Sable Monroe

For a moment, it felt like things were getting better.

Nassau County didn’t last long.

For a moment, it felt like I had landed somewhere stable.

That didn’t last long.

My stepfather and my mother had another rupture while we were living in Nassau County. This time, he ended up in jail again. While he was gone, my mother couldn’t afford the house on her own.

And just like that, the stability I thought we had started to unravel.

My mother was on the verge of losing the place, and that was when I told her about a friend from school. Someone I genuinely liked. Her family was renting out their basement, and it felt like a solution, maybe even a soft landing.

My mother went to speak with them, and because I was their daughter’s friend, they agreed to let us move in.

At the time, they were asking about $450 a month for the basement apartment, which I remember thinking was a good deal, especially given where we were financially. My mother was working as an accounting clerk then, trying to rebuild. It wasn’t the status she had in Jamaica, and it wasn’t enough to sustain the kind of house we had just left on her own.

Still, it was something.

She wrote two checks.

That always made me nervous.

My mother had a habit of writing checks based on money she expected to have, not money that was already in the account. Sometimes she could buy herself a little time that way. Sometimes it worked. A lot of times it didn’t.

One check cleared.

The other one bounced.

And instead of making it right, she decided to let that friendship burn.

What happened next didn’t just affect her. It affected me.

I lost that friendship, and somehow I was the one blamed for it, even though I was still a minor.

We weren’t welcome there anymore, but because the basement apartment wasn’t legal, they couldn’t formally evict us. So instead, they made the place unbearable. I remember them burning things, something heavy in the air, something that made it hard to breathe. Whether it was anger, smoke, ritual, or all three, I just knew the message was clear.

We needed to go.

Eventually, my mother got back with my stepfather, and together they were able to afford a condo in Glen Oaks, near Long Island Jewish Hospital. The kind of place that looked impressive from the outside, like we had finally arrived.

And in some ways, it did feel better.

There was space again. There was air again.

But he was back.

And I already knew what came with that.

By then, Nassau County was over. The yellow buses, the good school, the version of life that had looked so promising, it was done.

I ended up back in Queens, starting over again.