One to many speed bumps

Chapter One

She sitting on a wooden chair in the bathroom of a shabby apartment. She had lost her house, she lost her job and now she is thinking is this all there is to life. She looks up at the cracked plaster walls with water stains running down the walls from years of steaming baths that had taken place over the years. Wonders how many other lost soul have been there in her state.

The table wobbles so she places a book of matches under one leg to stabilize it, the table sits under the window with a water-stained window shade, and it has yellowed from age. The edges are torn. The bathtub claws hadn't been painted in some time, now it’s peeling away from neglect. Denise feels just like the bathtub claws, from years of neglect.   She looks at the colorful pills she had poured onto the table and started to sort them into piles by color. She thinks what a contrast from the beautiful colors of the pills to the state of her mind and the dreary room she sits in.  Is this all there is, is this the only solution.

Chapter Two

The car comes to a stop behind the house and Brad wakes her up to tell her she is home. He tells her goodbye, then his sister and he laugh. Denise gets out of the car and watches as they leave, she goes into the house. The hell hole. She is 7 months pregnant and 15 years old, still lives at home. Her mother wanted her to have an abortion but, Denise wouldn't have anything to do with that. She loved Brad and they were going to raise the baby. She had been working by taking care of 3 children and cleaning their house 50 hours a week. She had bought a baby crib, high chair and redone them to look like new. She had bought baby clothes, bottles, diapers, she was going to name her Christine Marie if a girl and Bradley Jay if it was a boy.

She didn't know that the day Brad dropped her off at home was going to be the last day she was going to see or hear from him again. He never even kissed her goodbye. The only thing she remembers from that day was the laughter coming from the car as they drove away.

In September she started homeschooling, because of her condition, this was in 1971 pregnant girls did go to public school and her family was too poor to send her away to one of those boarding schools.

By now she realizes that Brad was never going to be there for her and the baby, so she decided to give the baby up for adoption, so the baby would have a better life than she could give it. Denise did not want the baby to grow up in the hell hole she was living in.

When she was 14 years old her father made her leave home, because her mother had made her older sister leave, her sister was 18 and had graduated from high school. But Darlene would not work or go to college so their mother said she had to leave. Denise's father said, "If she has to go, so do you." Denise cried and begged her mother not to make her go. She was going to school and babysitting, she was a good girl. She was only 14. 

Chapter Three

Denise ended up at her brother’s one-bedroom trailer in a trailer park in Farmington Hills Michigan. He was married to Patty, they did not have any children. She got a job right away babysitting another couple’s child in the park. That was for the summer, then they moved to a house in Redford Township Michigan in September. Denise started school and she had chores to do around the house for her keep. Her bedroom, kitchen, living room, and bathroom. She had to have those rooms cleaned and homework done before she could go out with her friends and be home by 6 pm. she got out of school at 3:30. It was a sad time for her, she felt like a prisoner. Then one night her brother-in-law Sherman showed up at the house drunk, he tried to rape her. She screamed and her brother threw Sherman out of the house. The next day her sister-in-law and her went shopping for supplies, paint for the wooden floor and burlap to staple to the rafters, to fix up the attic space so she would feel safe. She wanted to go home so bad, but her parents wouldn't let her. This went on for a few more months until she just couldn't take any more of the abuse from her sister-in-law. She called her mother and begged her to let her come home. Finally, her father said she could come back. By now they were living in Howell Michigan and her sister Darlene was already back living there too.

Denise had met Brad two years before while they lived in Onaway Michigan, Brad was now living in Jackson Michigan, not too far from Howell. Denise's father was still being verbally abusive to her, they got into a fight one day and she ran away to Jackson to find Brad.

Denise hitchhiked down there, but on the way three guys pick her up and threaten to rape her, she fought them off until she jumped from the car, she ran to a payphone to call Brad to come get her. She was terrified of what could have happened to her by those three men.