During the summer I went on long, daily walks with Tonya, but other than that, I hung around the house missing Wilson and not wanting to miss any call. I slept in the basement bedroom and ached for him constantly. When I was given money from my school, I called Wilson and gave him half of it. I was lonely without him.

I was so bent on getting back with Wilson; I bought airline tickets to Las Vegas with my credit card and talked Dad into lending us money for the trip using the Buick as collateral. He agreed reluctantly.

A week before we were to leave, Wilson called. "Someone stole the Buick. I got up this morning and it was gone."

I went to his house to call the police. The police located the car later that day in a wrecking yard. They had towed it from where it had gone off the road and through a guardrail. It was totaled.
Wilson had some cuts on his arm and his glasses were missing, but told me he had fallen off of the curb while drinking the night before. After over four years of sobriety, he was drinking again.
"You were drunk and crashed it, didn't you?"

Wilson denied it. But at the wrecking yard I found his glasses on the dash of the car under the broken windshield. Despite my suspicions, I told Wilson that I believed him.

Cheri, angry at her dad for both drinking and seeing me again, moved back with her mother.


Although our collateral was gone, I took my dad's money and time off from school and we went on the trip to Las Vegas anyway. I wasn't really interested in gambling. I had only suggested Las Vegas because I knew it would interest Wilson. The manipulation (his and mine) had worked; we were a couple again. The first half of the week was fun. We played games, walked the brightly-lit streets and saw a show. On an evening about half way through the trip, Wilson slid a wrench into his boot and went off by himself to what he said was the Indian side of town. I stayed at the motel and studied my homework. He wasn't gone as long as I thought he'd be.

"Some people thought I was a nark, so I didn't hang around." Instead, he took some money and went downstairs to gamble. When he came back up, he was drunk.

While getting our breakfast at a buffet the next morning, Wilson claimed he'd lost our last $100 dollars in a taxicab. I was four months pregnant, and we were broke. Our room was paid for, but the plane ticket couldn't be used until the reserved day. In the meantime, we'd have to find a way to eat. My dad refused to accept anymore collect calls.

Late one night, after a couple days of not eating, Wilson returned to our room with a plate full of chicken. An employee had set it aside in a back room for his own dinner, and when the man had gone to grab a drink, Wilson slipped in and took the plate. Chicken had never tasted so good.

And the plane ride back couldn't come soon enough. But we were now back together again.

A week or so later Wilson woke up shaking. The weather was hot, but that wasn't the reason he was sweating. He needed a drink. After calling around, he found out people were drinking over at his ex-brother-in-law's. We got in the car to drive the mile or so to his house. As we passed the park, a tire on our car suddenly blew.


"Here," he said, "go over to that store and call AAA. I'll meet you over there."

And he left.

So five months pregnant, I waited in the heat for AAA to come fix the tire. But I said nothing when I finally arrived at the brother-in-laws. I just smiled and laughed with the rest of them.


"The reason you can't leave me is because I have medicine in my bag that keeps you with me. Wanda’s dad gave it to me a month ago," Wilson told me.
But he wouldn't tell me just what a medicine bag was or what was in it. All he would tell me was that it was personal, and that he shouldn't have said as much as he did.

"I shouldn't have even told you I was carrying it."


It was hard for me to decide whether or not he was just being melodramatic, but I chose to believe him. I wanted to believe there was a real reason, not my fault, for continuing with this relationship.


How comforting it was to now have an excuse. My behavior was now beyond my control.

All in a Good Day's Drunk

I returned to his home after not too long. Later that October, Yvonne was in the hospital in labor with Bradley and needed someone to go to her house to take care of Wanda. I didn't mind helping and the county would pay me, so I offered to go.
There would be no phone for me to keep in contact with Wilson, but he told me he'd come up and visit in a couple of days.

The first night went all right. The next day, I helped Wanda into my wagon and we went for a drive. We ran into her cousins down on the Avenue. Climbing into the car, they asked if we'd drop them off at a bar down the road. One thing led to another, and we stopped at a couple of bars.

I usually never drank at all, let alone with Wilson's relatives. I am still not sure why I did this time.
Maybe because it was Indian summer and the weather was great.
Maybe because I felt it was my job to take Wanda where she wanted to go and who was I to tell her what she could or could not do?
But more likely, it was because it was exciting for me to be away from Wilson and with people that just wanted to have fun. So I had a couple of drinks with them.

"I always wanted to be like Wilson," Verlin, one of the cousins, proclaimed to me over his beer, "Ever since I was a little kid watching him and Dan Hunter drinking with my ma in our kitchen, I always wanted to be like him."

Outside of the second bar, while transferring Wanda from the car to the wheelchair, I misjudged and almost dropped the chair backward with Wanda in it. I decided that I shouldn't drive and asked Verlin to. I didn't drink anymore that evening.

Eventually we found ourselves back at Wanda's. Somewhere along the line, a couple of girls none of us really knew had joined our group. As everyone sat in the living room laughing and drinking, the new girls, one skinny with straggly, sandy-colored hair and the other heavier and more Indian looking, tried to snag on Wilson's nephews.

As their partying progressed into the night, I became bored and went in to the bedroom to read. But that didn't help.

Restless, I returned to the main room and sat down. I don't remember saying anything; I don't think I even had time to. I wasn't seated but a moment when suddenly, the skinny girl with straggly hair jumped up and came at me. In her right fist was a knife. It happened so fast I had no time to think beyond, "Oh my God, what do I do?"

She was just a couple of feet away, ready to lunge, when Wilson, Pam, and Pam's boyfriend came in the kitchen door. Wilson took one look at what was happening and he and Pam’s boyfriend chased the girl out the living room door.

Everyone else in the room stayed where they were, guffawing to each other about what just happened. Still in shock, I neither heard what they were saying or cared. After what seemed just a moment, Wilson came back in.

"The girl must have been stoned, because both of us together couldn't get her down," said Wilson, "we hit her over the head with a 2X4 and she was still standing."

They didn't know where she went. She'd run off somewhere behind the houses.

I left with Wilson then. As we stood with Pam and her boyfriend outside by our car, Wilson asked me what had happened. I started to tell him, but to my embarrassment, began to cry. My whole body, tense as a rock until that moment, was now crumbling. What might have happened had Wilson not come in when he did?

But I knew it wasn't okay to cry, especially with Pam watching, so I stopped.