by Amy Sparling
Copyright © 2017 Amy Sparling
All rights reserved.
First Edition January 31, 2017
Cover image from BigStockPhoto
Typography from FontSquirrel.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems -except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews-without permission in writing from the author at [email protected].
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Also by Amy Sparling
About the Author
Chapter 1
The name Cara is scribbled on the side of my grande iced coffee with milk and whipped cream. I reach for it on the pickup counter, unable to hide the little smile that spears on my lips because they finally spelled my name right. Starbucks isn’t a luxury a girl like me can afford very often, and I probably only came here four times in the last year, but they’ve never spelled my name right until now.
I’ve seen Care-a and Kara and Karra, but never Cara before now. Which is weird because my name isn’t all that unusual. Maybe the baristas can tell I’m a boring person with a boring life, so their misspelling of my name is a way to invite me out of my shell, to turn into someone worthy of a name with a hyphen in it.
Or maybe they’re just lazy.
I turn away from the crowd of teenage girls who have just huddled up next to me while they wait for their drink orders. They’re probably sixteen or so, but I already feel disconnected from them, despite knowing we were probably both in Sterling High School just a few weeks ago. I’m not like them; I guess I never have been. Mrs. Youngblood used to tell me I was an old soul. The kind of kid who seemed much older than her real age because I was quiet and kept to myself and bothered to think about life in ways that my peers didn’t. She’d mention it almost once a day, and it really annoyed me. I was just quiet. I wasn’t old. I wasn’t channeling the spirit of a wise elderly monk. Luckily, that foster parent didn’t last long.
I take a sip of my coffee and send a text to my best friend, Riley.
Ready?
I stand next to a shelf displaying stainless steel coffee mugs while I wait for her reply.
No! I need another hour!
My thumbs ache to fly across the phone screen, telling her it’s been three hours since she originally told me it’d only take forty-five minutes. This is boring. I’m spending the entire day collecting free stuff by myself. What’s fun about that?
Riley must be able to read my thoughts because my phone lights up with another text.
Sorry! I’m hurrying! Xoxo
With a sigh, I sink into a chair at the back corner of the coffee shop. I take a long sip from my drink and my stomach begins to hurt. It had seemed like a good idea when I thought of it months ago. Sign up for every store loyalty card that gives free stuff on your birthday, then collect all the awesomeness as a free present to yourself on the one glorious day a year you get to claim as your own.
Today I am eighteen.
I’ve had a free strawberry banana smoothie, a free turkey and swiss sandwich on wheat bread at my favorite sandwich shop, a free cup of frozen yogurt, and now this free coffee. Seeing as how I don’t eat that much in an entire day on most days, I probably shouldn’t have had it all in the last two hours.
I push the coffee aside and stare out the window. This Starbucks is right on the boardwalk in Sterling. We’re a coastal Texas town with a beautiful view of the Gulf of Mexico, which is to say, not a very beautiful view at all. Our ocean water is brown and salty, overflowing with nasty bits of seaweed that they occasionally bulldoze into piles on the beach. Our beaches are littered with broken shells and old cigarette butts, and our lifeguards, when they bother to show up, aren’t even attractive, which pretty much shatters every stereotype ever of beach lifeguards.
But this scrappy little town is my home. I was born here, and I’ll probably die here, and now I’m turning eighteen here. Unfortunately, my best friend isn’t at my side, and now I have a stomachache, so this birthday sucks.
Okay, maybe that’s a little dramatic. Riley will be at my side, just after she’s done doing whatever she’s doing to celebrate my birthday. When she turned eighteen two months ago, we snuck into the movie theaters to watch her favorite actor walk around shirtless in one of those stupid college life comedies that are mostly trashy humor and not exactly real comedy. After, we celebrated her legality by buying some scratch off lottery tickets, which only won two dollars. Then we went back to my Uncle Will’s house and ate the cake I’d baked for her and binged Netflix until dawn. I’d love to see if Mrs. Youngblood would still call me an old soul after watching me eat half an entire sheet cake and then fall asleep on the floor in front of the TV.
A few minutes go by and I’m feeling stupid sitting here alone. Everyone else here is alone too, but they have laptops as companions and they all seem heavily focused on their work. I have nothing but a cheap prepaid cell phone and this half empty coffee that’s making my stomach hurt. I toss it in the trash and head back outside, the salty air filling my lungs as I turn north and start walking back to Uncle Will’s house.
It’s a nice day outside. Hot and a little humid, but the sun shines brightly overhead, sparkling down on the ocean. Our waves are never surfing quality, but surfers are out there anyhow, trying to catch something that’s so small it collapses back into the ocean the second it begins to look like a real wave.
I watch the summer tourists hanging out, enjoying their vacation in their brightly colored beach towels, brand new ice chests and umbrellas stabbed into the sand. I close my eyes and breathe in the smell of the ocean, tinted with the coconut scent of sunscreen and a hint of freshly baked bread at the bakery down the boardwalk.
