"Hell no I don't want to go to the hospital. We don’t need-your parents to find out that I'm coming down from three weeks of getting high out of my mind. Then they'd really hate me."
"I don't give a shit what they think of you. When I turn eighteen, it's going to be even easier to pretend that Lindsey and Langston don't exist. I doubt they'll bother to show up for my graduation. If you need to go, let's go."
"I'll be fine. If Uncle Keith can quit doing coke cold turkey after like twenty years, I think I can handle this."
"But your uncle was never really heavy into it was he?"
"I wouldn't say that Tor. He had been into it pretty heavy for a while. He almost got suspended right before my dad died because of it. They never knew he was doing coke, hell I don't know what those dumbasses thought he was doing, but he was acting messed up. He quit after Dad died, because Aunt Lori threatened to leave him and take me and Carl with her if he didn't get his shit together. He only did it now and then after that, but I know how hard it must have been for him to quit. The way the hard shit makes you feel is like nothing else. You know the way weed makes you feel, it's a much more mellow high. Everything's funny, you may think about your life and it may seem like an abstract concept, but you're still pretty much in control of what you do. The worst you'll do when you're stoned is eat a bunch of junk food and say some pretty stupid shit. With the hard shit, you're flying. Everything is different and all you can think about is your next high. Hard drugs screw with your mind and if you do enough, they'll keep it screwed. Like how I didn't remember you calling the other day. I really didn't remember Tor. If I'd have been in my right mind I wouldn't have been thinking about anything else."
"Do you want me to stay in your room Tony? I don't give a shit what Langston says. I'll sleep on the damn floor if I have to. I won't be able to sleep if I'm worried about you."
"I don't want to cause a problem Tor."
"I'll tell them you're sick with the flu. I don't want you to be alone through this. When I told you that I'd stick with you through this I meant it."
"I'll lay with you until you fall asleep and then I'll go to my room and listen to music or read a book. If I need to I'll go outside, go for a walk to clear my head. Things are bad enough with your parents. I don't want you getting in more trouble because of me."
"Things have never been good with my parents Tony. People here don't walk around the neighborhood late at night. If they see somebody out in jeans and an old leather jacket they'll probably call the police."
He gave her a weak smile. "Welcome to the world of the privileged huh? You wanna go for a drive? Go see a movie? It's still pretty early isn't it?"
She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket, and checked the time. "It's a little after ten now. I'm sure they have a late movie at the theatre.”
"Okay. Let's go. You drive since you know where everything is. You know I grew up three hours from here and have never been anywhere near this neighborhood? Must be nice to be rich and not have to worry about anything."
"Yeah, right.”
She followed him into the house and up the stairs so she could grab her coat.
"Look at Lindsey and Langston and tell me that rich people don't have problems. I think I'd much rather live in a crappy apartment and worry about making ends meet than deal with the bullshit problems that rich people invent."
He helped her into her jacket and then pulled his on. She still had the car keys in her purse so she checked to make sure she had her house key and then followed him back down the stairs, setting the alarm system and then leading him to the door.
"You're not going to leave a note? My aunt would have kicked my ass for doing that when I WAS eighteen."
"They'll be too drunk to notice we're gone. I think there's a different god that looks over rich people. They drink like fish, drive drunk, go out and get drunker and do you see a scratch on any of their cars? No. Do you see either of them with anything but a perfect driving record when they should probably be in jail for running over pedestrians?"
He shook his head, and strapped his seat belt on as she pulled out of the driveway. "I still think that I wouldn't mind trying it out for a while at least." He glanced back at the house.
