But it was Dad who was really getting to Lori. While he hadn't found
steady work, he always had mysterious ways of hustling up pocket
money, and he'd come home at night drunk and gunning for an argument.
Brian saw that Lori was on the verge of snapping, so he invited Dad to
come live with him. He put a lock on the booze cabinet, but Dad had
been there under a week when Brian came home and found that Dad had
used a screwdriver to take the door off its hinges and then guzzled down
every single bottle.
Brian didn't lose his temper. He told Dad he had made a mistake by
leaving liquor in the apartment. He said he'd allow Dad to stay, but Dad
had to follow some rules, the first being that he stop drinking as long as
he was there. "You're the king of your own castle, and that's the way it
should be," Dad replied. "But it'll be a chilly day in hell before I bow to
my own son." He and Mom still had the white van they'd driven up from
West Virginia, and he started sleeping in that.
Lori, meanwhile, had given Mom a deadline to clean out the apartment.
But the deadline came and went, and so did a second and a third. Also,
Dad was always dropping by to visit Mom, but then they got into such
screeching arguments that the neighbors banged on the walls. Dad
starting fighting with them, too.
"I can't take it anymore," Lori told me one day.
"Maybe you're just going to have to kick Mom out," I said.
"But she's my mother."
"It doesn't matter. She's driving you crazy."
Lori finally agreed. It almost killed her to tell Mom she would have to
leave, and she offered to do whatever it took to help her get
reestablished, but Mom insisted she'd be fine.