Chapter One
Daisy
“Daisy, I don’t know how much clearer I can be. You can’t pick up any more shifts this week. You can’t work more than forty hours. It’s company policy.”
I rubbed my temples and cradled the phone between my ear and shoulder. The television blared from the living room with some wrestling show that seemed to be more trash talking than actual fighting.
“Girl,” my fathered hollered from his recliner. “Get me another beer.”
I ignored him as I took stock of the refrigerator. “Mr. Herndon, it only puts me over for one hour. I can clock out for that hour and still work. Please.”
“And what happens if you get hurt?” he demanded. “What happens if a supervisor comes in? How are you going to work the register if you aren’t logged in? I’m sorry, Daisy. I can’t help you. See you next week.”
He hung up before I could argue my case any further. My heart sank a little and I closed my eyes. I’d had to use some of the money set aside for rent to pay for the overdue electric bill instead—before it got shut off. Without that extra shift, we’d really be scraping by.
“Girl!” my father yelled again. “My beer!”
Tossing the phone on the counter, I grabbed the bottle of beer and twisted off the top. We’d be in much better shape if my father didn’t drink all of our money away. Before I turned eighteen, I stashed cash around the house in an effort to hide it, but that turned out to be a horrible decision. My father always found the money and spent it before the bills could get paid. Now, I had a bank account, but my father demanded that his name go on it as well.
If he didn’t spend hundreds of dollars on beer and whiskey a month, we’d be doing just fine.
“Here you go, Daddy,” I said softly and handed the beer to him. He barely took his eyes off the screen as he reached up and grabbed it from my hand. “How was your day?”
“Shitty. How do you think my day was? I swear, sometimes you’re as stupid as your mother,” he growled. “Did you bring some dogs home for dinner?”
Plucking at the worn threads on the tattered green recliner, I tried to smile. “Sorry, Daddy. No hot dogs tonight. I reached my limit of freebies yesterday, remember?” Along with my minimum wage that really didn’t support us, the Fry and Grill let me have free food too—only we weren’t supposed to be bringing them home. Normally, the managers didn’t say anything, but when Jerry was working, he kept a sharp eye on what we walked out with.
“Ridiculous,” grunted my dad. “What’s the point of you working down there if you can’t feed me?” He reached for the remote to turn up the television, and I bit my lower lip. It wasn’t exactly a dream job. The place was crap; my employers were mostly stoners, two of my three managers tried on an hourly basis to get in my pants, and I walked home every night dressed in red and yellow stripes and smelling like a grease pan. Still, I got to meet new people every day, and that was nice.
“So what’s for dinner?” my father asked, not even lifting his eyes from the screen.
“I thought that we’d have breakfast for dinner. Scrambled eggs. Toast. I’ll fry up some ham to go with it,” I said brightly as I leaned down to kiss him on the cheek. “How does that sound?”
“Sounds like shit. I want steak.”
“Daddy, we don’t have any steak,” I reminded him quietly. The truth was that we barely had anything in the refrigerator except eggs, a few sandwich fixings, and beer. The pantry only had ramen, so after my father got his dinner, I’d boil one egg with some ramen for my own dinner to make our last few dollars spread a little further.
My father tipped the beer back and shrugged. “Whatever. I’m hungry.”
“Coming right up.” I headed back to the kitchen to start dinner. As I cracked a few eggs in a bowl and started scrambling them, the phone rang. Picking up the old-fashioned landline, I prayed that it wasn’t a debt collector. “Hello?”
“Daisy?” came a nasally female voice. I instantly winced. “It’s Rosaria. I want to talk to you father.”
“Of course, Rosaria. Nice to hear from you.” I gingerly tapped some salt onto the eggs, and stuck my head around the corner. “Daddy, it’s for you.”
He picked up the cordless next to the chair, and I closed the door before hanging up the phone. The last thing my night needed was to listen to my father talk to his girlfriend.
Because Rosaria hated me. I knew the reason even if it didn’t quite make sense. My father had apparently been handsome and popular in high school. As a talented football player, he had everything going for him. Colleges were lining up to recruit him until he got my mother pregnant. Their shotgun wedding took one second, and all other women were shut out of his life. Unfortunately, Rosaria never got over her high school crush, and resented my mother for her interference. And by extension, me.
But this story has a sad ending because my mom died a year ago. She lost a long battle against drug addiction and passed away quietly as she slept. It didn’t hurt as much to lose her as I thought it might because the truth was that I never really had a mother. We were three people living under one roof, but we were never really a family. My parents were more concerned with fighting each other than they were about raising me.
But family was family. Taking care of my father was my job now, and I accepted that. I’d been working since sixteen, and after high school, I’d started working full-time. Daddy hasn’t had a job in a couple of years. He used to be a car mechanic, but he’d gotten fired when he couldn’t stop drinking, and after that gig, he never really looked for a new job.
Sitting the bowl of eggs on the counter, I reached for the frying pan and stifled a scream when a cockroach ran out from behind the wall. Getting a hold of myself, I narrowed my eyes and slammed the pan down on the counter.
“Why you got to be so damn loud, girl,” my father yelled from the other side of the door.
“Sorry,” I called back and shoved the pan in the sink. Scrubbing it down, I turned on the stove and waited for it to heat up.
Our small apartment wasn’t much. We’d had a tiny but nice house on the other side of town up until I turned fifteen. I was never sure what happened, but things got so much worse between my parents. But I wasn’t too young to understand that the drugs and alcohol had taken over their lives. They sold the house and we moved here. It was rent-controlled, but that was about the only good thing to it. The walls were thin, and at night, I could hear everything. In this neighborhood, those aren’t good sounds.
