Page 7 of Southie
Boston wasn’t my cup of tea.
I hated it.
I detested everything about the place.
The weather. The traffic. Everything.
And to top it off, I had no friends and no life outside of school and my father’s business.
I pulled my jacket tighter around my body, but it did little to stave off the chill that crept into my bones. While sitting on the cracked and faded benches of the city bus on the way to the gym, I wiped the fogged window and watched the world pass by.
How much my life had changed in such a brief time was what I thought about as the heavy snowfall coated every surface in a blanket of white.
Mama had been dead six months, and everyone had moved on with their lives like she never existed, including me.
After my mother died, after a brief battle with ovarian cancer, there was no way I was going to let my father move here and run the gym by himself. Boston was so far from home, so far from the family we’d left, but he’d been adamant this was the best place for him to start over.
So, it became the best place for me to start over too.
In a downward spiral, my father had been angry all the time after she passed. He blamed himself for not pushing her to go see the doctor earlier. He blamed God for taking her away from him and blamed me for being around.
Lost without her, he became cruel.
No matter how bitter he’d become, if he’d made the move alone and something happened to him, it would have been devastating.
He was all I had left.
My father, Roland Jennings, was from a small rural South Carolina town on the South and North Carolina border. My mother, Carolyn, had come from a town twenty minutes from my father’s hometown on the North Carolina side of the border. Even though he grew up poor and came from nothing, he’d traveled the country as a prizefighter and was fortunate enough to gain his wealth that way.
After announcing Boston as the place where he wanted us to start over, I questioned his decision, but he’d been adamant that other than his hometown, Boston was the one place that called out to him, whatever that meant. So, as soon as my mother lost her battle with cancer, we packed up everything we had. He put my childhood home on the market, and we moved up North.
In one of our calmer conversations, he’d confessed living there with the memories of her had been torture. He’d sworn it was driving him insane. Although she was dead and gone, he swore he saw her everywhere. He smelled her favorite perfume in every room of the house and heard her voice whispering throughout the halls of our suburban home. Though I hadn’t experienced what he had, I understood how the love he shared with her drove him close to madness once she died. They’d been together for over twenty-five years, twenty of those wonderful years being married.
This move wouldn't only be a fresh start for my father, but for me too. I, at least, hoped it would be because he wasn’t the only one running from the ghosts of the past, even though I didn’t believe running would be an option much longer for me. Although I welcomed a fresh start, I just wished he’d picked somewhere warmer.
We settled in the Roxbury neighborhood in Boston. It was nice and quiet but different from our old neighborhood back in North Carolina. Boston was nothing like Charlotte. I missed the warm sunny weather. I even missed the North Carolina winters. While living in North Carolina, I’d hated the winter and longed for the warmer months. It was cold, but nowhere near Boston cold.
And our winters were nothing like these. I had no clue how to survive in this weather. I’d have to get a whole new winter wardrobe to survive it.
Never in my life had I seen so much snow. On both hands, I could count the number of times I’d seen snowfall in my lifetime, and it sure as hell wasn’t anything like what was falling right now.
At this moment, I was thankful for public transportation because there was no way driving in this kind of weather was possible. Back home, reports of snow shut everything down and the city became a ghost town. Here, everyone went on about their lives like it was nothing.
My throat constricted. The pain of her loss and the guilt of me moving along with my life so soon after her death hit me hard. After her death, emotion swept over me and depression set in. I’d lost no one close to me before her, so I’d assumed this was the normal process of grieving.
I rubbed my chest as if it would wipe the pain away. I slumped down further into the brown leather cushioned seat of the bus, blocking out the chatter of the other passengers and the rev of the bus’s motor as the driver shifted gears to pull off from the stoplight.
While my father argued with me daily about using public transportation to move throughout the city, today, I used this time to contemplate whether this move was even the right thing for me.
My life was a mess back home. I’d decided without thinking of the consequences of moving forward past the death of my mother, getting away fromhim,and what that meant for me.
I left my old life behind, but at what cost?
The elderly lady sitting beside me pulled me from my thoughts by touching my arm.
“You aren’t from around here are you, child?”
Her thick Boston accent caused me to smile. Bostonians' accents always brought a smile to my face although it took a little while to decipher what they were saying. I was sure they thought the same way about my southern accent.
