Adult Protective Services

At first my mother had an apartment she called "The Art Studio"
but she painted watercolors of flowers and butterflies to sell as greeting cards.
You can't support yourself that way. And
She didn't want to explore the non-Christian things she'd need to in order to be an Artist.
With a capital A and a breathy French accent.

I do want to explore those things. Some of them.

After the divorce, she never tried practical blue-collar, or should I say, pink collar, work like waitressing, nursing, or being a secretary.

Sweet. Innocent. Failure to thrive. She created a new life of bucolic naivete free from modern toil and sin with my stepfather.

“If I'm not here, I'm off walking a dog,” was a note on the door
I saw when I was making a collage of pictures of her
to display at the funeral.

In the custody agreement, she got to see us one day a week and every other weekend.
On a weekend when we were with our dad, she was raped.

Actually, she died a short time after I saw the note.
I saw it at 10:30. She died at the eleventh hour. She was ready.

“He gave me the creeps,” a high-school friend said about my stepfather.

When they met, he rode a bike everywhere. He deejayed at the local Christian radio station, housed in the same building as the adult contemporary station. My stepfather talked about the “Texicans,” and she said. He lived with his mother a la Norman Bates. I was led to believe that he lived off her Social Security checks as well. His mother's name was Goldie. In her bathroom was a sign that said, “If you sprinkle when you tinkle, be a sweetie and wipe the seatie.”

What would I have wanted Adult Protective Services to do?
Investigate my stepfather for elder abuse? Should they have kept my mother from being raped, kept her from leaving her doors unlocked? There were ants in my grandmother's ninetieth birthday. Should a swat team have barged in the door and thrown away that cake? Possibly carted my dear, sweet granny off to a nursing home? Does the government exist to protect people from themselves?

Should Adult Protective Services have kept my mother from marrying my stepfather? Should Adult Protective Services have intervened when my father made my mother walk places so her baby, my brother, would come out sooner? Should Adult Protective Services have intervened when my grandmother had to wash my brother's cloth diapers?

At the eleventh hour, my mother went out walking a dog, and never came back.