The Girl's Guide to Homelessness (21 page)

C
NN invited me to be on again, this time on a segment called Young People Rock, with Nicole Lapin. That was in LA, so Matt could come, though he still didn't want to be on TV, no matter how much I coaxed.

I continued posting blogs, doing my internship, doing phone and email interviews and answering emails. A couple of days later, a Brazilian TV news show called and invited to fly me back to New York City for another segment. I was willing to do it, if they'd fly Matt there, too, but they demurred, so I turned it down. We didn't have much longer before he had to fly back to Scotland, and I wanted to spend every possible moment with him. I could tell that he was still a bit dejected about my trip to New York without him, even if he wasn't talking about it. I didn't want to give him anything else to take to heart.

 

Walmart finally returned my calls and emails for the first time, after an entire month of ignoring my plight. They swore up and down that signs had been posted the day prior to towing. They hadn't. There was no sign on
my trailer. If there had been, I'd probably have moved it for a day or two to Sam's Club, as I had before. Besides, I pressed,
their own store manager
told me to ignore any
MOVE YOUR TRAILER OR BE TOWED
signs. I gave them her name again. The corporate guy said he'd call me right back.

Ten minutes later, we were on the phone again. “I'm sorry, Miss Karp, but there's simply nothing we can do. I apologize for any inconvenience. It's nothing personal. But it's not our fault or our responsibility.”

I began to sob angrily.

“Look, don't tell me you're ‘sorry for the inconvenience.' Maybe it's not personal to
you
. But it's personal to
me
.
You're
not the one who's just lost everything she owns in the world—I am. So save your apologies for somebody who cares!” I hung up the phone.

Meanwhile, two friends of mine were calling Walmart corporate right about then. One was Tommy Christopher, a Mediaite reporter I'd done an interview with, and who'd apparently been impressed enough with me to take it upon himself to call and see what he could do. He told them to do a quick internet search of my name, and said that he could hear the line grow silent as they realized that they had just stepped into more of a PR nightmare than they'd realized.

The other friend was Vicki Day, a follower of mine on Twitter who lived in London. I hadn't realized it, but Vicki was a big shot in London, and ran her own PR company. I just thought of her as one of those nice people who followed my blog. But she knew the head of Asda (Walmart's UK branch), and she was throwing all her weight into shaming him into calling up HQ and pulling some strings.

A few hours later, Walmart corporate called back and
told me that I could meet one of their managers at the impound lot the next day. He would bring the money to get my truck and trailer out. Over the month that it took to get any response from Walmart, the fee had ballooned to $3,500. Matt and I had no way of paying that fine, even early on, after my car had broken down. All our cushion money had gone into fixing it, so that I could keep going to job interviews. I was overjoyed.

Twenty-four hours later, I had the Dodge Ram and my trailer back. Thurman offered to buy it from me for $2,000, so that he could rent it out to more homeless people. I happily accepted, and moved my belongings out of it and into a storage shed. The same day, I received a call from a company I'd interviewed with a few months earlier. They offered me the job.

 

The position was as executive assistant and office manager at a motorcycle company. The company hadn't known that I was homeless when they hired me, and I did my best to keep it that way. I'd gotten the job on my own merits, and I was proud of that. It wasn't very high-paying at all; in fact, they paid far lower than industry standard. But I hoped that it would look good on my résumé, and any work was good work, right?

Unfortunately, it was also by far the most hellish place I'd ever worked. Though I didn't know about all of the staff hanky-panky going on with the owner at the time, I did stumble across a litany of labor law violations, health code violations, employee abuse, discrimination, harassment and illegal/shady/unethical financial manipulations. As I was hired to facilitate Human Resources, payroll and all the other business functions, I called attention to all these issues and was promptly fired for whistle-blowing
(though I threatened to report them, and my termination notice was hastily exchanged for layoff paperwork). Matt was actually glad that I got out of there. The round-trip commute to and from work every day totaled over one hundred miles in rush-hour traffic, and they often required excessive—and illegal—amounts of overtime and he was barely seeing me anymore.

