Kayla from social services was a six-foot-tall black woman with shoulder-length dreadlocks festooned with colorful red, blue, and yellow pony beads. At one time, she’d played center on the North High School girl's basketball team and still holds a record for scoring thirty-seven points in a game. Their team was a powerhouse and won the Class A state tournament four years in a row when she played with them.
I didn’t know her for all that. I knew her because I’d been picked up for vagrancy and taken to her office. Again. Fifth time in a year. This time by an over-eager rookie cop named Bellison who didn’t like the fact that I laughed in his fat face when he told me to move along from behind the dumpster next to the backdoor of Arnold’s Café where I’d crashed.
“Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, what am I going to do with you?” Kayla asked, taking off her glasses and massaging her eyes after looking over the incident report. She shook her head causing her beads to click-clack against one another. Then she looked at me straight on, “Tell, me, girl. Really. What am I going to do?”
We’d known each other for like two years. Ever since I started running away. I kind of liked her. Sort of.
“Well, for starters, maybe talk to that idiot Bellison,” I told her, pointing arbitrarily over my shoulder. “Let him that I’m not a menace to society.”
And I wasn’t either.
But I had been living on the streets off and on since I was twelve. I won’t bore you with the details, you’ve heard the story before: bad home life; father is a drunk and abusive when he drinks; mother copes by drinking with him; older child (me) has to take care of younger siblings (my brother and sister.) Social services steps in. Father leaves. Mother tries to clean up her act. Doesn’t. Older kid (me, again) has to step in. Mother goes to treatment. Comes out. Starts drinking again. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Sometimes, my charming home life got to be a little too much, and I’d have to leave my younger brother Raffe and sister Nikki to fend for themselves. What can I say? No one’s perfect. I’m fourteen and entitled to a life, right? Sometimes I just needed to get away.
You already know my name is Ruby. I like the name. My grandmother Jade worked for a fireworks manufacturing company in central Wisconsin. Her favorite color purple was produced when a chemical called rubidium was added to the mixture they used to make those high-flying rockets that exploded into colors that streamed down like rain. Ruby came from rubidium. Being clever was not something my mom was known for, but I always thought it was kind of cool how she came up with my name.
She told it to me this way when I first asked about it. I was probably five years old at the time. “Yeah, your grandma was a crackerjack of a person. Always interested in learning stuff,” she said, lighting a Camel and blowing out the smoke. “I think at one time she wanted to be a teacher, but,” she took a drag, “your grandma never had a chance.” She looked at me, “Her family wasn’t very supportive.”
Nowadays, I laugh when I think about that conversation. Supportive. Yeah, right. Try drunk all the time. Or on drugs. That’d be more to the point. It obviously ran in the family.
Back then, though, that five-year-old me was suddenly sad. “Really, mom?” I remember saying, “That’s too bad.” I felt bad Grandma couldn’t do what she wanted to do. I was a naïve little kid and didn’t’ know any better.
One main thing stuck with me, though. Jade did really sound like a ‘cracker jack’ of a person. I mean what’s not to like about having a relative who had a job making fireworks? My best friend Carmen had a grandmother who grew up on a farm milking cows and collecting eggs from chickens. You know what I have say to say about that? Boring with a capital B. Give me Grandma Jade anytime. I only wish I could have met her, but she died before I was born. The factory she was working in blew up killing her and ten other employees. I read about it online. It was pretty bad.
Anyway, Kayla brought me back to the reality of my vagrancy situation by saying, “I’ve called your mother. She’s coming to get you.”
Damn it. I sat up tall, all ninety-five pounds and four feet eleven inches of me, and said, “I don’t want to go back there.”
“Well, you have to, Ruby. You’re fourteen years old. You’re a minor. You can’t be on the streets. It’s not a good life and it certainly isn’t safe.”
I gave her my sullen, heard-it-all-before look. Screw you, Kayla, I thought to myself. I was going to add, I thought you were my friend but didn’t because she wasn’t my friend. It occurred to me right then and there Kayla was just another bureaucrat, who, even though she was young and hip-looking, in the end, could have cared less about me. Who needed the aggravation? Or her?
