There are moments when I wonder why I am bothering to document all of this. As soon as I think I have finished with my memories, I remember something else like the day my niece’s boyfriend was hiding in my house. There just seem to be so many stories. It seems like there was trouble with ‘T’ all of her life. The earliest story I have been told about was the day that 4-year old ‘T’ tried to run over a neighbor child with her battery powered motorcycle. When the child’s father told my niece to go home, she told him to “hit the bricks”. The expression came from my dad. My brother-in-law took ‘T’ to the offended neighbor and made her apologize. I heard that she cried, but not because of shame for behaving badly, but because she had her motorcycle taken away.
When she started school, the kindergarten teacher had so much trouble with her that the school refused to allow her to return unless she was medicated. Her behavior in third grade was so bad that the teacher moved ‘T’s desk to the front of the room. I mean right in front of the blackboard, not just the front row. I saw it myself, so I know it is true. School continued to be a problem with her. In middle school she showed up one day high on marijuana. The school system transferred her to a special school with behavioral problems. My sister always seemed to believe the fault was the school, not her daughter. I always felt sorry for my brother-in-law. He seemed to be trying to be a responsible parent, but my sister would always back up ‘T’ and ignore his input. When she was 13, ‘T’ was hospitalized in the psychiatric ward. I don’t know what precipitated it, but it was around the time that she was diagnosed as bipolar. She got a furlough to come home for Christmas. My son and I were spending that Christmas with my sister’s family. I was napping on Christmas Eve when I was awakened by my niece crying hysterically. What had happened was that ‘T’ was playing with my son who was 5 at the time, he fell, she fell on him and he had a large cut on the back of his head. It is not fun to be in the ER on Christmas Eve. By the next morning, ‘T’ had reworked the story so that my son was at fault for getting injured and her bad judgment had nothing to do with it.
As I said in Part 1, my niece had been given 7 years probation for the forgery conviction. She managed 3 years of reasonable behavior. Things began to really degrade when she moved in with the abusive boyfriend. Then when she left him and moved back in with her mother and me, and brought the friend who was also on probation. Her behavior was bad enough while she was with us, but it went downhill after I told her to leave my house. She stopped reporting to her probation officer and was involved with drug dealers.
She called one day in late February 2005 saying she had taken a job and needed to come by the house to get some clothes for work. My sister had paid for clothing for ‘T’s many different jobs, so there was a selection stored in the basement. ‘T’ showed up with a woman I did not know and carrying a puppy. She opened the refrigerator for this woman and told her to help herself since, as ‘T’ said, “This is my (‘T’s) house, my real house”. I bristled at this statement, but decided to address it later when the woman was gone. After pouring soft drinks, ‘T’ went to her mother’s bedroom and dropped the puppy on the bed. My sister exploded! She was allergic to flea bites and we didn’t know anything about this puppy. ‘Z’ yelled at ‘T’ to remove the pup from the bed. ‘T’ started shouting back and everything fell apart. My sister was extremely ill by then and did not need to be upset .I told ‘T’ to leave immediately. I was so angry by then that in front of ‘T’s companion I reminded ‘T’ that this was not her home and she had no right to offer the hospitality of my home to anyone. It ended up being one of those yelling matches where everyone’s trying to out-shout the other. She finally left when I picked up the phone to call the sheriff.
Later that day, ‘T’ called on my phone line. She apologized at first and then got angry with me because, according to her, I had embarrassed her in front of her friend. I wanted to hang up but she insisted she had to apologize to her mother. I reluctantly gave the phone to ‘Z’. From the end I was able to hear, they were arguing at first, but then I heard my sister give ‘T’ permission to return. When the call was over, ‘Z’ told me she had allowed ‘T’ to come back to get her clothes. Since she had been ordered out earlier, she had not looked for her clothes. She showed up alone some time after dark. I remember her spending some time in the basement and then she said she wanted some private time with her mother. After about 20 minutes, I found her in the ‘office’ in the dark talking on the phone. I told her she was supposed to be with her mother, not in the office. She did go to her mother’s room after that and then left shortly thereafter.
The next day, I answered a call on my sister’s phone line. She was really feeling awful that day and asked me to take care of the call. It was her bank. They had called to get approval to cash a check for ‘T’. I asked ‘Z’ if she had given ‘T’ a check. No. 'T' must have stolen the check the night before. My sister kept her blank checks in a desk drawer. I asked how much the check was written for. The teller said it was for $1,550.00. I told the teller to call the police immediately, the check was a forgery. They tried to delay ‘T’, but she figured out that something was wrong and left. The police chased her in her car. The story she told me later was that she ended up in a cul-de-sac, grabbed her puppy and ran through to woods to elude the police. She supposedly lost the puppy while she was running. The police lost her.
I called her probation officer to report the incident. I found out she had been assigned to a new probation officer and he was in the process of obtaining a warrant for her arrest for probation violation. Even though I put the probation officer in touch with the detective handling the new forgery, she was never prosecuted for it. Also probation violation is not considered a high priority by the police unless the person has a history of violence, so she went free for a while.
In April my sister was back in the hospital. By then ‘T’ had contacted her probation officer to try to talk him out of punishing her. They made arrangements for her to surrender to him on a specific date. It was decided that my sister needed to be transferred to a nursing home for rehabilitation since she had not been able to walk since January. ‘T’ did help me with the transfer. We had to take ‘Z’s personal stuff to the nursing home. 'T' told me she was supposed to surrender on Thursday of that week. She was also telling her mother that the surrender was delayed because she was helping the police with a drug sting. My sister asked me to stay out of it, but by Wednesday, I called the probation officer to find out what was going on. I told him about the drug sting story and he said it was a total fabrication. The sheriff’s office could not use her in a sting without his permission. Plus she would have had to have been arrested already and there was not record of it. He also said she was supposed to have surrendered herself on Tuesday, so she was late in meeting with him. When I faced her with the truth (in her mother’s room at the nursing home), she told me to stay out of her business and left. She was finally arrested in early May and had a crack pipe in her possession at the time. Between the county jail and the state prison, she served 14 months. During that time, I had to have her sign papers to have my sister cremated because my sister was comatose by then and it had to be signed by the next of kin. The last time ‘T’ saw her mother was the day I called her out on her lies.
Cell phones saved my sanity during my sister’s illness. I felt I had to have the phone so that my sister’s doctor could reach me at any time. I never gave ‘T’ the number to my cell phone. I unplugged my sister’s phone at home, but left the answering machine attached. I turned off the ringer on my line; I had voice mail. I checked the machine and the voice mail at least once a day. Many times the messages were from ‘T’. She would scream obscenities and threaten me. Better that she did that to a machine than to me. The people who needed to reach me had the cell number. When my sister went into the nursing home, I got her a cell phone. The nursing home would allow installation of a hard-line or use of a cell phone. We never gave ‘T’ the number.
‘T’ was paroled October 31, 2006. She is living in transitional housing in Atlanta. She called me for her birth certificate since I am still storing some of her stuff and the personal things of her mother’s I am keeping for her. I paid $32 to order her a new one over the Internet. She needed it to get a job. She says she is working. She seems to think the family should welcome her back like she had been away at summer camp. I laid down my conditions in a letter I wrote to her during her incarceration. I want her to finish her obligations to the state of Georgia, get a job and support herself for five years and then we can talk. She has never truly supported herself or taken full responsibility for her actions. My sister would either give ‘T’ what she wanted or ‘T’ would take it. I am not my sister and I will not step into the role she played in her daughter’s life.
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