The Autumn Harvest and a Broken Home
Autumn had arrived, the perfect time to gather the harvest. This year’s summer had been unusually warm; fruits and vegetables thrived wonderfully. The locals worked day and night on their plots, stocking up on everything they needed for the long winter ahead.
“Kim, are you there? Don’t expect him to wait for you!” A gruff male voice woke a two-year-old girl sleeping on the porch.
“Uncle Chris, don’t shout so loudly! You’ll wake up Sarah; she’s only just fallen asleep,” thirteen-year-old Kristen addressed the intoxicated man. “And Mom’s not home; she went to the store for groceries.”
“Well, you could have said that right away,” the man replied. “How long has she been gone?”
“Just recently, about 15 minutes ago,” Kristen whispered quietly, gently stroking her sleepy little sister’s head. She knew this made her sister feel safe and sleep peacefully.
When Chris left, another girl’s head appeared from behind the door. Seven-year-old Cynthia looked at her older sister with fear in her eyes. Kristen understood what she wanted to ask. “Come out, he’s gone,” she said, and smiled.
The girls had long grown used to their mother’s absence. Kim raised her daughters on her own; all of her children were from different men. The 36-year-old woman worked as a janitor at a local businessman’s office. Her earnings barely covered the essentials. The sisters often went hungry. If Kim didn’t drink away most of her paycheck, they might have had candy more often, but their mother had other priorities.
The eldest, Kristen, was in the seventh grade. Despite the family’s circumstances, she was an excellent student. Studying came easily to her; teachers said she had a natural gift. Seven-year-old Cynthia was supposed to start first grade this year, but some well-meaning ladies from a certain commission prohibited Kim from sending the child to school. Cynthia lagged behind her peers in development, so she continued going to daycare. The youngest, Sarah, would turn two in a month. Despite her age, she was more attached to her older sister than to her mother, whom she rarely saw, especially after starting daycare.
Kristen picked up her sisters from school, and they all returned home together. When their mother couldn’t prepare dinner, Kristen took care of it. She found a book with various recipes on the shelf and started cooking from it. However, many of the dishes she wanted to treat her sisters to were impossible to make due to the lack of necessary ingredients at home, so she decided to start with the simplest ones. Their mother had long considered her grown up and entrusted her with household chores: cleaning, laundry, ironing. She did it all as if she were 18, not 13. The difficult life alongside an alcoholic mother forced her to mature quickly.
Most of all, the girls were frightened by the men who visited their mother. Their loud feasts and swearing, which no drinking session could do without, made them flinch and sit in the children’s room, quieter than mice. Even little Sarah had learned the rule: if there were noisy guests in the house, it meant they had to be quiet.
The juvenile affairs committee had visited them more than once. Every time Kim saw the stern women from the committee inspecting her modest home, she promised to quit drinking and lead a normal life. But her promises lasted at most two weeks, after which the same reckless and irresponsible lifestyle resumed. Kristen was terribly afraid that they might be sent to an orphanage. They had no relatives; grandparents had long passed away, so if anything happened, they could only be sent to an orphanage. She had heard about the conditions in which children lived there, so she really didn’t want to end up there. The poor girl didn’t yet know that living next to an alcoholic mother was even scarier than being in an orphanage.
And today, most likely, their mother would go on a bender again. It was always like this whenever Chris, a local unemployed man whose wife had long fled due to his constant drinking, was looking for her. Kristen sat on the porch, waiting for her mother’s return. “If this continues, she’ll definitely lose her job,” the girl thought. Davis, her boss, had been threatening to do that for a while, but he must have felt sorry for her and turned a blind eye to her lifestyle. Kristen also really wanted to start studying; from the very beginning of school, they assigned a lot of assignments that took up hours of time.
Her mother hadn’t shown up by 8 PM or even 9 PM. Cynthia was playing dolls with Sarah while Kristen was studying. The room was quiet, as if the house had emptied and no one was in it. The girls didn’t talk to each other about how they worried about their mother, but each of them felt it in her own way.
