My mom lost the house on Puget Sound, also part of the restitution, and moved home to Richland, and toward the end of my father’s sentence, she married him and became pregnant with me. Not long after I was born, my father started an affair with the wife of a minister. My mother found out about that when the credit-card bills for Seattle hotel rooms came to our house.
It’s a complicated thing, knowing how much pain my father caused in my life and the lives of others whom I love, yet still holding love for him in my heart. No matter what he did, he was my father. He helped create the person I am. He showered me with love; he just didn’t know how to be a husband or a father or a responsible member of society. Yes, he was a con man. Yes, he was a ladies man. Yes, he was unreliable at best and a criminal at worst.
If I hadn’t made peace with him later in my life, I’d still be bitter and angry.
V.
After we got evicted, and moved into a duplex in a low-rent part of Richland, we still had occasional contact with my father. My mother didn’t bar him from our lives because she knew how much we loved him. He would promise to come and take us out for ice cream or come to our soccer games, and then he wouldn’t show. I remember waiting hours for him. Sometimes he would give me a card with a check inside, and I would ask my mother if the check was any good. Even as a little girl, I was learning not to take things at face value.
One afternoon I came home from school. My mom was at work as usual. My dog, Charlotte, wasn’t rushing to the door to greet me. Something seemed odd. Then I heard a noise down in the unfinished basement. “Come downstairs and see me, Baby Hope,” my dad called.
To my delight, my father was in our unfinished basement. Marcus came home, and we all hung out down there: the kids, Dad, and our sheepdog, Charlotte. We wrestled and laughed. It was a great treat. But we knew to keep it a secret from my mother. We knew he wasn’t supposed to be there: he had broken in and was crashing on our old couch at night. Eventually, of course, my mother found out. But instead of immediately tossing him out, she let him stay until he found another place to sleep.
Looking back, I realize my mother was pretty remarkable. She put up with a lot because my brother and I idolized our dad. Though she harbored her own demons, she had a kind heart. But there was only so much she could take. The breaking point came in July 1989.
My mother had already moved on: there was a new man in her life, Glenn Burnett. That created more tension in our household—Marcus and I weren’t ready for a new parent—and my father’s behavior was becoming more and more erratic. One weekend he took Marcus to Seattle without permission and had an accident—a car crash at an intersection. Marcus wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and hit the windshield. He was OK, but the crack in the windshield was clear evidence of my father’s recklessness. My father phoned in bomb threats to the Richland credit union and was arrested, a swat team kicking down his door and his name printed in the local paper. He wasn’t particularly good at covering his tracks, whether it was leaving photos in the car glove compartment or having his phone number traced. My mother thinks the bomb-threat stunt was a ploy to distract from the fact that he was siphoning money out of her account.
After that arrest, my father was allowed to see us one night a week at the Bali Hi Motel, where he was living. But after awhile, he couldn’t afford the motel and started living in the office of Chilly Willy, a packaged-food processing plant where he had a part-time job. When my mother found out that that was where her children were staying when he took them out, she put her foot down. She had just married Glenn and was trying to create a stable home. She wasn’t going to have her children sleeping on the floor of Chilly Willy, even though we thought grabbing food out of the giant freezer and unrolling sleeping bags on the office floor was a treat.
One afternoon when I was seven, while my mother was at work, my dad picked up Marcus and me to take us to the Little League All-Star game in Yakima. Marcus was eleven and was upset that he hadn’t made the all-star team, and my dad wanted him to experience the game. But we never stopped in Yakima. We kept going, all the way to Seattle.
We were excited, going to the big city with our dad. He made sure it was a special trip. We had ice cream and Chinese food and went to the Space Needle and the Pacific Science Center. We stayed in a hotel. It was like a vacation.
But back in Richland, it was the beginning of a nightmare. As my mom waited and waited and the hours ticked by, she realized her children had been kidnapped by their unreliable father. She didn’t know if we even knew our phone number or the address of the new house we lived in with Glenn. She borrowed my grandpa’s truck and drove all the way to Seattle on what
