RE: Trailer Trash 48 pt A (Patreon)

/// Going to use lettering rather than numbering this time because these probably won't wind up as linear, sequential chapter segments. More likely to be iterative new versions of the same content that expand or extrapolate out from the same basic content, that's how a lot of complex conversations with 5+ participants wind up evolving as I work on them.

/// I run through it first with some staple key stuff that illustrates the course of the conversation, then I keep running through it again and again and again from everyone's point of view until all the perspectives and reactions feel right and realistic. So--this isn't part 1 of a multipart series of Chapter 48 sections, this is prototype 1 of Chapter 48's main content; dinner meeting with Tabitha's parents. Wouldn't blame anyone if they pass on this and wait for the complete chapter, just wanted to immediately get back to writing and posting.

   We’re meeting at… an APPLEBEE’S, for the big serious resolution of issues between my immediate family and me, Tabitha was barely able to keep a straight face at the thought. An APPLEBEE’S. Seriously?

   She knew she was nitpicking, she recognized that once again her vaunted future perspective had soured her perspective on things, and it took a moment of forcing herself to consider the alternatives—or lack thereof—when it came to restaurant meeting places in town before she could settle herself down. After all, it could have been a lot worse; they could have been attempting to host this difficult heart-to-heart at the nearby Waffle House.

   I just can’t stop picturing Gary Cole as Ricky Bobby’s dad, making a big scene of getting kicked out of an Applebee’s in TALLADEGA NIGHTS, Tabitha lamented.

   It’s there in my head now. My dad wouldn’t do that—God, I hope not—but the parallels and all of the tongue-in-cheek CLASS themes just won’t get out of my head. The entire Talladega Nights movie was lampooning REDNECK CULTURE, so when they make such a point to emphasize the Applebee’s appearance, as if—I don’t know, as if to say lower class families conflate casual dining with fine dining? The idea sticks in my head. Please, PLEASE dad don’t make a scene and get thrown out of Applebee’s!

    *     *     *

   “You’re growin’ up, Tabitha,” Mr. Moore explained in a weary voice. “You’re goin’ through the phases. I know a’part of this is you wantin’ some personal freedom for yourself, so you can leave the nest, stretch your wings more—and I know with us we don’t have a lot of room for you to stretch your wings, and I understand that. But, the thing is…”

   The man sighed, frowning down at his food for a moment.

   “You’re jus’ now fourteen years old, and you’re not ready to be out on your own yet, you’re just not,” Mr. Moore shook his head. “No one at that age is. I’m not prepared to see anything happen to you, and out on your own—anything can happen to you. I can’t—we can’t—let that happen. Let anything happen to you. We’re not gonna sit back and watch as you go an’ put yourself out there and maybe the world jus’ chews you up and spits you back out.”

   Mrs. Macintire was sitting up in her seat and very obviously about to object to a number of his points, but the woman was paying attention to Tabitha and took the small shake of the head as a warning cue to desist for now.

   “I’m not exactly ‘on my own,’” Tabitha replied in a dry voice. “When they took me in, the Macintires didn’t exactly set me up in a doghouse out in their yard—”

   Sandra snorted at that, and a strained smile appeared for a moment before slipping away—her arms were crossed now, and her irritation with the Moores seemed to now be obvious to everyone at the table except for Mr. Moore.

   “—and I have to say that the level of support, attention, and care that has been provided to me has been nothing short of miraculous,” Tabitha finished. “If your concerns are based on—”

   “There you go again, talkin’ like that,” Mr. Moore interrupted with a scowl. “Like you’re somebody else. Like you’re tryin’ to be somebody else.”

   A flash of irritation—and, jarringly enough, words from a specific Avril Lavigne song—washed through Tabitha’s thoughts and jumbled up the careful and concise line of rebuttals she had to his assertion that she was ‘out there on her own in a cruel, uncaring world.’ This was even better. Now they were somehow already passing the frivolous arguments that had no weight or merit and getting towards the real meat of the matter, and Tabitha was just as prepared to cut into all that.

   “That is part of growing up, isn’t it?” Tabitha shot back at him. “Or, should I tuck my wings firmly in, and keep them there? Will you brook no attempt to fly? Should I make no attempt to grow up before an arbitrary amount of time passes—and then hope that, at eighteen and only at eighteen, I magically transform overnight into a mature, fully-formed adult?”