“Well, girls, sitting alone again?” Candace’s voice cheered them up. Kind neighbor Candace visited the girls almost every day. The 40-year-old woman didn’t have her own children; doctors had given her a diagnosis many years ago that had dashed her hopes of becoming a mother. She and her husband lived alone. Perhaps no one cared for the girls as much as Candace did, so today, understanding that Kim had gone out again, she came over to see them.
“Why are you just standing there? Come on, look what I brought you!” Candace said, unveiling a plate covered with a towel. The pies were golden and aromatic, filled with apple filling. The girls eagerly dove into the treat lovingly prepared by their neighbor. For dinner, they were going to have macaroni; it was the only thing Kristen could cook with the remaining ingredients on the shelf, so the pies came in handy just in time.
“So, what do you have here?” Candace asked, inspecting the refrigerator and kitchen cabinet shelves – as always, empty. “And where does she disappear to? She has money for drinking, but no thoughts about her hungry kids!”
“Please, Candace, don’t scold Mom,” Kristen turned to the woman. “I read that alcoholism is a disease. Women with this disease rarely manage to overcome it. I think it’s hard for Mom to live like this, but she can’t do it differently.”
“You’re still defending her? At your age, people don’t read about these things! She gave birth to kids, so she’s obligated to take care of them!” Candace said, hugging the girl. “I used to pity her too at first, but now I understand that it’s all pointless. She doesn’t understand anything. Kim is deeply stuck in alcohol. Will she ever get out? Who knows.”
At that very moment, a loud crash came from the hallway. Something fell from the shelf and broke.
“Kristen! Kristen, where are you?!” Kim’s voice echoed from the doorway.
“Mom’s back,” the girl shivered and rushed towards her mother’s voice, asking the neighbor to watch over her sisters and not let them out of the kitchen until she put her mom to bed.
“And here you are! Where were you wandering? Help your mother get up, can’t you see I can’t stand up!” Kim struggled to speak, her tongue heavy. “And I dropped something here. Clean it up, got it?”
Kristen helped her mother get up and saw that blood was coming from one of her hands. She must have cut herself on a shard of the vase she broke when entering the house. After getting the woman to the room and putting her in bed, Kristin rushed to the kitchen for cotton wool and hydrogen peroxide to treat her wound.
“What happened?” Candace asked, noticing that the girl had taken disinfectants out of the cabinet.
“Mom hurt her hand. She broke my favorite vase; I loved putting flowers in it,” Kristen replied and ran to her mother. A couple of minutes later, she returned and looked sadly at her sisters. “Go to sleep. Don’t go to the hallway for now. I’ll come to you soon,” she told the girls, who watched their older sister with frightened eyes.
“This can’t go on like this,” Candace said quietly, sweeping up the broken glass shards in the hallway. “How I feel sorry for you girls. I think they might take you away from your mother soon. Maybe at least this will be a lesson for her.”
“How can they take us away? No, we don’t want to be taken away!” Kristen protested. “Mom will change, Aunt Candace, she’ll definitely change! Right? Yeah, right.”
Candace shook her head, hugged Kristen once more, and went back to her place. Before going to sleep, Kristen looked at her mother again. Kim was sleeping on her side, her disheveled hair spread out across the pillow in different directions. Even her face didn’t give any indication that she was only 36 years old; right now, she looked about 60. The week-long bender had drained the last bit of life out of her; it had turned her into a sick and hopelessly lost person. Kristen felt sorry for her mother. Due to her age, she didn’t fully grasp the gravity of the situation, or maybe over the years, she had grown accustomed to this kind of life and had already adapted to it. She had never known any other life, although she definitely knew that just a few years ago, her mother drank less and didn’t leave her daughters alone for long. Two years ago, Sarah was born. Apparently, Kim thought that the father of the little girl wouldn’t leave her, that he would stay, but that didn’t happen. So, holding the tiny baby in her arms, the woman began to drink and didn’t realize that she was ruining not only her own life, but also her daughters’.
