Sweet Hell on Fire Read Free Page B

I should live my life and how I should raise my children. I appreciated their input, they’re fantastic to my kids, but ultimately, I didn’t want their advice unsolicited.
    My mother had been so angry when I took “The Job.” I’d had another job offer from an airline the same time the offer from the prison came, but my car had a catastrophic blowout and I had to accept the job at the prison. I could get rides in town, but all the way to the airport was another matter entirely. She told me she’d spent twenty years worrying if my father was going to come home every night working at the federal prison, and now she had to worry about me at the state prison and it was a shitty thing for me to do to her.
    My dad acted differently. He asked me if I had all the equipment I needed to start. He told me I would see people carrying these huge Maglite flashlights so they could use them like billy clubs, but that I shouldn’t take anything behind the walls I wasn’t prepared to eat, meaning nothing I wouldn’t want used against me or stuffed in any various orifices.
    When my estranged husband caught me trying to fit my flashlight into my mouth, he asked me if I was planning on trying to promote early by showing off that I could, in fact, fit it inside.
    Anyway, when I got home that night, my mother was screaming—it was a high-pitched sound, horrible and shrill, like something being torn out of her.
    She was in the bedroom where she spent most of her time in those days, and all she could do was howl. The kids were spending the night with their dad and my father was at work. The dog came to me, crawling on her belly and whining, obviously afraid. This had been going on for some time.
    I went into the bedroom and my mother was crying, holding her belly with vomit in the trashcan and burning cigarettes in the ashtray. She had a window open; it was summer. But she had the electric blanket wrapped around her and she was shaking.
    I didn’t know what to do. These attacks had been coming more often, and due to her other illnesses, she hadn’t been able to leave the house so she could go see a doctor.
    “Help me,” she begged.
    Oh, God. How? I didn’t know what was wrong with her, so how could I help her?
    “Help me,” she cried again, louder.
    I sat down on the bed next to her and tried to rub her back, to soothe her as she’d done to me when I was sick. It didn’t help. Nothing did.
    Her cries for help got louder until she was screaming again and I was at a loss. She screamed and screamed at me to help her and when her voice cracked, she’d whimper. All she could tell me was that it was a pain in her belly.
    I called my dad and asked him to come home. He told me he would and to call an ambulance.
    She screamed until they arrived, begging me the whole time to help her. To make it stop. EMS shot her up with painkillers and took her to the ER.
    She spent twelve hours in the ER only to be sent home with a referral to an ob-gyn.
    Still in pain and with no answers.

She begged me to stay home with her.
    But I didn’t.
    I couldn’t.
    Not only because I had no idea how to help her, but because I was still on probation at work. I could be fired for absolutely anything in the first year. If I called in sick during this time, I could lose my job. There was literally nowhere else in town I could get a job where I could get insurance and still support myself. The pay was horrible, barely a living, but the benefits were good.
    My starting pay was around $12 an hour; I made approximately $24,000 a year. The poverty level guidelines for my state and a family of three sit at $27,000 a year. Incidentally, the federal average for corrections officers was $53,000 a year in 2009. I made less than half of the national average and under the poverty level.
    As a kid, I’d quit so many jobs because I didn’t like them, or just didn’t want to do them. Like I thought they grew on trees. I’d never had a problem getting hired until I was a