She said no.
So he drove his daughter back to her place. Parked out front of the apartment, which was actually the top floor of an old house with a separate entrance. “Why don’t I just wait here while you grab a few things?” he said. “Then you can come back with me.”
Melissa told him to drive home, that she would call him when she was ready for him to pick her up.
Even though she was only nineteen, Melissa had been living away from home for three years. She was willing to admit, on the eve of becoming twenty, that she had been a difficult teen. She’d been a handful even before that. She’d gotten drunk the first time when she was eleven, lost her virginity at thirteen, and was dumb enough to leave marijuana in her room where her mother would find it a year after that. She openly ignored the limits her parents tried to set. Curfews were for breaking. Groundings meant nothing when you could open a bedroom window.
When she was sixteen, she dropped out of school. Ellie and Wendell decided they could take no more. They gave her an ultimatum. Get an education and live by the rules of this house, or move out.
The second option appealed to her more.
Melissa found a place to live with a friend from school. Olivia, two years older, was also young to be living on her own, but when you had a father who liked to crawl under the covers with you at night and a mother who refused to see what was going on right in front of her, you only had so many choices. You could stay and put up with it, kill the bastard with a frying pan upside the head, or get the hell out. Olivia got out. But as difficult as her home life was, she did well at school, wasn’t into drugs, and held down a part-time job at Pancake Castle. She introduced Melissa to the manager, who gave her a stint waiting tables three nights a week. It turned out that getting kicked out of her parents’ house was the best thing that had ever happened to Melissa. She looked up to Olivia, who was becoming a role model. Melissa was getting her act together. Without her parents to catch her when she fell, she had to stop falling so much.
She started to become responsible. Who could have guessed?
Ellie and Wendell were cautiously optimistic. Once Melissa got her head screwed on right, they figured, she could go back and finish school. If she did well enough, she might have a chance at college, Ellie mused one evening. Maybe she’d even think about becoming a veterinarian. Remember, she’d say to her husband, how when she was little, she said one day she’d love to work with animals and—
“For God’s sake, Ellie, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Wendell said.
Melissa would come over for dinner. Some of these get-togethers went better than others. One night, Melissa would tell them about how she was getting her life back on track, and her parents would nod and try to be encouraging. But another night, Ellie, anxious to see her daughter’s rehabilitation move with more speed, would start pushing. She’d tell her daughter it was time—now—to stop being nothing more than a waitress and get back to school and make something of herself. Did Melissa have any idea just how embarrassing it was for her mother, an employee of the board of education, to have a daughter who was a dropout? Who hadn’t even completed the eleventh grade? How long was she expected to wait to see her daughter get on a path where she would amount to something?
Then they’d start fighting and Melissa would storm out, but not before asking out loud how she’d managed to live in this house as long as she had without blowing her brains out.
It always took a few days for the dust to settle after a night like that.
Ellie and Wendell still kept their fingers crossed that Melissa, despite these occasional blowups, was growing up. She held on to her waitressing job. She was saving some money, mostly from tips. Fifty to sixty dollars a week, which was at least something. And one day, talking to her mother on the phone, she happened to mention that she’d been on a college website, looking at what qualifications you needed to enroll in the veterinary program.
Ellie was beside herself with joy when she told Wendell the news.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” she asked. “She’s growing up, that’s what she’s doing. She’s growing up and thinking about the future.”
What neither Ellie or Wendell had counted on was that the immediate future would include a baby.