"Bye, sweetie," I said and rushed toward the door to see our daughter, Iris, on the bus.
"I mean, I'm leaving you."
I tripped over the carpet. The following day we spent arguing over divorce. It turned out that after four years of marriage; he went out to explore other options. He used the word `options' like it wasn't our marriage and our child we were talking about, but some alternative routes to get to his relatives in New Jersey.
Our divorce was completed with a settlement based on an equitable distribution relief principle. My husband evicted his stepdaughter and me from his house in the presence of two cops, and let us take only our personal belongings, like a pile of mystery novels and computer games. My husband's lawyer argued in court that the defendant, a.k.a. me, contributed little to the family budget because I did not hold any job other than being a housewife. I couldn't afford a lawyer, so I argued on my own behalf that it was our mutual decision for me to become a stay-at-home mom. Still, I had produced no income for the past four years, they argued, and was entitled only to child support. I lost my house, because it was my husband's; I lost my car, because it was my husband's as well. I kept some pieces of furniture, though. All antiques with mismatched drawers.
Struggling to survive in a sluggish economy, I took the first job available. I drove a cab, because I could keep my cab after hours. Besides, driving was one of my two favorite things to do. (The other was reading mystery novels.) I could drive anywhere, anytime, regardless of weather. When I wasn't behind the wheel, I would most likely be lying in bed with a new whodunit and a nice calorie-packed snack.
Six months later, I knew the streets of Philadelphia like my parents' backyard. We rented a place on 4th and Arch street, a quiet, sleepy neighborhood, where shootouts and police raids were usually over before three, and burglaries wouldn't start until nine in the morning. After moving here from a Huntingdon Valley mansion in the Philadelphia suburbs, we got burglarized twice. The first time, thieves took our TV, which I didn't miss; the second time, they took my quilt, which I did miss. In this neighborhood, a single white mother living without a boyfriend had `troubles' written all over her; that's why I carried a compact pink, rubber-coated, ten-pound gym weight in my purse.