The walls were cracked and dingy from tobacco smoke. The carpet smelled of alcohol and urine. And no matter how many times I scrubbed the carpet, it never seemed to get better. There were two small bedrooms in the apartment, a living room, the small kitchen and dining area, and a small patio looking out over the busy street.
It wasn’t much, but I’d made it home. Any money left over at the end of the month would go to buying a few things from our local dollar store to help brighten the place up. My father always cussed me out for it, but the knickknacks made me smile. I’d collected a bunch of strange tin figurines in the shape of fun animals that sat on the counter. I filled glass vases with fake bright-colored flowers, and used craft paper on cheap canvases to decorate the walls and hide some of the cracks. It was the little things that made me happy.
Humming to myself, I pulled out the sliced ham and opened it up. The smell hit me before I saw the white and green moldy spots. Turning the box over, I sighed. I distinctly remembered buying the sandwich meat not too long ago, but it had come from the discount store.
Tossing it, I grabbed the last egg from the carton, the one that I was going to boil, and cracked it into the bowl. If there was no meat, Daddy wasn’t going to be happy, but hopefully the other egg would appease him.
Throwing hard ramen squares into some boiling water, I did a quick scrub of the kitchen while the food cooked. My father expected everything to be spotless, although with all the strange old stains on the surfaces, that was easier said than done.
When the food was ready, I took it out to the living room. We had a small dinner table in the kitchen, but I was the only one who ever used it. My father always took his meals in front of the television. “Here you go, Daddy,” I said as I handed him the plate and sat a new beer on the side table next to him.
“Where’s the damn ham?” he snarled as he looked at his dinner. “You said you’d fry up some ham.”
“It went bad, Daddy. I gave you an extra egg to make up for it. I’m sorry. I get paid tomorrow, and should be able to swing my the grocery store when after work.”
Grunting, he grabbed his fork and dug into the eggs. Quietly, I twirled my ramen around my fork and watched him from where I sat on the couch. “Are you and Rosaria going out tonight?”
“No. Boys night.”
Immediately, my stomach clenched. My neighbors, the drug dealers and gang bangers and addicts, didn’t scare me as much as my father’s friends did. Most of my neighbors have known me since I was fourteen. If anything, they looked out for me. On the nights that I came home late, those of them who were still out loitering would snap at me for not texting them and asking them to walk me home. They’d follow me up the stairs to the apartment to make sure that I got in safely.
My father’s friends, on the other hand, were drunk lechers who always looked at me like I was going to be their next meal. When they came over, I usually locked myself in my room and tried to pretend that I wasn’t listening to all the shit they said about me. It was gross, hands down.
“Are they coming here?” I asked quietly.
“Now why the hell would they come here? You’ve got no food for them,” he snapped. “We’re going to the bar. Not that it’s any of your damn business.”
“Okay, Daddy. Just remember that I paid a few bills yesterday and today. We have to pay a fee every time we overdraw the accounts.” I flinched when he turned his head and fixed me with his angry glare. Casting my gaze down to my food, I shifted uncomfortably on the couch.
“I need you to wash my clothes tonight. So whatever plans you had, cancel them. Wash my sheets, too. Rosaria is coming over tomorrow, and I need clean sheets.”
“I didn’t make any plans, Daddy. I’ll be happy to do the laundry.” It was on my to-do list anyway. It was easier to get the cleaning done when my father was out. I didn’t have many friend left and my boyfriend was working tonight, so what else was there to do anyway.
After cleaning and putting away the dishes from dinner, I reached above the refrigerator for the jar of quarters up there. There was a coin laundry in the apartment complex, although half the machines didn’t work and I was pretty sure that they were designed to eat the quarters. As I wrapped my hands around the jar and grabbed, I squeezed my eyes shut. It was so much lighter than it was supposed to be.
Three days ago, the jar was full. Now there were barely enough quarters to get one load done.
Great. Now I was going to have to start hiding the coins.
“By the way, you have to move out at the end of the week,” my father said coldly as he walked by the kitchen and down the hall.
I couldn’t have heard him right. Confused, I called after him. “What was that, Daddy?”
“I said, at the end of the week, you need to move your slutty ass out of my apartment. Rosaria is moving in, and there just isn’t enough room for the three of us. Not the way we do things.”
I shuddered. With these thin walls, it was impossible not to understand his meaning. “How are you going to pay the bills?”
He smirked. “Rosaria just got a raise. She makes more money cleaning than you do slutting it around at the Grill and Fry Hut.”
“It’s not like that, Daddy. I’m not. You know that,” I said desperately, reaching out and grabbing the frame to the door.
“Please,” he scoffed. “You’re just like you’re fucking mother. She’d spread her legs for every man if it meant paying for her next score, and you’re no different. I see the way men look at you. You think I don’t know?”
Hot tears gathered in my eyes. Usually, my father didn’t accuse me of being like my mother until he was good and drunk, but even sober, I could tell there’d be no convincing him that I wasn’t like that. “This is my home, Daddy. Where will I go?”
“That’s your problem. You’re eighteen. Just make sure you pay rent before you go. It’s the least you can do for all that I’ve done for you.” He grabbed his wallet and hat and stomped out of the apartment. As the door slammed shut, I let the tears fall.
One week? How was I going to find a place to live in one week? My entire paycheck was going to go to his rent. There wouldn’t even be enough left over to pay for one night as a sleazy hotel, let alone find a new apartment.
What was I going to do? Wrapping my arms around my body, I slid down the wall as hot tears burned my eyes and trailed down my cheeks.