A Notional Fiction
It was hot as hell in Auburn that day in 1958. It often was in Alabama.[1]
Somewhere nearby a song floated out of a radio and through an open screen window. The deep gravel voice of country and western star Johnny Cash sighed through his cross-over hit single, “Guess Things Happen That Way.” It was the stoic lament of a man beaten down by love’s rejection.
Well, you ask me if I’ll forget my baby.
I guess I will, someday.
I don’t like it, but I guess things happen that way.
The tears burning down Diane’s cheeks and the snot bubbles pulsing in and out of her nostrils made the searing day even worse. She was outside, standing next to the mailbox in front of the modest working man’s house, sobbing in uncontrollable shudders. The most important man in her life was leaving her alone, abandoning her to the emotional hell inside that house.
Diane was six years old.
“No, Daddy!” she cried. “Daddy, please! Please, Daddy, don’t leave me. Please.”
But Diane’s daddy had had enough. Maybe he loved her. Maybe he didn’t. Or maybe he didn’t love her enough. Whichever it was, he just kept walking out of that little girl’s life. He never looked back. He left her alone with her momma, a woman Diane would grow to detest. Her mother burned through five marriages and untold amounts of the drugs and alcohol to which she was addicted. As wretched as her tumultuous life was, Diane’s mother nevertheless managed to ride her daughter just as hard and as mercilessly as the demons that tortured her. When she died years later, Diane refused to go to her funeral.
“They fought like cats and dogs,” Diane’s cousin said of the two women.
Diane loved country music throughout her life. But she flatly refused to accept Johnny Cash’s hopeless premise that things just happen the way they do. She was damned well not going to be a victim of her father’s abandonment or her mother’s self-inflicted illness. Life was not going to tell her what to do. She was not going to sit at a bar, listening to the jukebox in some beer-besotted roadhouse, looking for love and feeling sorry for herself, whining about the cruel cards that life dealt her. Whatever did not kill Diane made her stronger. Somehow, she forged a steel will power on the chaotic anvil of her younger years.
Diane was determined to make things happen the way she wanted them to. She vowed to leave home the day she turned eighteen.
“She was going to make her own path in this world,” her cousin recalled of her. “She wasn’t going to rely on anybody. She was going to be a self-made woman.”
The events in this chapter are a literary recreation based on factual material derived from the author’s interview with Diane McIver’s close friend, Dani Jo Carter, and descriptions of Diane’s childhood by her cousin, reported in “5 Things to Know about Diane McIver,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 23, 2018, https://www.ajc.com/news/local/things-know-about-diane-mciver/tfktDC2Xtwvm1rAIG4IiAL/.