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If you’ve been listening to my podcast or reading my blog for any length of time, you know that I encourage you to do things that are scary. I’ve been getting into short story writing recently, and I recently dug this one out of the archives and dusted it off.

This is the first time I have shared a short story publicly. I hope you enjoy it!

I never thought much about Mom’s sun tea until the day my life depended on it. 

I grew up in a home where abuse was a fact of life. My father was a drunk who could never hold down a real job, and sometimes he abused my mother. He would leave work around dinner time and go straight to the bar with his friends. He would stay there, drinking with his friends, for a couple of hours. This ritual happened at least a couple of times a week, many times more often.

When Dad came home, he would be angry and unpredictable. I always got the feeling that he was an intensely unhappy man who felt as if life had handed him one raw deal after another. He took out his anger on his family because he had no other outlet.

Dad would sometimes get abusive with Mom. He would hit her, and she would have to hide the bruises on her arm with a long-sleeve shirt, or hide her black eye with lots of makeup or sunglasses. I knew she wanted us to escape, but we didn’t know how. And where would we go? We had no family that lived close by.

Life was a constant downward spiral of fear. Sometimes I wondered how far down it could go.

One day, someone would end up getting killed. Would it be Mom? Him? Or even me? Anything was possible

The abuse had been going on a long time. In fact, Mom told me that Dad started being abusive right after they got marred, several years before I came along. She told me that one time, she had to hide from Dad because he was in a drunken rage and she was afraid for her life. She had to hide until he fell asleep or passed out. She used a key to get into the secret cellar in the barn that was in the back yard. 

Dad never knew where she hid the key, and in fact he didn’t even know she had a key. I always wondered about that key and what happened to it.

The only light in our very dark existence was Mom’s constant love and warmth. One of the ways she showed it was by making her special lemon tea. I don’t know what she put in it besides lemon, but it seemed to have that magical quality that only a mother’s tea can have. She would put a big jar of sun tea out on the back porch every morning, and by the afternoon it was ready to drink. 

I remember one Christmas when I got very sick with strep-throat, and Mom took great care of me. During the whole week when I was sick, she would make me hot lemon tea every night. Even when I didn’t want to finish it, she would say, “Drink it, Tommy. Drink it all the way down to the bottom.”

I wish that Mom would have always been around to protect me from things in this world that would hurt me. Unfortunately, we found out she had stage 4 cancer when I was nine. She went downhill pretty quickly. When she started to decline, Dad stopped being abusive. But I guess it was too much for him to take, so he decided that he would be better off without the burden of caring for a sick wife along with a kid.

Dad left under the pretenses of taking a job in another city, but we knew the truth–he just didn’t want to be around.

Mom was declining fast. One day she called me into her bedroom. She was so thin, so frail. She made me sit down and had a very serious look on her face. She said, “Tommy, you know that things didn’t go well with your Dad and me. He had a temper and things could get very bad. In case he comes back and he is drunk or in a rage, I want you to run to the neighbor’s house.” Even when she was sick, Mom was always looking out for me, making sure that I would be alright.

Mom died two months later. Even though I knew it was coming, it still felt like I had been emotionally hit by a freight train. You can see it coming from a mile away, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less.

My Grandma, my Mom’s mom, came to live with me. Grandpa had died many years before, and she wanted to keep as much stability in my life as possible. With both parents now gone, I needed all the stability I could get.

Life was so much different than I imagined. I had no parents and lived in constant fear of my Dad coming back. How much further could life spiral down? When would it hit bottom?

Sometimes I would close my bedroom door, lay on the bed and imagine what Mom would say. I would think back to her magical lemon tea and how it would make me feel better, and all the cares of the world would vanish. “Drink it, Tommy,” she would say. “All the way down to the bottom.”

To keep Mom’s memory alive, I kept the very last jar of sun tea she brewed before she died. It has been several months since she passed away. I knew it was crazy to keep a big jar of tea, but I couldn’t help it. It reminded me of how she always was looking out for me.

Grandma would occasionally leave me alone while she went to the store or to run a quick errand. Dad had been gone for over a year. I figured at this point, he was probably never coming back.

But I was wrong. Very wrong.

One day I was home alone. I was in my room, doing homework. All of a sudden I heard the front door burst open. For the first time in years, I heard my father’s voice. He was calling for me and he sounded gruff and angry. I knew he was drunk and in a rage. 

I froze. What should I do? I gathered my wits and knew I had to hide. But where?

Then it came to me: the cellar! But where was the key?

I jumped up from my desk and knocked my chair over. I knew that Dad heard it. “Tommy, is that you? Come here, boy!” He kept raising his voice and I knew it spelled trouble. I didn’t want him to see me because who knew what might happen.

Where was the cellar key? I had to find it fast or Dad would find me.

I desperately wondered, “What would Mom do?” Then I heard her voice, almost audibly in my head:

Drink it, Tommy. Drink it all the way down to the bottom.

Then I knew. I rushed into the pantry where I kept the jar of tea that had been sitting there for months. I went to the back porch and then ran across the yard. I unscrewed the lid on the top of the sun tea jar and began pouring it out onto the ground. 

Clink. 

There it was—the key to the cellar!

I ran into the barn and slid onto the floor by the opening of the cellar door. I heard the back screen door slam and my father yelling for me. He stood there yelling on the porch but didn’t know I had gone into the barn.

I fumbled with the key and opened the lock to the cellar door. It was almost too heavy for me to lift, and the ancient rusted hinges creaked as I opened it. I saw a ladder going down about 6 feet, and started climbing.

Down, Tommy. All the way down to the bottom.

I skipped the last rung and jumped to the floor, which to my nine-year-old self seemed like a skyscraper away from the top. Then I grabbed the rope and with a loud THUD I shut the door over my head.

Dad was still yelling for me but I heard his voice coming closer. The barn door opened with a slam, and then all of a sudden I heard Grandma’s voice. She was yelling at Dad, telling him to get out of here or she would call the police. She had come back home just in time to catch him before he figured out where I was. She finally got Dad to leave only because he knew the police would be trouble if she called them.

After he left, Grandma started calling my name. “Tommy! Tommy, it’s OK to come out now.” I struggled to lift the heavy cellar door, then crawled out, running into her arms. The nightmare was over.

It’s been 23 years since that happened, and rarely a day goes by that I don’t think about it. My Dad never came around again, and I don’t even know if he’s alive or not. Grandma died when I was in college, and the house was sold shortly thereafter.

Every once in a while, when I’m back in my hometown, I drive by the old place. Another family lives in that house, and the hedges have grown so high that I can no longer see in the backyard. Somewhere beyond those hedges, there is still a lost little boy who is afraid to come out of the cellar.

Some things can never be mended, but other things can never be broken.

Nothing can break a mother’s love for her child. Even though she’s been gone many years, Mom’s love for me has always been there. It was there when life was going great and I was up. And it was there when I’ve been down. 

Mom’s love went all the way down. Down to the bottom.