Seven and Counting by Cassidy Shay (13 inch ebook reader .TXT) 📕

Now that I think about it, it’s not even a lot of respect and trust. More like acceptance. The beauty of having a single mom in a relationship is that even if you don’t like someone, you have to learn to accept them.

And that’s what I did with JimBob. I didn’t like how fast they moved. Exactly a week after my birthday, my mom came to me and said, “He told me he loves me today. And I love him too.” Two months into the relationship, they were engaged and planning to move into the same house. I didn’t like it. But my mom seemed happy, so I accepted it.

Although I thought they were moving too fast, I had to admit that JimBob was fun, and I did enjoy spending time with him. He taught me how to ride a horse, and after school got out, we went on daily rides for a couple weeks. He’s a judge for Professional Bull Riding, so he was able to get us free tickets to PBR when it came to town. Because of JimBob, I met Flint (PBR’s rodeo clown), along with several bull riders. Because of JimBob, I learned what it’s like to love a horse, and because of JimBob I got my first job (his parents own a restaurant, so Jim and Dixie hired me with no hesitation).

Now, three years after he and my mom broke up (yes, they did break up- my story is far from over), JimBob is still a friend. When we’re at the restaurant, I’ll usually eat my food with him and just talk, catch up. I also know that if I ever need anything, I can always go to JimBob.

If JimBob has taught me anything, it’s that fun doesn’t equal quality. We had fun with JimBob. There’s no way that I could deny that fact. But the relationship between my mom and JimBob had no quality.

After JimBob, my mom stayed single for quite a while. Then in January, things changed. In January of my eighth grade year, I got a purity ring with the girls in my youth group. One of these girls was Taylor, and her single dad was at the ceremony. So was my single mom. It didn’t take long for them to become a thing.

Rick only dated my mom for a couple months. His importance was trivial, almost not there (except that he was one of my best friends’ dads). Because of Rick, I got to experience that feeling that you might get to be sisters with your best friend.

I never really thought that my mom and Rick would get married. But it was fun to play along, pretend that we would be able to combine our five kids and his three at the dinner table. And then Rick slipped out. Another guy who was here and gone in only a couple months.

After Rick, softball season rolled around. And that brings us to the most recent guy. In my eighth grade year, I played on the softball team, and so did Stephanie Amaral. Ken, Stephanie’s dad, met my mom at one of our games. They went out on a couple of dates, and a relationship formed. There was one difference that I noticed in Ken.

He was very reserved. Unlike all the others, he had waited until their third date to even kiss my mom. It wasn’t until a month after that that he would kiss my mom in front of us kids.

We went camping with his family in June, and in July he went with my family to Idaho, where we used to live and we visit every summer. In October, we all moved into a house together.

So that should be it, right? That should be our “happily ever after.” Ha! Will we ever get one of those? Do they even exist?

Ken is… he’s a lot of things. He’s funny, sarcastic, fun. But he doesn’t ever do anything. Actually, he does too much. But that’s the problem. He’s so busy working on the cars and doing stuff outside that he doesn’t have time to spend time with my mom or us. They’re together, but alone.

Ken can also be mean. Not in front of anyone else, of course. But as he and my mom get ready for bed, he tears into her like a wolf on a morning hunt. Never physically, of course. But the verbal abuse can sometimes hurt more. Verbal scars are invisible to the outside world, but they last for a small eternity.

Over the summer, I ruined things. Before, Ken and I got along great. We were pretty much best friends. But I was tired of the way he kept treating my mom. So I stopped talking to him. For a few weeks, I didn’t talk to him at all. Because of how close we’d become, I was surprised at how easy it was for me to shut everything off. I had expected it to be hard not to talk to him, that it would hurt. It didn’t. But after a while, he started to change. He didn’t hurt my mom like he had before. They still argued sometimes, but he wasn’t saying the hurtful things anymore.

But when I tried to go back to the way things were before, it was hard. It was weird. When you destroy something, you don’t ever get to rebuild it exactly the same. You can follow the exact same blueprints, use the same materials. But it will always be different. It can’t be the same.

Ken is a roller coaster. Up for a while, until he crashes to the ground, bringing the rest of us with him. Over the summer, and even this fall, my mom and Ken have been on and off. It’s made me weary, tired, hopeless. I won’t hope that they’ll last, because I’ll just be disappointed.

