Urban Drama: The dollar, the mom, and the problem kid

Don’t you love it when people let it all hang out, in public? One of the joys of living in a big city is that people act up in front of God and everyone, knowing they’ll never have to see any of those folks again. Endlessly entertaining, and it’s free!

This afternoon I drove up to the fancy Costco at Paradise Valley Mall, there to return a couple of things and pick up two or three grocery items to tide Cassie and me over until the current budget cycle closes on the 20th. One of the objects I needed to return was fairly large, so I parked the car and snagged a grocery cart from in front of the store. Under the store’s portico, a woman’s voice reverberated off the concrete walls and overhang. A middle-aged woman with a toddler in a cart and another young child in tow was haranguing a young man, who looked like he was struggling to hold back tears.

Passersby were pretending nothing was happening, chatting and going about their business, as though women with small children holler at young men on the front stoop of Costco every day. Like me, presumably, they were trying not to hear, but it was impossible to block out all of her tirade.

“You’re 26 years old!” she went on. “I have other kids to raise now…”

The 26-year-old looked stricken. The scruffy-looking girl who was with him—the current love of his life?—looked like she was trying to will herself invisible. This child had some mileage on her, part of it over rough roads.

I dodged inside. In due course, the returns clerk forked over $200 and then took the cart with the junk in it. When I walked back into the 110-degree heat to collect another cart for the day’s shopping, the little tableau was still there. The curtain was rising on Act V. The woman, presumably the young man’s mother, continued to harangue. The soft-spoken young man’s words could not be heard, but the older woman’s certainly could. He did not interrupt her as she launched into another tirade.

It’s hard to guess what he did to set her off. Probably asked her for money, or maybe to take him in while he was weathering a spate of hard times. Though he was a clean-cut kid, he had a whiff of the loser about him. Maybe had a drug or drinking problem, maybe out of work, maybe broke, maybe some or all of the above. Maybe she was trying to practice some tough love. Or maybe she was fed up and had decided to wash her hands of him.

On the other hand… How would you turn out if you had a witch of a mother like that?

Moving on, it was back into the store and out of earshot.

Half an hour or forty minutes later, I exited those air-conditioned precincts, pushing a cartful of goods before me. The dragon lady was gone. But the young couple were still huddled on the concrete ledge outside Costco’s front door. He was smoking a cigarette, never a sign of high intellect among the under-60 set.

“Maybe you could find an apartment there,…” the girl was murmuring to the boy, whose expression looked every bit as despairing as it had while the older woman was yelling at him.

Soap opera in real life! The Dumb and the Feckless, episode 12,134. I love filling in the story of these urban dramas. Here’s my theory of the plot:

♦ The woman is the young man’s stepmother. He is the child of her last husband (not the current one) by a prior wife. Her former husband disappeared into the Amazon jungle while on a fling with a Brazilian floozy.

♦ An affable leech, the youth has succeeded in nothing except accruing a spectacular collection of traffic tickets, a few of them for DWI. Oh, and he’s very good at making babies:

♦ The two small children are his, by two loserly mothers. The volcanic woman and her current husband were saddled with the care of these kids when the infants were removed from the parental custody by Child Protective Services.

♦ Having been convicted on one of the DWI charges, our hero finds the felony that now appears on his police blotter makes it impossible for him to get even a minimum-wage job. He therefore has asked her either for money or for free lodging.

♦ She has decided, on the advice of her therapist, to quit “enabling” him. Hence her strident rejection of his request, whatever it may be. She hopes this will push him into fiscal and social responsibility. Maybe he’ll get a job, pay off his debts, settle down, and quit making her crazy.

♦ This is the first time she’s behaved as though she’s seriously saying “no” to him. Hence his shocked and dumbfounded grief.

Several elements remain to be explained. For example:

♦ Why were the two young people still outside the Costco after the older woman was long gone? Did she leave them there to find their own way home, wherever that might be?

♦ Or did they arrive in a different vehicle?

♦ If so, how did they know to find her at the Costco, or when she would be there?

♦ Were they stalking her?

♦ Or did they just accidentally run into her there? If the latter, what would possess him to ask her, then and there, something that would set her off like a Roman candle?

♦ What effect does it have on a toddler to hear his mother (caretaker?) berate his older brother (father?) before a crowd in front of a Costco?

What think you, readers? What’s the real story? And is it a money story?

Images:

Shylock and Portia. Thomas Sully. 1835. Public domain.
Costco in Henderson, Nevada. Photo by Wikipedia user Coolcaesar. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Dramatic masks of Thalia and Melpomene, muses of comedy and tragedy. Booyabazooka. GNU Free Documentation License.