The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [6]
“What are you doing?” she asked her father.
“I’ll show you,” he said. He quickly left the house, returning minutes later with a bottle of red wine. He poured her a glass, encouraged her to drink it, and when she was happily dizzy, he led her into the back bedroom.
Malinda came home from class minutes later. She opened the bedroom door to find her husband lying naked on the bed with their daughter.
The fighting lasted most of the night. Senior tried to convince his wife that nothing had happened, but Malinda had seen. Her rage re-erupted the next morning even stronger. As they screamed and yelled at each other, Senior rounded up all three children and put them in the car. Malinda followed him to the driveway, demanding that he leave the children with her. When he refused and prepared to get in the driver’s seat, she tried to wrestle the keys away from him. He shoved her hard to the ground, then jumped into the car. As he drove off, Malinda was still on her back in the driveway, kicking and screaming for him to return the kids.
Days later, the police would pick her up from wandering the streets and take her to Elgin Mental Health Center, where she would be diagnosed with severe depression and spend the next month undergoing treatment.
Art never knew what caused the fight. Because of their individual shames, no one ever told him the truth about what his father had done. In Art’s childhood mind, everything congealed around the bizarre incident with Connie, and for years he’d harbor a vague shame that it had all been his fault—the work of the vengeful spirit inside him.
SENIOR DROVE STRAIGHT TO ANICE’S house in Schaumburg. She had a room prepared for Art junior and his siblings, and welcomed them in as if she’d been expecting their arrival for weeks. Senior told his children flatly, “This is your new mother, we’ll be living with her from now on.”
Art’s first instinct was to not trust her; the last time he’d seen Anice, after all, his mother was pounding on her face. But he quickly grew to like her. Anice employed all the dialogical tricks that suggest coziness, calling Art and Wensdae “kiddo” and “honey” and even referring to Jason as “my baby.” She was particularly affectionate when Art senior was present. Over the next several months she cooked for them, played games with them, and seemed remarkably unperturbed by the fact that she had gone from two kids to five overnight.
Anice’s own children, Larry and Chrissy, were older than Art junior—Larry by four years and Chrissy by two. Larry, a budding jock who had always wanted a younger brother, duly drafted Art junior as his number one sports buddy, a role Art junior happily embraced. They’d play basketball at the courts at a nearby school on an almost daily basis, and Little Art beamed when the older boy began calling him “bro.” Chrissy, a gabby little blonde, was less enthused by the three new “brats” who had taken over the house, but she eventually came to love them. Neither of Anice’s kids had any relationship with their own father, and Art junior noticed that early on Anice encouraged them to call Art senior “Dad.” Art junior called Anice by her name.
The kids were just adapting to the new arrangement when Malinda was released from the hospital. She quickly got an apartment in Arlington Heights and a job cleaning houses, then demanded that Art senior give her custody of the kids under threat of bringing in the law. Even though her mental stability was questionable, he made no attempt to resist.
ART JUNIOR AND HIS SIBLINGS didn’t see their father for several months after rejoining Malinda. Senior called the house numerous times and spoke to the kids, but Malinda, horrified by what she had seen at Uncle Rich’s, refused to allow him to visit. He swore to her that nothing had happened—he had experienced a moment of weakness, but her entrance into the room had prevented it from going further. He loved his daughter and would never let that happen again. Malinda experienced a moment of weakness