Ken moved so that he could be closer to Stephanie. We moved too, because we can’t afford the house without Ken’s help. We now live in a tiny apartment, where no one has enough space. He and my mom broke up a little over a month ago. A couple days ago, they got back together. Again. I pray that this will be the last time. The roller coaster gets old pretty fast.

But with Ken, I learned something about trust. And what I learned was that trusting people just gets you hurt.

Although Ken is the most recent man in our lives, there’s still another that I think about all the time, even though I haven’t seen him in over a year. Someone who has made the biggest impact on my life. Someone I love, who is my hero. Someone who taught me what could be the most valuable lesson out of all of them.

Bob was a retired Army Special Forces sergeant. He met my mom online a few months after she met James, and they became very good friends. He wasn’t really her boyfriend (they tried dating and decided that they were better as friends), but they became close. But when we moved to Arizona, we heard of him less and less. And then, one day, he came back into our lives. He came back to deliver the news to my mom.

While he was in the Army, several things happened to him. One is that while they were giving him his anthrax shots, they gave him too high of a dosage. He developed diabetes, and he began to rapidly lose weight, until he almost looked like a drug addict. The second thing that happened was that he was in an explosion, and shrapnel worked it’s way into his brain. Slowly, he was being killed. The doctor gave him six weeks to live.

We all spent the weekend together in Phoenix. We watched movies, went shopping, went swimming, and listened to his stories. We watched as he acted out how he would catch pigs in a greased pig contest, and how his pony would kick the pigs over the fence. We listened as he told us about the day he picked up a bee hive and put it over his brother’s head. We burst into laughter when he came to the pool in a bathing suit and combat boots. And we all tried to pretend that we didn’t know him when he spoke to the man in the elevator.

My mom’s toenail polish was chipped. She was wearing flip-flops, and she looked down at her feet and commented on how bad it looked. Her big toe only had half of the paint still on it. Bob looked down at her toe and said, “It’s a camel toe.” He started discussing it with my mom, who kept saying that no, it wasn’t a camel toe. When an old man got onto the elevator, they stopped. After a couple seconds, Bob looked at the man and said, “She has a camel toe.” As you can imagine, the rest of the ride was pretty awkward.

And then he disappeared again. He didn’t want us to be attached to him, because he didn’t want us to be heart broken when he died. What he didn’t realize was that by staying away, he was hurting us even more.

About a month later, he finally decided to see us again. He didn’t feel like he was going to die in the next two weeks. So he thought it was safe. We spent the weekend in Mesa (a stone’s throw from Apache Junction), and that weekend, we had fun. One of the nights, we went to Applebee’s for dinner. Sitting in the booth across the aisle was a boy with long, dark hair, and a hat that looked a lot like Michael Jackson’s hat. Actually, he looked like a teenager version of the adult Michael Jackson (this boy was white). My mom looked at me and said, “Cassie, you should take a napkin and a pen over there and say, “Michael, Michael! I thought you were dead! Can I have your autograph?” I held my hand out, waiting for my mom to hand me her pen, trying to keep a straight face.

Bob, of course, had to ruin it. Only, he somehow made it better. “No, Sherry. Don’t let her do that. Her mom might get mad.” Our entire table burst out laughing. Because… well, it wasn’t a girl. A couple minutes after that, the other family left, so I didn’t have a chance to ask for his autograph.

After that, I saw him once more. He was flying into Phoenix, where my dad lives. Bob called my mom and had her meet him for the breakfast at the hotel where he was staying. She called my dad and told him to bring us to the hotel so that we could see him. We sat with him while he are for about ten minutes, and then drove him back to the airport. And that was it. That day, April 9, 2011, was the last time that I saw him.

I only met him a total of 6 or 7 times, but he’s the one who’s made the biggest impact. He made memories. When he found out that I collect hotel key cards, he saved them for me. He took Jake to Pima for a week, where they rode quads and shot guns all day. He used his K-bar to remove a splinter from Shelsey’s hand. He also had a Corvette. Maroon, and boy was that a nice car. When I was twelve, I got to drive it.

Now, when I’m at a