by Vivian Gray
I knew I couldn’t get my hopes up. How many times had I heard her say these same things before? How many times had she sworn to me she would get better and then she fell right back into the same patterns?
“You need to get better and get a job,” I said. “You need something to keep yourself occupied. There is an opening at the diner. I can talk to Rob about hiring you.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Rob hates me. He looked at me like I was scum when I walked in there.”
My mom was the only person I knew who could pass out in the middle of her living room in front of her eleven-year-old daughter and feel no shame but would still hold a grudge forever if someone gave her a single dirty look.
“He’s always like that,” I lied. Rob was actually a nice guy, but I’d never convince my mother of that now. “I’ll talk to him about the job, and then we can sort everything else out. But you have to get healthy.”
“I will, honey,” she said, patting my hand.
“And you’ll get clean?”
She nodded. “Of course. That was implied.”
***
Trigger
I tossed Kenna one hundred dollars and my number as I left her in the emergency room. I wasn’t even sure why I did it at the time. I didn’t want to talk to her again. I didn’t want to see her.
But then, suddenly, I did.
Each time an unknown number called my phone, I answered, growing more and more annoyed each time it was a telemarketer and not her on the other end of the line. It didn’t make sense. I barely knew her. I’d helped her once and talked to her for ten minutes. I shouldn’t be thinking about her.
A guy in the club, Monk, used to be a private investigator, and after a few weeks of wondering when and if Kenna would call, I finally broke down and asked him for help.
“Does this chick owe you money or something?” he asked when I gave him her name, description, and the little info I knew.
“No, nothing like that. I just want to know where she’s at so I can keep an eye on her.”
He narrowed his eyes at me but didn’t ask any more questions.
Within a day, he got back to me with her address, phone number, and the name of the diner where she worked, ‘Robert’s All-American Diner’.
I held onto the information for a few days before I did anything. I had a club to manage and plenty of club girls to keep me busy, so I waited, hoping that having the option of contacting her would satisfy my desire to see her. That perhaps the only reason I wanted to talk to her was because I had no way to contact her.
“You are being so boring tonight,” Katie moaned, her legs thrown over the side of the armchair in my room.
She had dyed red hair the same color as a fire hydrant, but a killer body she dressed almost exclusively in tiny leather skirts and lace tank tops. We weren’t in anything even resembling a relationship, but she showed up at my place a few times a week for a quick fuck. That night, however, I hadn’t been in the mood.
“You’ve never not been in the mood,” she added. “I actually didn’t even know you had any other moods.”
“Shut up.” I rubbed my temples. I had a headache that wouldn’t go away, and my eyes kept hesitating over the drawer in my desk where I’d put the information Monk had found for me.
“Maybe I’m not in the mood because you won’t stop bitching and moaning.”
She gasped and stood up, her heels pounding against the hardwood floor as she left, slamming the door behind her.
Not even five minutes later, I was on my bike headed for Rob’s All-American Diner. The front of the diner was all windows, red neon lights running around the sign and along the roof. I parked in the chiropractor’s office parking lot across the street, watching as patrons walked in and out, and waitresses in long black skirts and white starched shirts walked around with fake smiles and trays full of hamburgers and shakes and fries.
After sitting there for fifteen minutes, I began to think Kenna wasn’t working that night. But then she whirled in from the back door, beaming at a table of men across the room as she carried out their drinks.
With her blonde hair pulled back in a tight ponytail and her wide, blue eyes, she looked like a poster child for the 1950s. She was wholesome and all-American, just like the restaurant advertised. Even from across the street, I saw the men admiring her. Her white shirt was unbuttoned a few buttons, showing off a bit of cleavage, and she smiled at each man as if it was just for them.
I had every intention of seeing her and then walking away, but I couldn’t. I needed to talk to her. Needed to hear her voice and get her out of my system. Before I could stop myself, I was walking across the street, pulling open the glass door, and sliding into a red leather booth.
Two waitresses came to help me, and I waved them away. Finally, Kenna came out with a confused look on her face. One of the first waitresses who had tried to serve me whispered in her ear and pointed out my booth.
As soon as Kenna saw me, her eyes widened. She did her best to hide it, but I could see the nervousness in her shoulders, the way her fingers shook around her small notepad.
“Can I take your order?” she asked, her eyes glued to her pad.
“A chocolate shake would be just swell,” I said in my best interpretation of a Leave It to Beaver accent.
She sighed and lowered the pad. “Why are you here, Trigger?”
I laid my arm across the back of the booth and shrugged one shoulder. “For some all-American cuisine.”
“If that’s true, then I’m happy to serve you. If it’s not, then you better leave. I don’t want you to mess anything up.”
“What would I mess up?”