"Sure, they've got a big house. They've both got an expensive car and there's three more in the garage. They've got people that do anything from their cooking and their laundry to answering the door. So what? I have no idea what the hell it is that Langston does for a living. My mother has never worked a day in her life, unless you count seducing her next ex-husband out of his money. When it comes down to it, what are they going to leave behind? Langston doesn't have kids, so where's his money gonna go when my mom divorces him and moves on to the next moron with more money in the bank? And Lindsey, all she has comes from the rich prick that she's married to. So what is she going to leave behind? Credit card bills? The one thing that I was grateful for growing up was that she never married a guy with kids, so I never had to deal with stuck up brats reiterating the fact that I would never be good enough. Now she can marry whoever the hell she wants when she divorces Langston. I know it’s coming. She's been with him almost four years. I think that's a record for Lindsey. I never understood why she married him. Sure he's rich, but this is not the biggest or most expensive house we've lived in. I think Luther was the one with the most money. He was the only one who ever paid attention to me. Of course it was never in a good way. He was the one who beat me with a belt when I got in the cookies because Lindsey fired the cook and was too drunk to fix dinner. I was eight years old. Langston was the only one smart enough to make her sign a prenup. So she's got to have her claws firmly imbedded in the next sorry rich guy before she divorces him."
"Did you ever think that maybe she loves him Tor?" He glanced at her as he lit a cigarette.
Tory snorted, cracking the window as she lit a cigarette of her own. "My mother doesn't know what love is. I have no idea why she was with my father. He came from a working class background. His parents were two of the best people you'd ever meet. I think that maybe it was before she figured out so she could turn the head of someone who was not only good looking, but had money. I think there's a part of him that still loves her. Yuck."
"She's beautiful no doubt." Tory turned to give him a dirty look as she pulled up to a red light. "I'm just saying I can see where you get it from.”
“I don't look like her." She grimaced. "I look like my Dad. She's got those ice queen blue eyes that cut right through you. My Dad's blonde too. Don't ever say that I look like her again. I am nothing like her. Nothing."
"Baby, I'm not saying that you are like her. But you've got her facial features. That's not a bad thing. People still stop me on the street sometimes and tell me that I'm the spitting image of my dad."
"Your dad was a good man Tony. Don't you think that it drives me absolutely crazy to look in the mirror and catch a glimpse of her face? Sometimes I want to have plastic surgery so I don't ever have to see it again."
“Darlin' I know how it feels. I couldn't look in the mirror when I was getting high all the time. With as proud as it makes me when people say that I look like him and remind me of what a good person he was; because anyone will tell you that my dad was someone who would give you the shirt off of his back, it hurts me too. I would never want to forget him. It messes me up bad that there's times when I wonder if my mom would be better off not remembering him because she can't deal with it, but it still kills a little part of me every day too. I don't want to look in the mirror and see my old man because he's not there anymore. I don't want to hear one of his old friends from high school reminiscing about the good times they had. I don't want to look at Uncle Keith and see a piece of my dad. He sounds like him sometimes. All of that makes me want to go find the guy that took him away from us and make him pay."
"They never found the guy who did it?"
“Nope. And there were like ten witnesses. No car was ever reported stolen, no body shops came up with
a car with damage like that, and no one could remember the plates. They gave the cops about five different descriptions of the car. They couldn't remember if the guy was a darker skinned Hispanic guy or a lighter skinned black guy. For all we know it might have been a white dude with a good tan. If Dad is watching over us from wherever it is that dead people go to, he's probably kicking his own ass every day for being gone. I know how much it hurts me to see my mom all messed up. He'd been in love with Mom since he was like twelve. I can't imagine what it must be like to him if he can see her now. And me, who in the hell wants to see their son dealing drugs? I can't believe that Uncle Keith lets me get away with it."
"Maybe he's waiting for you to figure out for yourself that it's not what you want to do with your life. Don't they say that there's a point where you've got to let go? Let your kids make their own mistakes?"
"I've made enough mistakes in my life for a damn army Tor. And I don't know what I'm going to do if I'm not dealing. How in the hell will I take care of my mom then? If I have to fit the full bill for her care myself, I'll be screwed. I'm really lucky that their insurance plan still covers her. And the cost of the insurance is insane. I don't see an option for me getting out of dealing. I sure as hell can't cover it all with some minimum wage job which is all I'd be able to get since I have no work history."