I made myself unclench my fists and took a deep breath to calm down. I’ll admit, I have a little bit of an issue with my temper and what they call anger management. At least that’s what counselors call it whenever I talk to them. Which isn’t too often.
I made eye contact with Kayla and tried to be sincere. “Look, I know you’re trying to help.”
“I am.”
“I’m just not ready to go home yet. Mom is drinking again and Raffe and Nikki are driving me nuts.”
She checked her file on me. “Your brother and sister are eleven and nine, right?”
“Yeah, and they both can be a real pain in the ass.”
Kayla set the file down. “Look, I know it’s hard.”
I was sick of this. “No, you don’t,” I punctuated my words by jabbing my finger at her. “You don’t know me at all.” I started to get up out of my chair. I was pretty wound up, “Let me put it to you another way: I don’t need your pity.”
Kayla put out her hands to placate me. “Ruby, sit down. Please. You’ve got to let us help you.”
I sat down and held my hands in my lap to stop them from shaking. Adrenaline or something. “I’m fine,” I told, through my clenched teeth. “It’s my mom who needs help.”
“I know. We’re working on that.” She was quiet for a moment and made a note in my file. “Look, all I can promise is that we’ll keep doing welfare checks on her. You know Mel and Jackie. We’ll send one or the other over every day to see how things are going. But for now, you’ve got to go home and be with your siblings. It’s just the way it has to be. You’ve got to tough it out.”
I doubt that she expected my reaction because I certainly didn’t. But right then and there it was as if my mind exploded. I literally saw red.
“What do you think I’ve been doing!” I yelled, jumping to my feet. I slammed the chair back and it fell to the floor. “Tough it out is my middle name!” I know it made no sense, but I’d had it.
Kayla quickly stood up, her athletic six-foot-tall body towering over me. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’ve had enough of this crap. I’m out of here.”
I ran out of the office with the sound of her voice trailing me down the hall, “Ruby, get back here. We aren’t done yet.”
Ha. I thought to myself. Maybe in your world we aren’t, but in my world I am. I made it outside without getting caught and started running. I knew what I had to do, and headed for the bus station.
* * *
I love telling that story. I love it, I guess, because it eventually had a happy ending, and in my life, there hadn’t been a lot of them up until that point. Like none, actually. I took the Greyhound to Wisconsin to the town where my grandma Jade used to live. They’d rebuilt the fireworks factory and I got a job working there. I found a room to rent in a big old house run by a kindly lady who could have been the grandmother I never had. Fortunately, for my sake, she couldn’t see too well. After all, I was only fourteen. So, I kept a low profile and saved my money. I began to make a life for myself.
When I was eighteen, I moved into an apartment, and when I was twenty, I got my brother and sister away from my mom and had them come and live with me. They’re doing all right. Mom? Don’t ask. Once a drunk always a drunk in my book. I don’t have anything to do with her.
Kayla? Well, that’s another story. We’re friends and we get together pretty often. She calls me one of her success stories.
“Yeah, little girl,” she sometimes says when we meet for coffee. “You were going nowhere fast, weren’t you?”
“You got that right,” I tell her. “Until I ran off to Wisconsin.”
She just laughs. “And I let you go. I knew you’d make something of yourself.”
Which was a load of crap and we both knew it. Kayla was overworked at her job and only let me go because she had no choice. I was not only vagrant material, but headstrong. There was no way she or anyone was ever going to reign me in.
But, as they say, ‘that’s all water over the dam.’ I’m happy enough. I’ve got a job, a place to live and now my brother and sister are with me. I’ve broken the family cycle and I’m proud of it. So, all I have left to say is this, even if it does sound corny, “Sometimes things really do work out for the best.”
Oh, and one other thing. The fireworks I make are awesome. Especially the purple ones.
The Piker Press moderates all comments.
Click here for the commenting policy.