It’s a Coyle family tradition of sorts, or so they told me. They’ll buy you a cake, your favorite ice cream, maybe even take you out to dinner, but you can bet your sweet ass that, on the day you turn 18, you’re getting luggage.

And just in case the message is too subtle, they’ll throw in a card, whatever Hallmark's the cheapest, tucked inside a lavender envelope with your name on the outside. It’ll be pleasant enough, maybe a picture of some flowers blowing in an open field, maybe a puppy romping ahead of its mother, and it’ll be embossed with words of loving encouragement for your happy future. And on the inside, at the bottom, just above the grease spot from someone’s dropped potato chip, scrawled in the ink from the pen that’s always on the kitchen counter, it’ll read “Happy Birthday. Now git your shit and git OUT!!”

“Luggage is expensive,” my dad said. “It really is a nice gift for a kid. But when you turn 18, if times are tough, we may not be able to swing it, you know, buying you that Samsonite we’ve promised. I’m just warning you now, ok?”

I responded with an open-faced stare.

“We’re not stingy or anything, Ann. We’ll give you a Hefty bag, maybe two. Y’know, double-ply and all.”

“Ok, Dad, I gotcha.”

And as I walked down the hall towards my bedroom, I heard him, still sitting at the dining room table, laughing, not even going through the motions of trying to muffle it behind his hand.

“I don’t care, Dad, you know I don’t. If it was up to me, I’d be gone now.”

He shouted back, “Well, I could go in the kitchen right now and pack you a lunch for the road...if it would help. We’ve got some peanut butter and jelly, I’m sure.” And then he fell back into a choking fit of laughs, then coughs.

And when I turned 18? I didn’t get luggage. After all the prep work they’d done on my oh-so-fragile teenage psyche, my parents didn’t come through with it. I got the cake, the special meal, and a really good dictionary from my mom. My dad was in Miami that week, though, so he sent roses, a dozen red ones. And the card read, “Happy 18^th—VOTE REPUBLICAN! Love, Dad”

“Where’s the luggage?” I asked him on the phone that evening.

“Oh, you’ll be graduating soon. We were afraid if we gave it to you now, you’d leave and we’d have wasted too much money on your graduation celebration.”

“Really? You think a cake and a shitload of wings would go to waste around here?"

He sighed on the other end, knowing I was right, that there was never food wasted in our home.  "Oh and you know what? Bob's parents are serving sangria from Jimmy Mac's at his party...how lucky is he to have parents that cool?  You know he won't be leaving home until he graduates...that's going to be a party worth sticking around for...that's incentive to stay...”

Another sigh came through the phone. “You’ll get luggage when you graduate from high school.”

And sure enough, they made good on that promise. Less than a month later, on a hot morning in early June, I came home from my graduation rehearsal, and there it was, in the living room, three steps inside the front door: a Samsonite, my name already written on the tag looped through the handle.

“Cool,” I screamed. “Thanks!” I shouted. To nobody. They were out and about, getting the cake, the wings. “I hope they don’t forget the sangria,” I said to myself as I hefted the suitcase in my arms, hugging it against my chest.

And now, a generation later, I have a good friend who is going through this, preparing her 17 year old son for the reality that free rent and groceries will soon be coming to an end. She’s convinced him that on the wall in her bedroom, there’s a calendar she’s using to mark down the days until his 18^th. “I use a big, black Sharpie to mark off each day,” she screams, her punctuation mark to each of their arguments.

He’s a lot like me, though, when I was that age, dealing with the same thing from my parents. So he shouts back, “I do too, Mom, I do too. And I guarantee you that my Sharpie is bigger than yours!”

He’ll still be high school when he turns 18, though, and that, of course, warrants him a reprieve from the street for a while. But she hasn’t told him that yet. “Makes ‘em stronger,” she says. And I know she’s right. So, not knowing any better, he’s already gotten a job, already saving his money.

My neighbors, however, used a different approach.

Not long after Christmas, she came over to borrow money, a twenty I think. “We don’t have much food in the house after the holidays,” she said. She walked back across the yard, my money already shoved into her front pocket, and headed straight for her car. I was at the kitchen window when she returned, McDonald’s bags in hand.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about funding a Chicken McNugget extravaganza, resentful that they’d wasted my money on expensive shitfood, but I was certainly grateful that I wasn’t over there in the midst of the festivities, that, from my kitchen window, I’d be blind to the masticated chicken bits spilling from their greasy lips, the gummed-up French fries visible behind broken and missing teeth, their feast of fast food being washed down with warm beer from knocked-over cans. I was pretty sure a fight would break out in no time, perhaps over a forgotten Big Mac or, more likely, the last beer.

A week or so later, her husband caught me outside.

“Hey, I’m going to pay you back that money next Thursday, ok?”

“But I thought you guys were moving on Wednesday,” I screamed back across our driveways.

“Oh, yeah, did Lisa tell you? Well, I tell you what…we’re having a garage sale on Monday…we’ll just consider that you’ve got a gift certificate you can use.”

I started laughing.

“No, no, we’ve got some really nice stuff. You should send your son over—I’ve got some really cool knives he’ll want.”

“Uh, I don’t think 14 year olds and knives is a good combination,” I replied.

“Oh no, these are cool, I'm telling you,” he said, going back through his front door, never, ever considering that, uh, I didn’t want my son to have knives and, well, my son likely wouldn’t want them.

But knives we got.

Stamped with “Made in Pakistan” between the spots of rust.

“They’re collector’s items,” he said. Readily available on CheapJunk.com, I’m sure, where all the, er, collectors shop.

A few days later, the knives already settled into their new home, a resting spot somewhere in the county dump, my neighbors moved. To the beach. It was always their dream. And, like most parents, an integral part of their dream was NO KIDS.

Not quite at the finishing line with parenting, though, six kids between them, all from previous marriages, the oldest one having just turned seventeen, my neighbors, they left their kids behind. That’s right, in the great tradition of white-trash heroics, that WalMart school of parenting, they left every one of their children behind. Classic.

The evening after the Camaro was packed up, revved in the driveway, then squealed off towards the interstate, I kept watch from my kitchen window. The kids, they’d periodically spill through the front door into the yard, like a litter of abandoned kittens, mewling towards the sky. Except I don’t think singing along with the Metallica that was blaring through the slung-wide-open door counts as mewling. And I am not sure I’ve ever seen a kitten throw a beer can that far.

The next morning, I went over when I saw one on the front porch, nursing a hangover with the hair of the dog, a can of beer turned up at her lips, her mascara smeared down her cheeks.

“You doing ok?” I asked.

She smiled. “Yeah. I got me a place to stay. Not sure about everyone else, but I got my own room where I’m going.”

“Ok. Well, I know this is tough on you.”

“It is,” she said, pushing the upturned can a few inches above her open mouth, the last drops of her breakfast falling to her outstretched tongue. “But Momma says it’ll make us stronger.”