It didn't end up mattering much one way or the other. The day after I was fired, I was offered a book deal, and Matt and I decided to accept it.

I'd stayed up long nights with Matt agonizing over the book proposal and sample chapters. I begged him to help me, especially with the marketing and technical stuff, since he was so much more attuned to the analytical side of his brain than I was, but he insisted it had to come from me, and that I'd feel much better about myself for doing it on my own. He'd proofread it for me and give me some ideas and input, but it was important that it come from my own heart.

At one point, I remember drifting off as I typed, and awakening to Matt yelling at me. I was completely confused. I couldn't understand why he was angry. Matt never yelled at me. I
hated
people yelling at me—it sent me into freakout mode. In my mind, calm discussion was always better than angry confrontation. I sat up, wrapped my arms around my knees and reflexively started screaming back.
What's wrong? What did I do? Why are you yelling at me?

He was startled. He'd seen that I was asleep and had tried to take the laptop from my hands and tuck me in, and then I'd started picking a fight with him, he said. He told me that my eyes were open and that I seemed completely lucid and awake, if a bit drowsy. He said I was acting nasty,
as he'd never seen me acting before, and I had even called him names and insulted him. He had no idea why I had suddenly started fighting with him, and his gut reaction was to fight back.

I was horrified. I remembered none of it. It wasn't the first time I'd held an entire conversation in my sleep with a boyfriend. Dennis had related a similar experience to me, when he hadn't realized I was still sleeping for a good twenty minutes or so, until I completely stopped making sense. Brandon, too, who occasionally let me crash at his place for a movie and a change of scenery when both of his roommates were out of town, once swore up and down that I'd conversed with him at length, when I was actually conked out on his couch and blissfully unaware. I kept shaking my head, trying to comprehend, and Matt eventually realized that I wasn't messing around: I had absolutely no recollection of anything he was talking about. We held each other and both of us trembled at the thought that it could be so easy to fuck up a good thing over a little misunderstanding. I thought, meanwhile, that maybe I should go back to therapy. I'd been told that I had sleepwalked as a child, and my mom even said that she heard me speaking in French in my sleep in high school, when I had taken French class, but this was an altogether different kind of problem. I didn't want it to ever happen again.

 

It was time for Matt to go back to Scotland. The farewell at the airport went tearfully, much as before, except that this time I knew we'd be apart for much longer, and that things would, one way or another, be irreversibly changed by the time we saw each other again. There would be a baby. I went back to the ranch and pressed my nose to the grindstone in anticipation of the event, trying to put on
a happy face and subjugate my loneliness and fear; bury it beneath a smile and layers of bravado and confidence I couldn't yet feel.

 

Matt kept me well informed on the baby front. He and Lori went to another scan together. While he'd been in California, she'd somehow fallen in her kitchen and knocked out several teeth, so now she was wandering around with a creepy, gap-toothed grin, he said. It was also clear that she'd completely disregarded the doctor's instructions to put on weight. She had only gotten scrawnier and scrawnier. She was at a dangerously unhealthy weight, and the doctor told her that by no means could she be allowed to give birth naturally. They scheduled a C-section for her in Aberdeen on October 28, nearly a month premature. It was good that we'd decided to fly Matt home much earlier than the anticipated due date. Within weeks, the child would arrive.

He was frightened beyond belief, and it fell to me to give the pep talks, even if peppy was not what I was feeling. I was just as afraid as he was.

On the evening of October 27, I stayed up all night talking Matt through his bus trip to the hospital in Aberdeen. He was a wreck, and my heart broke for him. I would have given anything to be there for him, but all I could do was hope that my voice on the phone line would make a difference.

I was the first (and only, to my knowledge) person he called, an hour after the birth. It was a baby girl.
I wanted my first child to be a baby girl, and she beat me to it.
I tried not to get emotional. I was happy for him—really I was. I told him over and over again how proud I was of him. He sent me her first picture and her first video, shot on his
camera phone. I watched the video over and over again. She was indeed beautiful, and obviously Matt's daughter. She looked exactly like him. True to my prediction, he was madly in love with her the moment she arrived.

