"You're a bad man." I said trying to sound brave, but what came out of my mouth was nothing above a whisper.
"Doll, I'm no bad man." He said, his lips pulled into a smirk.
Just goes to show that the blood you bleed is just the blood you owe."
My parents had raised me to have a strict moral code, they insisted on having me know what the difference between right and wrong were. This wasn't a bad thing; I thank them for teaching me a skill that takes others a whole lifetime to learn.
Unfortunately for me, my Father had been one that had never really learned how to listen to his own advice and while my Mother and I were working day and night, he was off gambling away the little money that we had.
"How does a thousand dollars just disappear Robert?!" My mother shouted from downstairs; I was always ushered upstairs so the grown-ups could talk.
"What the hell do you want me to say Andrea, I made a fucking mistake." My Father shouted back; I felt my skin prickle as I knew where this was going.
"Get the fucking money back." I could hear my Mother say, I hears a lot of clattering and several smashes
"What the fuck do you think I've been doing?!" Another smash could be heard. My eyes became flooded with tears and I rushed back into my room not wanting to hear any more of their argument.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Unfortunately for us my Father had never gotten himself together and while we worked, we never saw the money. He had become addicted to cocaine after one of his coworkers noticed he was become sluggish and wanting him to work more efficiently they introduced him to the damned thing.
He was quickly fired; all he could do was think about drugs and doing them while he was at work.
I had begun to store half of my paychecks away and giving him the rest, he never noticed the missing money. He was too high to know different.
I was fortunate enough to work in a café where they didn't care too much about my home life, this was different for my mother where she struggled to sell any dresses. No one wanted to buy things from the druggie home.
Living in a small town definitely had its faults, one of which being that everyone had known about the downfall of my family and they judged us for the decisions that my Father had made.
A part of me was upset when my father passed but the man that we buried was not the man that raised me. He was an addict, not the man that I knew.
I can still remember the day that I found him, I had just come home from a morning shift and was getting ready to go back for another shift. It was eerily quiet in the house which didn't strike me as odd at first, I had just assumed that my father had passed out after a night of binging.
"Father?" I called out, hoping to hear some sort of noise to ease my anxiety. The silence was deafening as I walked down the dark hall towards his room. I slowly opened the door and found no one there, my heart was pounding in my ears as I could now hear a low gurgle. I walked through the door and towards the small bathroom.
