Chapter 3
Tara's Hit By Another Car
Robbie settled in one night away from the bar scene, his money was low and tight, inclement weather kept him home, you can't lay brick in subzero weather, so, he stayed in the basement and watched some late movie with Tara, he felt life was at standstill, no great jobs were worth working at, hourly wages in Kentucky meant you were nearly in the soup lines, stagnant as flies on flypaper, he hated his life, and college meant more bills, at least his car was paid for and he pulled his weight around the house, he mowed the two acres with a push mower in the summers and the winters kept the woodstove fed and stoked. His sisters only cared for themselves, and they did nothing to support their widowed mother with an exception of tidying up the kitchen and doing their laundry, and waiting for their boyfriends to pick them up at the front door.
The bad weather came in spells during the long Kentucky winters, when you work outside you adjust to the unforgiving weather and the despair of the short working hours in a short week, two days or if you're lucky three days was the max you could garner in a good week, but you were grateful for the money, carrying mortar in two buckets because a wheelbarrow was impossible to push in four inches of mud and snow, this was slave work, a backbreaking job, and when you came home from sludging in mud all day you had no time for nagging sisters for pettiness and nitpicking. They often teamed up and conspired against him, and they had a three-to-one advantage-would've been four-to-one but his oldest sister was married young due to pregnancy with her boyfriend-when they brought their paltry charges to their poor acting judge and advocate mother who always without evidence sided with them, every winter this repeated, they simply hated their brother, who kept to himself with his loving dog. He endured a lot of misery from his own family.
7
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