Page 29 of All Jacked Up

Ransom: Speaking of relationship status, how are things with editor douchebag?

The high I’d been on sank instantly at the reminder of Arden.

Me: He left. As in left the country. Just upped and poofed.

Ransom: What, is he in trouble with the mob?

Normally, I’d roll my eyes, but this had run through my mind today. That and drugs. Both seemed so bizarre, but I was grasping for something that made sense.

Me: I honestly don’t know.

My cell phone rang.

I never answered calls from numbers I didn’t know. It was always instantly sent to voicemail and ignored.

I also never answered calls from my mother. When I said that there was no communication between us, I meant that I had shut her out of my life the last time she called me, asking for money.

Four years in college, and she’d never called. I had to call her, and after the first year of trying to occasionally contact her, only to get her voicemail, I stopped. It took almost a year before she called me. It was a short conversation, where she asked me if I was still eating too much—which wasn’t something I’d ever really done—and if I had a boyfriend. Then she told me about herself before ending the call.

Another year passed before she called me right beforeChristmas to make sure I knew she wouldn’t be home for it. She didn’t want me “showing up” at her place, “expecting anything.” And she and Dick went on a cruise that he’d won from a radio call-in contest.

I hadn’t been home for the holidays since I’d left. Jellie’s family always invited me to their home, included me in their festivities, and for the first time in my life, I’d experienced the holidays.

The most my mom had ever done when I was growing up was to heat up canned chili and make hot dogs for dinner. I thought, once, there was a small tabletop tree she’d put on the coffee table, but I’d been young. It was a very vague memory.

She didn’t inquire about or show up to my graduation from college. There was noI’m proud of youphone call or congratulations. But I hadn’t expected it from her.

Once I moved to New York for my job, it was two years before she called me. She asked me a few questions about life, then asked me for money. Dick had run off with some other woman, and the rent on the trailer was due. She’d had a car accident and hurt her back, so she wasn’t able to work full-time anymore due to the pain.

I sent her the money.

The next month, it happened again.

When the third month rolled around, she needed money for all her bills and groceries. Like an idiot, I sent it to her.

Then, three days later, I got a call. She’d been arrested when cops showed up to bust a meth lab in the trailer park I’d grown up in. My mother had been inside and using.

Maybe it made me a bad daughter, but I didn’t go back there. I didn’t go try and bail her out. She’d drunk too much most of my childhood, but drugs hadn’t been a part of it.

Dayton Anthony was one of the arresting officers, and he was the one who called me. I’d helped him more than once in high school with a Literature paper he had to write. I asked him tokeep me updated on her, but that was all I did. Hoping that some time behind bars would end the drug use.

Unfortunately, she was released after thirty days, and the calls started up. The third one I answered because she was my mother.

It took her going from unnaturally sweet, to bitching about my not getting her out of jail, to sweet again several times for me to realize she was messed up on something. The violent outbursts continued until I ended the call. She immediately started calling me back.

I blocked her, and I kept her blocked for over a year. A few months ago, I unblocked her number since there had been no calls from the Madison police station. Her first call came a few weeks later. I sent it to voicemail.

She had asked for money.

Instead of blocking her again, I just began sending her to voicemail, along with all the unknown numbers that called my phone. Sometimes, she left a message. Other times, she didn’t, but I always deleted them without listening. She was a negative in my life that I chose to keep out.

I’d give her credit for one thing though. I could write one hell of a messed-up childhood in my books. Drawing emotion from readers through the struggle the heroine had survived was all thanks to the life I’d lived, growing up. Just like Melinda, Jellie’s mom, had given me inspiration for the positive female influences in my writing. They said to write what you knew, and my first three books had been just that. Well, almost. I had no knowledge of the spicy scenes that I wrote.

Arden was my first sexual partner, and he had been nothing like the men in my books. He was boring, worried about his self-gratification solely, then acted as if he’d given me a gift that I should worship at his altar for when it was over. He’d even gloated over the sex scenes I’d written, like he was the one whohad given me the inspiration. I often wondered if he was actually in the bed with us when we had sex since nothing I wrote resembled our sex life.

That was all thanks to the hours of porn I’d watched, researching, making mental notes, as well as writing ideas down. I never got turned on by the live-action sex. The women weren’t very good actresses, and their fake enthusiasm was obvious. But if I ignored that and focused on the things they did, the things the guy said, and added my own imagination to it, I could come up with good material.

The phone began to ring again. Swinging my eyes from my computer screen to the phone, I glared at it. She was insistent today. This had been her sixth call in an hour. Reaching over, I silenced it and went back to the words on my screen. I was at forty-two thousand, and I was stuck. I’d tried deleting a couple of chapters and taking the storyline in another direction, but that hadn’t helped.

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