My Birthday

I believe we stayed at the shelter for about a week and a half, maybe two weeks. At that point, we thought it was enough time for things to cool down and we could perhaps head back to my mother's house. "S" and I had moved in with my mother.

It was coming up on my 14th birthday and I wanted to have a slumber party. I invited my closest friends. Although I had told my best friend one or two things about staying with "K" and "S", it never came up and I don't know that she ever shared it with the others. They never knew we had just come back from a shelter, all they knew was that I had gone to California with my mother for Spring break.

It was time to settle down and we had decided we would all sleep in the living room, which was at the front of the house by the road. Most of the lights were out and my friends and I were talking quietly, while my mother read upstairs in her room. The road my mother lives on is a very quiet country road, not many cars travel it in a day and if they do, they are most likely locals. All of a sudden we heard a shout from the road. A man's voice yelling that he loves "S", at the top of his lungs. My friends and I looked out the window and there is "K", in his car, with his shotgun pointed out the window. He just sat there in the road with that gun pointing out of his window. My mother came running down the stairs, opened the front door, went out onto the porch and stood there with her arms crossed. I have to give her credit, she just stood there and yelled at him to leave or she was calling the sheriff. He went down the road, she came inside and ushered us all into a back bedroom (just in case). I was so scared and so embarrassed. What would my friends tell their parents?

My mother sat in the front room in a rocking chair and waited. I remember the sound of her chair as she rocked back and forth. It sounded like someone was walking through the house with a wooden leg. The floor would creak and then there would be a small thump. I imagined "K" getting into the house and coming to kill us all. Soon enough, he came back up the road, yelling out the window as he passed. Then a few minutes would pass and he'd come back by, yelling out the window and pointing the gun. He did this for what seemed like hours and we hoped he'd just stop without having to escalate things by calling the sheriff. Finally my mother called the sheriff and they came to the house. They ended up sitting outside our house for a while and then patrolling past the house all night.

Pretty soon he found a way to communicate with me and unfortunately it wasn't difficult to pull me back...