Chapter 11: Adieu

We move in a few days, and we have received word that the buyer of this home we're about to leave will be putting up a fence. Wise choice, I suppose. So, the Ambrosia Files are coming to a close. I'd been thinking for a while that Ambrosia must've run off to Alabama with her sister. Having gone into my yard at least a half dozen times without having her black-clad body appear in the doorway with a cigarette in hand, it just seemed she had made an exit. Also, the last time I saw her, she mentioned she was thinking about leaving Steve and heading down to Mobile. "I'm afraid my ex-husband would get me for kidnapping," she said. "So, I thought about just leaving the kids with Steve and getting out of here. I got family. I'm sick of his ass. But then my ex would probably get me for abandonment."

"And you'd miss them," I answered, hopefully.

She gave me a sideways like-heck look and said, "Harlan is getting on my fuckin' nerves so bad. I don't think so."

But she clearly got a second wind and decided to persevere, because when I went out to barbecue with my husband yesterday, there she was. She was standing in a semi-circle of lawnchairs occupied by what appeared to be a few of the extras from Deliverance. As soon as she spotted me, Ambrosia came skipping -- yes, skipping -- over to get me. She fairly giddily took me by the hand and led me from my yard, giggling as she half-whispered, "You gotta meet my dad. I swear he looks like a hillbilly chimp." She's mentioned her father's likeness to a monkey before, but I honestly couldn't see it when I met him. I just saw a weathered speck of a man with no teeth, sitting spread-legged next to an enormously round woman in a muu-muu and who also had no teeth. This was Ambrosia's mother, and she actually spit on the grass just before she shook my hand.

Later that evening, Ambrosia brought Meddow into our yard to play dolls with my daughter, Abigail. I don't know where it came from, but as they were making their dolls do cartwheels and kiss, she just sort of blurted out that her parents used to be complete drunks. "I remember drinking beer when I was about three or four," she said. "And having them make me rum-and-cokes when I was about seven. They used to let me stay up drinking myself silly, or they'd bring me liquor as I waited for them in the car. We drank all the time at home. I'd be sick in the bathroom at 4 a.m., go to bed for a couple of hours, and then be off to school for the day." I add this up in my head with the story she once told me of watching her first porno with her parents, when she was thirteen, and I think how amazing it is that Ambrosia is as okay as she is. I realize why she never drinks when her kids are home, even if they're in bed. I realize how hard it is to be Ambrosia and how she's no longer a joke to me anymore.