I spent the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at college.

I’d gotten a job in the admissions office for the evening programs, geared towards folks with 9-5 commitments. I wasn’t very good at calling people, and I rarely got anyone on the phone, but it was a job, and, by that point, there was no home to go back to. My mom had called me one day as I was walking to class, breaking the news that she was leaving Schlep. She was getting a divorce.

“Good,” I said.

I was still trying to have a relationship with him at that point. He was my father, after all. Maybe I was the one messing up. Maybe I was the one not trying hard enough. He was the one I called during my sophomore year at school to ask advice on how to get an internship. I wanted to apply to the daily newspaper near where I’d grown up, the Pocono Record. I was scared I wouldn’t get it. I didn’t know how to follow up after I’d sent in the application. I wasn’t sure if the person in charge of the program was married or not, and I didn’t know how to address her. He was the one to say just write or say Ms, and avoid the Miss or Mrs altogether. It was good enough advice.

But even if I still called him, still tried, there was no question that I would be staying with my mother when I got back. It never even crossed my mind to ask Schlep if I could stay with him. If he could lend me a car for a few months.

He was living with his new girlfriend, and I found out soon enough that my mother had moved in with her new boyfriend.

It was the new boyfriend that lent me a car that summer of 2007 when I was 20 and Margaret was about to turn 10, who jumped that same car when I accidentally left the lights on for several hours. And who I could absolutely not stand. He was good for my siblings for a time. He was there when they needed him, filling in a fatherly role that Schlep had abandoned. The new boyfriend’s anger issues would take some time to pop up, but pop up they did. He and I butted heads immediately.

The car he lent me didn’t have a working dashboard. There was no way to know how fast I was going or even if there was enough gas in it. And it would shut off randomly. There was one day where it died right next to Pocono Candle, and I had just enough giddy up in it to roll perfectly into a parking spot. But that was the day I was done with the car. My mom traded cars with me. She’d take the little blue Neon that was unpredictable and rather dangerous, and I’d take her van for the rest of the summer.

After her boyfriend and I got into a few verbal spats, I moved in with a friend of hers, renting a room about 20 minutes away.

Even then, I never thought of asking Schlep if I could stay with him. I wouldn’t have, even if it had crossed my mind.

I worked three jobs that summer, as an intern at the paper, as the communications coordinator for a church, and, briefly, as a cashier at Michael’s. But I still tried to spend time with my family as often as I could, and one day, when I went to pick up Margaret and Rachel, Margaret saw that I was driving the van.

“Ew,” she said. “No boys will look at you in THAT.”

Emblem of Our House is an on-going series about the death of my sister Margaret in 2018, published every Monday/Tuesday here and on Instagram @EmblemofOurHouse.