   “Tabitha,” Mr. Moore warned. “Now, you know that’s not what I meant.”

   “No, I’m sure it wasn’t,” Tabitha wanted in some part to flinch back at the animosity she heard in her own voice. “Your meaning hews instead towards class, doesn’t it? In which case, what do you even identify me as in the first place, that you find yourself so uncomfortable with me attempting to act like someone else? What am I? Simple small town girl? Your humble blue-collar daughter? An ordinary Kentucky country girl? Redneck, poor kid—white trash?”

   “Tabitha,” Karen Williams reined her back in, and Tabitha rocked back in her seat, realizing her overwhelming teenage emotions had started getting the better of her again. She had good arguments—she had so many good arguments here, but there was a deceptive amount of difficulty in articulating them here in front of everyone without losing her cool.

   “We’re all on the same side here, and we’re all here for Tabitha,” Karen reminded everyone. “We all want what’s best for her, and I know we can agree on that—or come to an agreement on what that winds up meaning.”

   “In my opinion,” Sandra jumped in, “this isn’t so much about class, or resources, or socio—socio-whatever, this is just about method and manner of parenting. If—”

   “Sandy,” Karen now turned in exasperation to try to moderate her friend, but Tabitha was already realizing that everyone at this table was sitting on their own topical powderkeg. And all of the fuses seemed to be lit at once.

   “No, let me finish,” Mrs. Macintire waved Karen down. “If there are communication issues between parent and child so stark as to allow a heroin addict into their home, despite of all of Tabitha’s warnings and comments about it—that’s a huge problem!”

   “Now hold up, we still don’t know for sure that Lisa was—” Mr. Moore started to argue.

   “Yes we do,” Sandra talked over him. “Yes. We. Do. The heroin was found on her, she tested positive for it, for Christ’s sake they put her on Methadone to manage her withdrawal—”

   “Okay, let’s settle down, settle down,” Mrs. Williams restrained Mrs. Macintire with a hand on her shoulder and turned in her seat to face outside their table area. “Sorry about that, honey. We’ll keep our voices down!”

   “Uh, no no—you’re fine!” A wide-eyed waitress blurted out in an apologetic tone. “Please, don’t even mind me. Was just gonna cut in and see if any o’ y’all needed a refill on anything. I can come back?”

   “Pepsi, please?” Tabitha spoke up, feeling her cheeks burn at the reminder that they were doing this in an Applebee’s.

   The waitress awkwardly stepped over and leaned in past Tabitha’s shoulder to pour more ice and soda pop into her glass from the jug she was carrying, and then the poor worker promptly excused herself again. Silence lingered heavily around the table following the interruption however, and Mrs. Williams took the opportunity to shoot Sandra a look and then attempt to clear the air a bit.

   “Mister Moore, you hold family as inviolable, and I can understand that and respect that,” Mrs. Williams said. “I know you love Tabitha, and want the best for her! She’s your daughter. I just think this ‘family’ mindset of yours, where family can just do no wrong, gave you a bit of a blind spot when it came to this Lisa woman! Maybe the way you see her, or the way she is around you all led into that somehow, and it just becomes difficult to believe a problem like drug abuse could be so close to home. Which is—it’s understandable—”

   “I can’t, and won’t, forgive willful ignorance when heroin winds up around minors,” Sandra sniped with a frosty expression before Karen could stop her.

   “—It’s—yes, that is a huge problem, but I think we can all agree no one could have expected it or seen something like this coming in a nice area like Springton,” Mrs. Williams hurried to finish. “This was going to be crazy news to all of us, and if I’d heard it but not seen the evidence myself, I’m not sure I’d have believed it, either. Who would? Heroin? In Springton?”

   “It was obvious enough that a minor caught all the signs,” Sandra refused to relent.

   Tabitha couldn’t help but chafe at the continuous emphasis on her being underage, but she did appreciate the thrust of Mrs. Macintire’s argument. After all, the woman had her own experiences, she’d married a police officer, and she had her own daughter to look out for. Mrs Macintire’s stance of zero tolerance on heroin was completely sensible.

