in California. The added burden in places like Kim’s back holler is, odds are good that some of your neighbors are part of your crazy-glue family, while others are members of your blood kin. Some are both. Thus the networks of dysfunction are smaller, tighter, and probably sharing the same roads to get to and from most places. You can run; you can hide; but by the time you’ve settled into your secret refuge, someone in the community has called both your mothers to tell them where you’re staying.
In my bookstore hangs a tea towel embroidered with the saying “In a small town, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know what you’re doing, because somebody else does.” When Kim and Hutton saw it during her interview, she laughed.
“That,” she says, pointing. “That.”
Kim left home on extended-family couch-surfing adventures more and more as the years rolled by—not least because she found an ally next door to Kristin’s in her maternal grandmother’s husband, the man who with his wife had raised Janice (Kim’s older sister). Grandpa and Grandma owned the farmhouse whose yard hosted Kristin and Jim’s trailer.
“I loved him from the minute I met him. The first time I met him, we were at a birthday party, one of those crazy times with the whole holler there, family, friends, kit and caboodle, and I walked up to him and said, ‘I bet you don’t know who I am,’ and he said, ‘Yes, I do, you’re my granddaughter Kim.’ And I loved him from that minute on.”
Kim stayed with Kristin most of the summer between her sophomore and junior years of high school. One afternoon she came out of the house, upset from a phone call with Annette. Grandpa was sitting on the porch, drinking beer. He listened to her tale of woe and then said, “I wish I’d taken you in myself.”
Kim started crying.
“It was one of the best conversations I ever had with him, over beer. He loved his beer.” Kim’s smile speaks volumes as her eyes fill again with tears.
Emphysema took Grandpa the next summer; Kim went home and remained there until two weeks after her eighteenth birthday, during her senior year of high school. Then she moved back in with Jim and Kristin, remaining through graduation. Annette told her husband they would not attend their daughter’s ceremony after such a display of ingratitude and disrespect. By this time, Jim was terminally ill, but the man responsible for Kim’s leaving home at the age of three came in his wheelchair, Kristin pushing it, to watch Kim graduate.
“Family is weird,” Kim says. “That’s all.”
Kim recognized that more than one rite of passage lay at hand. Her maternal grandmother (widow of her beloved Grandpa) hugged Kim at the graduation party and said, “Now you’ll come join us for good.” Although she had moved back after her birthday with that intention, Kim felt in the moment of that hug that her decision wasn’t just about where she was going to live or who her mother and father “really” were. The time had come to accept or break with the patterns repeating around her. To ignore the community judging Rick for returning early from his stint in Iraq to look after Annette when she contracted cancer. (When he pointed out that Annette couldn’t look after their daughter alone while sick, fellow members of his church said, “She’s not your daughter. You should’ve stayed and done your duty.”) To reject living like Kristin, who took in and raised her husband Jim’s grandson after he had refused to help raise her daughters. Not to be like her sister, Janice, whose oldest child was adopted by his foster family and her second son placed with Kristin after she petitioned the court via KinCare.
“That holler was one big merry-go-round of people taking care of everybody else’s kids, and a community acting fit to judge everybody else for it.” The generation that didn’t raise their own kids wound up raising their grandchildren.
Realizing that “the only way to make money there for a woman was build a meth lab or become a nurse,” Kim followed in her father’s footsteps and joined the army. Packing in as much travel and education as she could, she made friends with people from very different places, got informally adopted by the family of her best friend in Canada, and turned herself into a stable adult. “It was me or nobody who was going to make that happen. So I did it.”
The tension with her mother never resolved. “She was proud of me. My dad was proud of me. But we never really got it together.”
After