This week’s story is part of my memoir series.

It was hot, even in the basement of Denison University’s Huffman Hall; early fall could still be warm and muggy in Central Ohio. Of course, the heavy, plastic apron I needed to wear to wash the dishes contributed to my discomfort by sealing the heat in like a Ziplock bag. I signed up for this gig though as part of my work-study financial obligation, so I headed over to the towers of stacked trays and dishes and grabbed the first of what felt like a thousand plates.

I scraped its leftover contents into a large garbage can. Then I placed it into a heavily scratched, pale green dish rack. The rack held almost two dozen dishes and as I muscled it down along the rollers, the Kenny Loggins-Stevie Nicks duet “Whenever I Call You Friend” kept me company, singing soulfully above me, through the building’s ceiling speakers. Someone had called in sick, so it was just the three of us.

I pulled the hanging hose down and sprayed the dishes hard before pushing them through the steamy dishwasher. Letting them sit and drip for a minute, I returned to the front of the assembly line to scrape, rinse, and build a new rack until I had four of them to push through to the washer back-to-back. It was easier that way. Even though my hair was up in a ponytail, I was still sweating.

Although I hated being stuck in a basement, taking part in wet, gross grunt work, I was also grateful to be living on a college campus; it meant that I was enrolled.

And that was in jeopardy for a while.

I remember suddenly pausing a few dish racks mid-push. Ahead lay the large, silver commercial washer, which had its wide gaping space, waiting for me to deposit my new load of small juice glasses.

I guess I had stared into it, as it was suddenly a dark abyss, and my mind twisted at the sight of that gaping darkness; leading me somewhere I didn’t want to be. I was rushing back in time; my body locked uncomfortably within memories I didn’t want.

It had almost been six months. Six months ago, my father had still been trying to be happy. Two weeks later, he was dead. He had died in the overnight hours of March 31^st, 1978. He was fifty years-old.

It was not a heart attack, or car accident or terrible illness; it was addiction and our family had been collectively facing that addiction almost our entire lives. He had abused alcohol and sleeping pills. The death certificate bluntly announced “Death was caused by acute intoxication by the synergistic effect of ethyl alcohol and secobarbital.”

In the days and weeks that followed, I had worried over a million things, basically all returning to the single realization that it was going to be just my mom and me now. My older sister, Heidi, had married two years earlier and was on the road a lot; traveling because of her husband’s baseball career. He was working through the Major League Baseball farm team’s training as a pitcher. For a while, she returned to the area over the winter months, but either way, she would not be part of the day-to-day.

I felt a weighted responsibility that I needed to take care of mom, although I really did not know what that looked like.

My mother was intelligent, enjoyed being the life of the party, and sought a certain status in life. But she was horrible at communicating, and that was most likely passed down from her own relationship with her mother, who didn’t feel it was necessary to communicate much with mom. She had things to do. So, my mother never learned about the give and take, the evolution of mother-child relationships.

The innate problem with this inherited parenting model is that she never learned to listen to us. She never practiced listening. She could only parent in the one-way black and white tones she learned from her mother. It was her path of least resistance. There wasn’t much color in our relationship. My sister and I would never hear the yellows and oranges of “that’s right, Melanie!” or big congratulatory hugs with life’s small victories. We needed to color those in ourselves, although dad held the color too, but now he was gone.

I was very anxious about it just being the two of us and I was also anxious about my own hopes. I had planned on attending college that September, but would she let me?

We never discussed college directly, other than she would not be helping financially. I was on my own. To this day, I’m not sure if she wanted me to stay home and work instead.

Undeterred, I selected Denison, and met several times with my high school’s college advisor, and she found a financial assistance path for me. She cobbled together a state grant, scholarship, participation in a work-study program, a loan, and Dad’s monthly Social Security check, which I began receiving as a minor.

When mom learned of my plan, her only request was that I pay her $60.00 of that Social Security check every month to supplement her work in retail. There had been a misunderstanding that she would be the one receiving ongoing benefits from dad’s death, although she did get a small lump sum. As a dutiful daughter, I did it. I was okay with it.

Suddenly, my thoughts came screeching back to the present and the wet dishes when another employee tore down the basement steps of Huffman.

“Sorry!” he exclaims, a little out of breath.

“I was working over at Crawford and they pulled me to come over here.”

“I’m glad to see you, thanks,” I say, a little sheepishly, as I hadn’t progressed since stopping moments before.

“Hey. Get out of here. I’m right behind you,” my affable co-worker offered.

Nodding gratefully, I started up the steps from the basement and continued walking towards East Hall next door. And I understood. These were my first steps in a new space, a new environment (for the first time in my life), where I would grieve my dad, gain more independence from my mother and try to find my way.