2

Raymond’s records approximated fiction, trashy fiction no less, the likes of which seemed preposterous and clearly based on something other than reality. However, unfortunately, everything I read was true. He moved from Oklahoma to Tennessee to Texas because he passed out all his greeting cards in the first two states and figured he should look elsewhere for acceptance. Having no home, he bounced from one relative to another from the time he was a toddler. His mother was a drug abuser and maybe a prostitute (a caseworker’s recorded word said it was suspected, but not proven) who slithered in and out of county jail. Likewise, she slipped in and out of her boy’s life. To him, she was an itinerant. A grandmother, and then a pair of aunts were his earliest caregivers, but from the time he was eleven years old Raymond’s guardians were mostly juvenile jailers and psychiatric treatment center employees. From bedraggled paternal relatives, he learned that his father had been released from a Texas prison after serving thirteen years for aggravated robbery and decided to get to know him. An aunt who disliked Raymond gladly purchased a one-way bus ticket to Waco and soon the youth’s new resting place was the concrete floor of a public housing apartment where his father lived with his womandu jour. Within six days, the father and son got into a fist fight. Raymond apparently won the fight, but lost his meager meal ticket and moved in with a nineteen-year-old girlfriend.

Girlfriend? Like father, like son. Four weeks later, Raymond’s residence was an eight by ten cell injuvi.

Frankly, I was surprised when Raymond’s mother answered the phone on the second ring when I called her one evening from the study in my comfortable two-story house. I immediately wondered about her Oklahoma abode—what it looked like, how it smelled, whether or not it was clean, how many people flopped there at night, its square footage, how much food sat in the fridge. Presuming her circumstance differed appreciably from mine, I caught myself being judgmental. A dollar to a dozen, though, she surely bore a human resemblance to a shipwreck. The disheartened, impassive tone in her voice convincingly said so. Just as her son murdered a man, someone killed her soul long ago. Her heart still p