"Oh, Tony." He was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. And she was selfish enough to complain about her life she thought. "Maybe you can break out of it slowly. Take some night classes or online classes. You're smart. You'd have no problem getting a good job if you went through college."
"I'm supposed to go to a class here and there, because I won't be able to get a good enough job without a four year degree. If I'm lucky maybe I'll be finished in eight years. By then I'll be thirty and I might be in prison because Uncle Keith got shot in the line of duty or something screwed up like that. I love you more than anything Tor, but sometimes I wonder if you wouldn't be better off with someone else. I don't have much of a future ahead of me. It kills me to think of being without you. But I can't sentence you to the life that I've gotten myself into. You've got a chance baby, and I'm not going to take that away because I messed up."
"Don't you dare say that Tony. You're not taking anything away from me. I was an idiot hung up on Jude for so long, blind to what was in front of me. You are hands down the most honorable man I've ever met. You put your life on hold so you could make sure your mother was taken care of. You stand up for people that have no one else to stand up for them. Who else do you think would have stood up for that girl when her dad tried to sell her body for drugs? If he would have gone to any other dealer in the world they would have taken her without a second thought."
He sighed. "You're probably right about that, but that doesn't make me a good person. It makes me sick some days to sell to those idiots. Sometimes I want to look at them, especially a guy like Eduardo who's got a wife and kids at home, and is spending money that was probably supposed to be used for diapers or food or to pay the light bill; but instead it's going to get some nasty wasted crack head high one more time. I want to tell them to take a look in the mirror and ask themselves if it's all worth it. And believe me, I ask myself that shit every day. What makes me feel worse is that Carl's got it into his mind that what I do is cool. I've always got cash on hand. I don't really have to work for a living. All I have to do is pick up drugs every once in a while and then I just wait for the crack heads and the tweakers to come to me. Carl has really changed in the last year. He used to have aspirations. He wanted to be a cop and now he's looking at me and thinking that I've got it made. He sees how hard his dad works. How down he gets sometimes because he can't convince a woman who just got the shit beat out of her for the like hundredth time by her husband that she's better off without him. And next thing you know he's back again and she's laying there beaten to death on the kitchen floor. Or she's got another broken arm and he's got to take their kids because it's midnight and there's no food in the house and the electricity’s off and it's the middle of winter and the poor kids are shivering, bawling their heads off because they watched daddy beat the holy hell out of mommy again. The only time I saw my Uncle Keith cry other than when Dad died was one night when he came home from a domestic. It was right after graduation and I was still living with them. I was up early, helping Aunt Lori make breakfast. All Uncle Keith wants to do when he gets home after the night shift is eat and go to sleep. He comes in the door and drops his hat on the couch. She looks up at him, gives him the usual kiss and I love you honey how was work? He puts his head on her shoulder and starts blubbering like a little kid. So she goes into the living room with him. They're sitting on the couch. He's got his head in her lap. She's stroking his hair like I'd seen her do with Carl a thousand times when he was little and when he was upset. I'm standing there in the kitchen feeling like an intruder. I start to go towards the door. She looks up at me and gives me this sad smile and gestures for me to sit down in the chair in the living room. So I sit. It takes what seems like forever for Uncle Keith to calm down. He was sobbing Tor. You would have had to have been completely without a heart to not let it get to you. Then he sits up, asks me for a cigarette, which he never does, because he hates cigarettes, won't kiss Aunt Lori after she's had one until she's brushed her teeth, goes to the bathroom, blows his nose, washes his face, comes back out, lights the cigarette, takes a drag, coughs his head off. Then he smokes the whole thing down, puts it out, looking at it again like it's the nastiest thing on earth, then lets out this big sigh and starts to tell us about what went on that night. It's was like fifteen minutes from the end of his shift when a call comes in from this old lady. She