Just then, an older woman spun through the back doors, a rag tossed over her shoulder and a mop and mop bucket in her hands. Kenna’s eyes darted nervously between the woman and me, and it took me a few seconds to recognize her.
My mouth fell open. “Your mom has a job here?”
She nodded and tried to position her body between her mom and me. “Yes. Things are going really well. She’s clean and healthy, and I don’t want her to see you. She might recognize you, and I don’t know what that would do to her progress.”
I raised an eyebrow. “She’s clean?”
Kenna nodded, and I wondered how naïve she was. Could her mom – the woman I’d seen slumped on the floor of a crack house only a few weeks ago – really be clean? I doubted it. But still, I wanted to believe her. For Kenna’s sake, I wanted it to be true.
“Fine,” I said, sliding out of the booth and standing in front of Kenna, close enough that I could smell her vanilla-cinnamon scented skin. “I’ll leave.”
Her shoulders visibly relaxed, but before I could walk past her, she reached out and grabbed my arm. My skin tingled beneath her touch, but I did my best to ignore it. “Why did you come here?”
I turned back. Her blonde eyelashes were long and delicate, almost touching her cheeks, and she blinked slowly up at me, biting her lower lip. I smiled down at her and shoved my hand in her apron pocket. “It looks like you’ve really got things turned around. Make sure it stays that way.”
As I walked away, she pulled out the fifty and tried to shove it in my back pocket.
“It’s a tip,” I said, smiling.
“You didn’t even order!”
I was still smiling as I hopped on my bike and rode home.
Chapter Six
Trigger
I’d been dreading seeing Buzz again. Not because I was afraid of him, but because he was a hassle I didn’t want to deal with. Everyone else paid us on time and took The Broken Mavericks’ threats seriously. But Buzz resisted. I knew it was because he didn’t have the money. If he had the money, he would have paid up immediately. He didn’t want trouble any more than we did.
However, like I’d seen the night we walked in on him with Kenna and her mom, he was much too willing to accept payment in alternate ways. He ran a poor business, and it was affecting my bottom line. As soon as I got my mo
ney out of him, I’d gladly drop him as an associate and never darken his doorstep again.
“Same plan as before?” Dean asked as we walked up to the dilapidated crack house Buzz operated out of.
I nodded. “Make him pay or make him pay.”
“Excellent,” Dean said, cracking his knuckles like a character about to fight in a cheesy movie.
The house looked the same as before, and as we walked into the large space, I would have sworn it was the exact same people laying in heaps along the walls. The room smelled like urine and dust.
Buzz was standing in the middle of the room. For a second, my mind flashed back to the last time I’d been here. To Kenna standing half-naked in the middle of the room, Buzz’s hand on her body. I was flooded with the same rage as before, and I wanted to rip his arm off in a kind of delayed retribution.
I took a deep breath. “Good to see you again, Buzz.”
The giant of a man turned around, an incredulous look on his fat face. “I wish I could say the same. What brings you to my neck of the woods?”
“You know why we’re here,” I said, already dropping my sad attempt at civility. “You still owe me money, Buzz.”
“I thought we agreed that I’d get it to you when I could.” He shrugged as if he didn’t care, though I could see the panic in his eyes. He kept glancing at Dean standing next to me, probably remembering how the smaller man had pummeled him only a few weeks before.
“I can see the bruises on your cheeks that prove that isn’t true. My men beat you to a pulp last time we left here, and I told you we’d be back in two weeks.”
Buzz was healing up nicely considering the beating he’d taken, but I could still see the ghosts of bruises under his eyes and along his jawline.
“And here you are,” Buzz said, using both arms to gesture to me and the Mavericks standing behind me. “Very punctual.”
“I warned you what would happen if we showed up and you didn’t have the money. I hate to do it, but how would it make me look if I didn’t follow through on my threats? What would it do to my reputation around town?”
Buzz took a staggered step backward, his fear overriding his pride. “People would think you’re a merciful guy.”
I shook my head and gestured for Dean and the other men to move forward. “Exactly. And I wouldn’t want them to get the wrong idea about me.”
Dean lunged at the much larger man without hesitation, and within seconds, Buzz was on his knees. Dean rained down blows on his face, specks of blood and saliva flying across the room with every connection. Buzz lifted his hands to fight back, but it was like he was stuck in slow motion while Dean was in fast forward. He couldn’t keep up with him, and within two minutes, he was limp on the floor. I only knew he was alive because of his shallow, ragged breaths.
I walked over to him and kicked his side, watching his body heave slightly and then return to its original position with a jiggle. “I’ll be back in a few weeks. If you still don’t have my money, you’re dead.”
