Rob Henderson fills the first part of Troubled with stories from his childhood in foster care, until he gets adopted by a couple that gets divorced. Then his adopted Mom brings home a “friend” named Shelly, who becomes a second mom. They don’t feel safe, so they decide to learn to shoot:
Shelly and Mom had met up with several of their friends at an outdoor shooting range. They’d gone once before; this was their second time. One of their friends was firing her weapon, and it suddenly jammed. As she tried to figure out what was wrong, she carelessly moved the pistol around. Suddenly, the gun fired. Shelly was standing fifteen feet away, talking to a man and his young son. The bullet went straight into her lower back. Had Shelly not been standing there, the bullet would likely have killed the boy.
They were barely able to make ends meet before Shelly was disabled:
At last, Shelly had received a large insurance settlement from the shooting. She and Mom never mentioned the specific amount. I figured it was a few hundred thousand dollars, given what they bought: a new truck for Shelly, a Ford Mustang for Mom, and a motorboat they kept docked at a marina at Shasta Lake. In Red Bluff, having a new boat and a new Ford Mustang was really something.
Mom and Shelly also bought three houses in Red Bluff. One was for us to move into and two were investments to “flip.” They had agreed that the family should move into another home as a way to “start over.” But they strongly disagreed about what to do with the rest of the insurance settlement.
[…]
Mom and Shelly expected to make a lot of money by selling the other two homes they’d bought. These houses required some upkeep, and I wanted to help out, so I’d stop by both homes every week to rake the leaves and mow the lawns. Shelly explained that both houses would likely be sold within two or three months at the most, and I didn’t mind doing the extra work for that amount of time.
But three months passed, and there were no buyers.
[…]
“I would lie awake in bed at night for months, because I knew this day would come,” Mom said.
We were sitting in the living room of the biggest house I had ever lived in, and I learned that it had been a temporary dream. Eight months had passed, and the two houses Mom and Shelly had intended to flip had still not sold. Shelly and Mom had run out of money. The year 2005 was the right time to invest in houses in California, they said. But not 2006. They explained that all our homes were being foreclosed, and that we had to leave Red Bluff.
I’m seeing a pattern of increasingly stupid decisions by “Mom”.