   There was temptation again for Tabitha to mention that the D.A.R.E. programs at school could have clued her into factors more quickly than her parents, but also she wasn’t confident bringing that forward to the scrutiny of so many adults at once. Tabitha had been absent from public school for some time now, and she couldn’t recall any appreciable Drug Abuse Resistance Education lessons since reliving this part of her life.

   “Tabitha honey—what was it that first caught your attention regarding your Aunt?” Mrs. Williams passed the ball back to her court.

   “It—um,” Tabitha swallowed. “I think I always suspected. When she actually just showed up that one night recently, she barged in around midnight hammering on our door—that’s when I couldn’t help but look for signs. All the signs were there.”

   The truth had never felt like such a lie, and Tabitha immediately felt guilt wash through her upon saying all of that out loud. The fact of the matter was that in her first life, Tabitha had been completely ignorant of Lisa’s heroin addiction; it was simply an offhand fact she heard from her parents years and years later, something her parents had discovered when Tabitha was already well into her twenties. There hadn’t even been any opportunity for the original Tabitha to suspect anything, either—aunt Lisa had disappeared from their lives after uncle Danny was incarcerated. It was only a unique set of circumstances and rumor of settlement money that by chance brought her back this time through.

   “Can you be more specific?” Mrs. Williams pressed.

   “In regards to…?” Tabitha wavered. “In regards to specific needle abuse symptoms I observed, or pertaining to insight into Aunt Lisa as a person that first led me to suspect her?”

   Mrs. Williams exchanged glances with the Moores and than Mrs. Macintire before turning her gaze back towards Tabitha, and Tabitha inwardly cursed at realizing her language had turned clinical again.

   “Anything you can give us, just whatever comes to mind, hon.”

   “Okay,” Tabitha took a deep breath as she gathered her thoughts. “There are two traits I would first use to characterize my aunt Lisa by; her having poor impulse control, and her having little to no regard for consequences. When I found out my uncle had committed a serious crime and was facing prison time, I wasn’t surprised at all. I had subconsciously already put my aunt and uncle in roughly that same mental box, and any such news would just fall within my expectations. I think maybe only my father was actually shocked by the news.”

   “Well o’course I was!” Mr. Moore seemed both angry and indignant. “It was just—it was stupid, what he did. Stupid.”

   “Yes,” Tabitha agreed. “But, that fit perfectly with what I thought of him and Lisa.”

   “So that’s it, then,” Mr. Moore’s voice rose. “That’s what you think of us—you think we’re all stupid?!”

   “She said him and Lisa,” Grandma Laurie pointed out, speaking for the first time. “Alan, she didn’t say you, she didn’t say you all, she didn’t say her whole family is stupid, but Lord help me, with the way you’re—”

   “We’re, we’re getting sidetracked,” Mrs. Williams held up her hands. “Let’s just let Tabitha say her piece, okay?”

   “The rest is all obvious,” Tabitha gave the table of adults a small shrug. “The puncture marks were there if you looked for them. She was twitchy. Unusually possessive of her handbag, never had it out of arm’s reach or even away from being tucked in under her arm like she had it. It was suspicious. My first thought was that she’d stolen something.”

   And I think she DID, the last of my codeine tablets still turned up missing.

/// Obviously jumps around and omits a ton of stuff (arrival at Applebee's, setup, initial conversation and niceties, presents, etc. just wanted to jump back into writing and posting ASAP considering the circumstances rather than leave everyone hanging. Mrs. Shannon Moore IS present in this section, but will be mostly silent any time she's in a large group of people or there is confrontation going on, I don't start to seed in her reactions until later passes, want them to be scarce but punchy.

Can only say that when it rains, it pours. Extreme cold temperatures and no running water went right into burst pipes, flooding, and water damage (with the cold temps disappearing like it was a bad dream?) The night before / day of finally getting a plumber I was already into severe food poisoning & a fever of some kind, I'm just now getting through the last of that (I hope) and waiting on whatever next shoe is about to drop on me. 

Heavy focus on RE:TT right now, am trying to sprint through a chapter completion because the big announcement I was 200% prepared for last month got delayed to this month, where I happen to be 0% prepared. Will redo Patreon tiers at start of Feb when I have appreciable writing content, only want to focus on writing right now. Cannot justify hiking prices when have not posted in so long.