The Commission’s Verdict
A week had passed, and Kim continued to drink, leaving all the household responsibilities to her eldest daughter. On a Friday, coming home from school, Kristen noticed an unfamiliar car in the yard. She met three women in elegant suits; they looked somewhat similar to each other. They were surveying the yard with disdainful looks and whispering to each other.
“So, how long has the homeowner been absent?” one of the women asked Aunt Candace, whom Kristen hadn’t noticed right away.
“She hasn’t shown up at home for three days now,” the woman answered. When she saw that Kristen had returned home, she shifted her focus to her. “Here comes Kristen. Come here. These women are from the juvenile affairs commission. They came to see how you and your sisters are living here.”
“Hello, Kristen,” the woman standing closest to Kristen greeted her coldly. “We’ve received a report from the school that we couldn’t ignore. Your family has been on our radar for a while now. You’re old enough to understand that things can’t continue like this. We’re obligated to terminate your mother’s parental rights.”
“What are you saying? And what about us?” the girl exclaimed in fear. “We want to live with our mom! We love her no matter what she’s like!”
“Can I stay with the girls today and explain to them myself what’s going on?” Candace addressed the women. “I think it would be better that way.”
“All right, but we’ll be back tomorrow morning. All the documents are prepared, so there’s no turning back on this matter. Keep that in mind,” the woman warned and hastened to catch up with her colleagues who were waiting on the street for the driver to open the car doors for them.
When Candace and Kristen were left alone in the yard, they were silent for a while, as if unsure of what to say to each other. Unexpectedly, a wave of sadness overwhelmed both of them, making them want to howl in despair. Kristen cried, tears silently rolling down her cheeks, leaving wet streaks.
“Are they going to take us to a children’s home?” the girl finally mustered the courage to ask. “Mom still hasn’t come back.”
“No,” Candace replied. “She was seen recently with Chris. They say she was sober and… well, you need to know this anyway. What are you trying to say? Did something happen to my mom?” Kristen panicked. “Speak, Aunt Candace!”
“Nothing happened to your mom,” the woman replied angrily. “She called me. She said she’s leaving all of you with me. She knows that I’m the only person who cares for you like family. Just one thing Kim didn’t consider: they won’t give you to me.”
“But why are you saying they won’t give us to you, Aunt Candace? You want us to live with you, don’t you?” Kristen asked hopefully.
“Of course I want to! And I’ll fight for you. They came to me today too. I saw the commission coming to your place and realized something was wrong. Besides, Kim managed to call me before they arrived. I invited these women into my home, so I told them that I want to keep you with me. But you know how modestly Evan and I live. They went through the house and said there is no place for three girls to live, not even for one, you understand? To take you in, we need to set up a room, buy furniture. But don’t worry, you’ll spend a couple of months in the children’s home, and during that time, Evan and I will surely come up with something. We won’t leave you there, do you hear me? I promise you,” the woman reassured Kristen. Those words warmed the girl’s heart. She tightly hugged Candace and listened to her heartbeat in her chest – a heart that loved her and her sisters.
“Oh, Aunt Candace, we forgot about Cynthia and Sarah!” Kristen suddenly remembered. “I’ll run to the daycare center! They are probably already there alone!” The girl jumped to her feet and ran towards the daycare center with all her might. Candace headed to the kitchen; she decided to set the table before the sisters’ departure.
By eight in the evening, everything was ready. Kristen didn’t explain the real reasons for their mother’s absence to her sisters. It was difficult for her to understand the true reason herself, let alone the little ones. Uncle Evan, Candace, and Kristen together tried to convince Cynthia and Sarah that they were going to a wonderful place tomorrow, but they didn’t forget to remind them that it wouldn’t be for long. Candace and Evan would surely take them back, as promised.
The next morning, the same car pulled up to the house. This time, only one of the women came for the girls. She checked that the children had taken everything they needed – their documents – and then seated them in the car and drove away. The house was now completely empty. Only in the yard did leaves fall with a quiet rustle, and the ripe apples remained untouched, as no one had any use for them now.LS����