250Excerpted from Free to a Good Home: With Room for Improvement by
Jules Torti, with permission from Caitlin Press (2019). Now available at
caitlin-press.com and amazon.ca.
M
ine was a normal
enough childhood,
as far as we were
concerned—“we” being me, my
younger, then-bratty sister, Kiley
(spelling unofficially changed to
Kylie during the Kylie Minogue
“Locomotion” years), and my
even younger tagalong brother,
Dax. I’ve only met one other Dax,
and there was a Dax character on
Deep Space Nine or one of those
Star Trek spinoffs.
I say we thought we were
normal because in the country,
there’s not a lot of opportunity
for comparison. We thought
everybody lived on roads like
ours—where you were related to
everyone on them. And in Mount
Pleasant, this was true. Our
great-grandmother lived right
beside us. Nan Chapin (my mom’s
mom) lived farther up the road.
Aunts and uncles at the top of the
road swapped houses a