Working in the Dark

As best as I can remember, my mother Trudy and I boarded the Greyhound bus in Augusta. We couldn’t depart from the station in the little Middle Georgia town where we had lived. Trudy was afraid that her abuser, my father, would catch us. So friends had secretly driven us to a terminal some miles away.

With one-way tickets in hand, we fled to Miami at the beginning of the summer of my eleventh year. In the divorce, my father had kept the house and the only car. The courts held him to one-dollar-a-day child support and no alimony. The child support never arrived. My mother had supported us on hourly wages from a local factory, catching a ride to and from work with sympathetic coworkers.

To buy those tickets and to provide us a cushion in our new setting, my mother had saved what she could and had sold…