said she couldn't sleep because the neighbor's little girl had been up all night crying. This little girl's not a baby. She's like five. They go over there Uncle Keith and his partner; and knock on the door expecting some tired mom to open the door that’s been up all night with a sick kid. Instead this little voice says ‘Just a minute’. They can hear her struggling with the locks, because she's a little kid. Finally she gets the door open. They can see that she'd had to drag a chair over to the door to get to the locks. They ask her where her mom is. She tells them that Mommy's in the kitchen and they've got to help her because she's real sick. Uncle Keith looks at his partner, I think his name was McCaffrey, he quit a few weeks later, and went to sell insurance. They look closer at the little girl. She's in her nightgown and there's blood all over it. They go into the kitchen, and her mom was lying on the floor, blood and brains splattered all over. She's got a pillow under her head. The poor kid was trying to make her comfortable. She was too little to understand that Mommy wasn't sick, Mommy was gone. Her dad had told the kid that she needed to stay with Mommy because Mommy was sick and needed her. He shot his wife, took their eighteen month old little boy out of his crib, stuck him in the car, told his little girl she had to stay to take care of Mommy and took off. That poor girl sat there all night with her mom's dead body, crying because Mommy was sick and wouldn't wake up. Her dad must have gotten her up right after he shot her mom because the blood was still fresh then. This guy wasn't your usual wife beater. He wasn't one of the ones where you know she's gonna end up dead if she doesn't leave him. They'd only been in town a few months, kept to themselves, and never bothered anybody. Uncle Keith said he saw them all out in the yard a few days before, looking like your all American apple pie family. Pretty wife, handsome husband, two gorgeous happy little kids, looking like they didn't have a care in the world. They found that guy six months later, never found out why in the hell he did what he did. He'd parked in the garage of their new house in Florida. He gassed himself and his son to death. I can't imagine how that little girl feels. Uncle Keith still has nightmares sometimes. He doesn't like to talk about it not even with Aunt Lori, but it kills him."
"Geese," Tory said softly as they got out of the car in front of the theatre.
"I can't blame Carl for not wanting to go through shit like tha
t, but it's not like dealing is such a glamorous life. I ain't never had a drugged out fuck pull a gun on me, but I can see the desperation in their eyes sometimes. Like with that guy who left me with his car. You could tell he was thinking of doing something stupid. I can't put you through that shit Tor. I can't have you coming home from school or work or whatever, and finding me dead on the living room floor because some junkie had to get his fix."
She put her arms around him. "That's all the more reason to get out of it. I'll beg some money off of Langston for college and not go so you can have money to take care of your mom for a while without worrying about it, if that's what it takes."
"The hell you will. I'm not going to have you putting your life on hold for me."
She laughed, looking away from him to the front of the theatre which listed the movies that were playing. "Maybe I can convince him to pay me never to come home again. That sounds right up his alley. It's not like he'd miss the money."
"No, Tor. I mean it. I'm going to get out of this shit myself. No matter what I have to do."
"I told you Tony. You're not getting away from me that easily. We're in this together. No matter what shit you have to go through, we're going through it together. And there has to be some advantage of having a rich stepfather right?"
He shook his head and scanned the movie titles. The only thing that was playing for the late show was a romantic comedy that started in ten minutes. "C'mon Tor. We better get inside or we'll miss the movie. We'll talk about this later."
She gave him a kiss. "I mean it too, Tony. I love you. I'm not my mother and I will stick by you. I'm not going to let you get away from me because you think you're doing the right thing. You're stuck with me babe."
"Okay Tor." He squeezed her hand, but there was a look in his eyes that made her wonder.
He paid for the movie tickets and two sodas. They walked back to the darkened theater, taking a seat in the middle of the back row. The theatre was almost empty. Besides Tory and Tony there was only a middle aged couple, glancing furtively around; as if they were afraid someone would catch them together, and a teenage couple making out brazenly in the front row.
Misty Reigenborn Romance Boxed Set Page 118