“See? What were you so worried about, honey?”

“I don't even know anymore. You were right. She's absolutely perfect. I love her, and I love you.”

Prior to the birth, Matt told Lori that Kelsey was a name that he really loved for a girl. It was his grandmother's name, he explained to me. He hoped he could honor her in this way. If it was a boy, he wanted it to be named after his favorite grandfather, John, with whom he'd been incredibly close. Lori had never come up with any ideas for names, he told me, so they named the baby Kelsey Barnes.

 

Lori had to recover from her C-section, and she wouldn't be able to take the baby home to Peterhead, Matt explained to me, since her stepfather's house was not fit for a child. He brought the baby home with him from the hospital a few days later. Lori only took the bus to visit him and Kelsey every few weeks, he told me.

In the UK, Social Services checks up on every newborn baby at its home for the first several months of its life. Lori, he told me, had listed her home address as
his,
so that they would do all the checkups at his home. I wasn't very fond of this idea.

“You mean, as far as they're concerned, you two live together. You're a couple.”

“Well, I never really thought of it that way, but I suppose so, yes.” I was silent. “Come on, Bri, this isn't for me. All three of us know the truth. She visits Kelsey, but she will never stay overnight in this flat, I promise you. It's just that if they see where she lives, they may take Kelsey
away.” I guess I did understand, but I was still protective. I didn't want to hate Lori, but in some corner of myself, I did. She had complicated our lives beyond belief, made demands upon Matt that had cost
me
exorbitant amounts of money, and put me in the position of having to make concession after concession in order to be a supportive wife to Matt. Now, in a manner of speaking, she was getting her way on another point—she was his girlfriend, too, if only on paper.

“How are you going to explain Lori's complete absence from your flat every time they do a welfare check?”

“Out at the store? Visiting family? Don't worry. They only do these checks for a little while. Besides, soon it
will
be her flat. I'm coming home to you for Christmas, right? I figured we'd get married on this next trip out…if you like. Then I can sign the flat over to her and she can move in with Kelsey.”

All my fears were forgotten. I was ecstatic.

“Yes,
of course
I like, baby! Oh my gosh, I love you so much! I didn't realize it would be so soon! Let's do it.”

“We will. I just need to keep her happy until next week. That's when we go down to the registrar's office and put both our names on Kelsey's birth certificate. If she only puts her own name on the certificate, then I don't have parental rights unless I go to court for them. But if we do it
together,
then she's automatically given me equal parental rights. So then, I won't even have to have her fill out that form you gave me.”

“You still should, you know. Just because you have equal rights on the birth certificate doesn't prove the custody arrangements you agreed on for Kelsey—equal time in the United States and the UK, and once she's old enough
for school, the school year in one country, vacations and holidays in the other.”

“We'll worry about that afterwards. I need to keep her happy until my name is on that certificate. Then you and I are getting married and building our life together.”

In a mere couple of months, I would be a wife, and there was so much for me to accomplish before then. I'd better get started.

 

Matt did indeed get his name on the birth certificate, and continued to care for Kelsey in the following months. He was a lot more exhausted than usual, obviously, with a new baby in the house. We still spoke over gtalk nearly every day, but our chats were constantly interrupted.

“Uh-oh…we have company! She's coming around.”

You may think that this irritated me, but I wasn't usually bothered. If anything, it made me love him all the more, seeing how much he clearly adored his daughter. If I was going to eventually take on parenting (and step-parenting), I
wanted
my husband to be an excellent and attentive parent, and Matt was. Lori still didn't come around to visit her very much, he told me, so he was mostly on his own, and the rest of Lori's family had never met the baby once, or even expressed any interest in seeing her. They hadn't even come to the hospital when the baby was born, which made me feel a bit sorry for Lori—something I hadn't expected.