Left for Garbage

than us - am I right? Not too long after our wedding, I got pregnant with what turned out to be our son, Seeley. We call him Seel, and, oh, before I forget, let me explain how Denise came up with Deeley’s name. It’s a combination of her name and Seeley’s, which I think illustrates at least a tiny bit how close we are as a family.
    At any rate, after Seel came along, I wanted to be home with my baby , Seel, like any young mother. Keith and I aren’t what you call liberated. I guess we’re family-rated. Anyway, so Keith, while he really loved being a deputy, started to see the writing on the wall, money-wise, I mean. Now I’m nobody to tell her husband what to do - Keith being happy, my kids being happy is all that matters to me - but I might have helped him along in his decision process like we women do, you know? A little reminder here and there, like saying, “Keith, they don’t treat you with enough respect and they’re paying you peanuts … maybe it’s time to either negotiate for a better position and more money or look for something else?”
    It took him a while, I’ll admit, because of his love for the work , but he started to hear me eventually. After a little while, Keith came around fine and that’s how we ended up here in Orlando. He took a job as manager with his uncle in the lighting place, but then, well never mind, it’s not important. We had Denise just before we got here, so we had our boy and our girl, and I resumed my career as a nurse and everything’s been great. We raised our kids to have what they needed. We don’t skimp on our kids.
    Seel, he played football, and Denise was a gymnast , and, after high school, Seel went right to work for Xerox where he still is. Now, Denise, maybe she was a little slower off the mark - takes after her dad - but she got my looks so she’s been able to slide a little bit, if you see my point, and three years ago those looks led her right to some boy and she comes up pregnant.
    People said to me, ‘D idn’t you notice her bulge?’ Well what am I, the house police officer? Haven’t I got enough to do around here, with working full-time and having to follow Keith around to make sure he doesn’t turn all our clothes gray doing a load of laundry? When she finally tells us she’s seven months along, what do I say to her, this daughter of mine? I say it’s going to be fine … we’ll manage, because that’s what I do. I manage. And Keith, I tell her not to worry about Keith, I’ll handle him too, not that I’m implying I had to. Keith was delighted about becoming a grandfather. Well, we both were excited and happy. God’s honest truth, it’s all we felt right out of the gate. We set up the nursery and picked out the crib, and when that baby was born, you can bet we were both in the delivery room right there with them. In fact, I was the first one who got to hold her.
    Keith and I, we loved that little girl with our whole hearts. We were never … what I’m trying to say is, there are some people, people who have young unwed daughters, who might have felt disappointed or even burdened, but not us. Now, I know what the cops are saying, maybe it wasn’t us who felt burdened, maybe it was Denise, maybe Denise missed her young, free life. Well you can take this as gospel: that is just a bunch of garbage and I didn’t know you could pile garbage so high.
    Because , don’t think for a second Keith and I didn’t understand she’d still want to go out and see her friends and things. Of course, we did, and if I’m going to be fair here, I’d have to say we took on eighty percent of the care for Deeley right out of the shoot.
    Maybe it was hard on us but she brought joy for every m inute of exhaustion, and Denise now, don’t get me wrong here, she loved her … loves her like crazy, she does. But she’s just a kid too, and so, sure, there was a lot of ‘Mom will you watch the baby? I wanna go to the movies, out to the mall,’ that sort of thing, her being so young and all. Well, you have to expect it. And mornings, oh well, I have to laugh about the mornings because a Sherman tank can’t get Denise up if she’s not ready. It worked out fine, the mornings. Me, having to rush off to work, and Keith, having a more flexible schedule, well, it became their time - his and Deeley’s.
    You see, we’re a family, a perfectly normal family doing the best we can like everyone else. This babysitter, you want to know about him, this so-called