Dean kicked him, as well, still hyped from the fight, bouncing from foot to foot. I was the last to turn and leave the room, and as I did, someone called out to me.
“Trigger.”
I spun around, searching for the speaker. A figure in the dark back corner waved to me weakly. The person looked more like a pile of dirty laundry than a human being.
“Who are you?” I asked, taking a few hesitant steps towards the person.
“You helped me before,” the raspy voice said. They leaned forward and the newspapers they were laying on rattled beneath them. “Me and my daughter.”
I shook my head, not wanting to believe it. My heart thudded in my chest as the person leaned forward into the light. I recognized her immediately as the same woman I’d seen working at the diner, and the same woman I’d carried out of Buzz’s two weeks prior. Kenna’s mom.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, wondering where Kenna was. Where did she think her mom was? Did she know her mom was back here?
“I need money,” the woman said, moving towards me on her hands and knees. She looked thinner than she had the last time I’d seen her, as if I could blow her away if I breathed too hard. “Just a little bit of money. You helped us before, and you can do it again, right?”
“Does Kenna know you’re here?” I asked with a bark.
The woman flinched back at the tone of my voice. “Kenna is such a good girl. She loves me so much.”
“I assume that means you didn’t tell her you fell off the wagon again.”
Kenna was a good girl. Perhaps, a little too good. She believed in her mom even when she shouldn’t. She had sacrificed everything to look after her mom, and this was how her mom repaid her? By going back to the same man who had tried to rape Kenna only a few weeks before?
“I just need a little money,” the woman said, looking down at her hands, studying them as though they were foreign objects. It was clear she was high out of her mind.
“Why? So you can get high again? So you can overdose and die in this crack house where Buzz will dump your body on the street? Is that what you want?”
My words didn’t seem to make any impact. She simply blinked a few times and then repeated her request for money.
I barely resisted the urge to spit on her. She disgusted me. “I should leave you here to rot. I’d be doing Kenna a real favor, that’s for sure.”
“Kenna is a good girl,” the woman said, smiling slightly. “Such a beautiful girl.”
I bit my lower lip hard enough that I was worried I’d draw blood, shook my head, and then bent down to pick the pitiful woman up off the floor. She weighed almost nothing, but she smelled like death. Her limp hair looked like it could be the same shade of gold as Kenna’s, but it was so matted with oil and dust from the floor that it was hard to tell.
Her eyes were bloodshot, but behind the haze of drugs, I could see where Kenna got her blue eyes. It was clear Kenna’s mom had once been a beautiful woman, but she’d ravaged her body with drugs and a lifestyle that stripped her of any possibility of youthfulness.
“I just need money,” she said, trying to pull her arm from my grip, but too weak to do more than flex her thin muscles and give up. “Where are you taking me?”
“I’m taking you to the very last place you deserve to go,” I said, dragging her past Buzz’s unconscious form in the middle of the floor, past the Broken Mavericks who were all looking at me like I was crazy. “I’m taking you home.”
***
Kenna
Mom didn’t show up for work. It was the first time she’d missed a shift in two weeks. Normally, we went to work together. Rob had us working the same shift because he wasn’t sure about her yet. He wanted me there to keep an eye on her. But over the last few weeks, he’d come to trust her somewhat. Enough to give us different shifts, at least.
My mom had sold her car years before for drug money, so we had to share mine. She dropped me off at the diner at ten for the start of my shift. It was the first time in years I’d seen her drive a car, and she looked perfectly natural. Still thin and tired looking, but her eyes were clear, her smile wide.
“You need to be back at two,” I said, checking my watch to the car clock to make sure they were both correct. “And Rob likes when people show up a few minutes early.”
“I know, I know,” she said, smiling and waving me away. “You are such a worry wart, Ken.”
I wanted to remind her that years of her disappearing and then dragging herself home days later with no explanation had made me a worry wart. Years of finding credit card bills for thousands of dollars that she’d hidden behind the toilet made me a worry wart. But I didn’t. As much as I wanted her to understand what she’d put me through, Mom seemed happy for the first time in years, and I didn’t want to ruin it.
Instead, I just rolled my eyes, smiled, and reminded her again. “I’ll see you at two.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, saluting me. “I’ll be here.”
&n
bsp; I closed the door, and as I walked up to the diner and began my shift, I believed her. Wholeheartedly. I fully expected to see her in four hours. But then she didn’t show up. I called and called and called, but her phone went to voicemail until I’d filled that with messages. When I finished my shift at six, I took the bus to the stop closest to our house and then walked nine blocks. The car was gone, but still, I’d unlocked the front door and called for her.
“Mom? Are you here?”
I knew she wasn’t, but I couldn’t help wishing. I’d really thought things were getting better.
