Drive-By











Daytime isn’t the time when you’d expect a Drive-by shooting to happen. My mom, sister, and I were living in a bad apartment complex in Hanford called Amberwoods while my dad was in jail. Drive-bys don’t happen like they do in the movies. There were no women crying or babies screaming. After the shooting it was actually quieter than usual. The cops didn’t show up immediately after the shooting and catch the shooters. It took the police about half an hour just to show up and they never caught the guys who did it.
This hadn’t been the only scary thing to happen to us while living in Amberwoods. There was constantly shootings, gang wars, and drug dealing. Plus the people who lived all around us were either strung out drug addicts or psycho. No, not exactly the best place to be raising your one year old daughter and four year old son but with only one source of income, it was about the best my mom could get. I hated living there and waking up in the middle of the night hearing gunshots or beatings.
This drive-by was the first shooting to happen in the middle of the day though and it scared my mom. She knew that we had to move out of this horrible place before one of us was killed. Up until this happened my mom had been working at the hospital part-time, but soon she started working for sixteen hours so that we could move into a nicer apartment complex.
When my mom was working part-time I saw her most of the day and she was as happy as a girl living in crappy ‘hood while her boyfriends in jail trying to support her two kids could be. For the few hours of the day she was at work my uncle Steven watched me. He was a fun guy to hang out with because he was content just to sit around and play Nintendo with me all day. Then she started working full time and over time and I was with Steve from early in the morning till late at night. It was hard because I was so used to seeing her most of the day and now I got to see her hardly at all. One of the upsides to me being with Steve all day was that we developed a very close bond which we still have today.
About two months later my mom had saved roughly twelve-hundred dollars. Which was enough to put a down-payment on a apartment in a nicer part of town on a street called Florinda. I was finally able to sleep without feeling scared. I could walk outside without worrying about getting shot or jumped. All of us were much happier than we were when we lived in Amberwoods.
Having my mom work full-time at the hospital was harsh on all of us, but in the long run it was better and safer. If we had never moved I would have either been killed or went to prison. What my mom taught me that if you work hard enough you can achieve your dream no matter what.

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