Sterling is a good place to live. Maybe not the best, but it’s good. I am a legal adult now, and although I have no desire to buy a cigar and gamble and any other things I’m legally allowed to do, I am old enough to think about my future. With the noose of high school behind me, everything is in front of me. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like that. Sometimes the crushing weight of reality claws its way into my mind, telling me that I’ll never get into college because I’m broke, I’ll never be loved because I never have been, and I’ll never amount to anything but some loser’s second wife, and that’s only if I get lucky.
But right now, in this very moment, I’m breathing in salty air and the wind is whipping my hair all around, and the ocean is so huge and impossibly vast, and I just have a good feeling about things. I’ll get a better job than the part time joke that I currently have at the Surf n’ Shop. I’ll get a place of my own with Riley and we’ll make s
omething of our lives. Everything isn’t hopeless. Not on a day like today.
* * *
Uncle Will’s house is a one bedroom brick bungalow that was painted lime green in the seventies and hasn’t been updated since then. He lives two blocks from the sea, in what used to be an old neighborhood filled with old people, but now more and more houses are being sold and then remodeled into something marvelous. Some of them are even demolished to the ground and rebuilt. But Uncle Will’s house is still here, the same as always.
I skip up the four stairs to the front door and grab the pink envelopes stuck in the mail slot on my way inside. There’s a weird stench of burnt sausage in the house. I don’t know why Uncle Will even bothers cooking when he’s so terrible at it.
“I’m home,” I call out as I set the mail on the coffee table and turn to head to my room. Home is a relative term, as is my bedroom. I’ve lived here six years, but the room I sleep in hardly looks any different than it did when I arrived. It’s technically a formal living room, with two doors. One leads to the kitchen and is closed off with a folding accordion door, and the other is an archway that leads into the hallway. You can’t close it off because there’s no real door, but after the one time my uncle accidentally walked in on me in my underwear when I was thirteen, we’ve had a sheet thumbtacked into the wall to give me some privacy.
I sleep on a fold out couch that I’m too lazy to fold out, and my clothes are kept in a dresser we picked up at a garage sale. I would kill for my own closet so my clothes don’t get so wrinkly, but when I remember that some people like Riley don’t even get a dresser, I shut up and count my blessings.
“Cara, is that you?” Uncle Will’s voice is booming and deep, like a lumberjack or maybe a professional wrestler. Unfortunately for him, he’s actually kind of short, is balding, and has a beer gut that could put him in the running for best Santa Claus impersonator.
I hear the screen door slam closed as Uncle Will enters in through the back yard. “Yes, I’m here,” I call back.
“Can you come in here for a second?”
I drop my purse on the couch bed and push open the accordion door that leads to the kitchen.
“What’s up?”
Uncle Will smiles at me from his place at the kitchen table. He’s wearing a crisp new button up shirt, navy blue to match his eyes. It’s a drastic change from the worn out T-shirts he usually wears, but getting a new girlfriend will do that to you I guess. This isn’t the first thing Rachael has changed about him. He’s also wearing contacts instead of his old wire frame glasses.
“Happy birthday,” he says, his lips creasing into a hesitant but caring smile. He holds out a pale yellow envelope, the kind shaped like a greeting card.
I smile and take the card. “Thank you.”
“I haven’t seen Riley yet,” he says, clearing his throat. “I thought you two were doing something for your birthday?”
“We are, but she’s not ready.” I give him this look that says you know how Riley is, and he nods because he does know. I open the envelope and read the birthday wish on the card he selected for me. It has butterflies on the cover, flocked with glitter and a sweet message about how I am a niece he is proud of.
Inside is a twenty dollar bill. “Thank you,” I say closing the card. “You didn’t have to do this, you know.”
Uncle Will’s painting business has been struggling lately, so I feel immensely guilty about him giving me money. He shrugs away my words and extends a hand toward the chair across from him. “Can you sit down for a minute?”
My stomach tightens, feeling ten times worse than it did when I ate too much food and chased it down with coffee. Uncle Will usually keeps to himself. He doesn’t ever ask me to sit with him unless there’s food on the table and he’s offering to share it with me. The twitch in his brow and the crease above his lips tells me this isn’t a fun chat about having a happy birthday.
The chair groans as I drag it across the floor and I slowly sit down, nausea rising in my stomach.
“I have some—uh—bad news, Cara.” Uncle Will stares at his hands, which are intertwined on the kitchen table, his knuckles white with worry.
A lump rises in my throat as I realize this is the kind of moment where people tell you they’re dying of cancer. “What is it?”
“I’m going bankrupt.” He says it all matter-of-factly, like maybe it took him a while to admit it to himself but now that he has, he can admit it to anyone. My eyes dart to the birthday card in my hands, the twenty bucks he needs more than me.
“No—” he says, holding out his hand. “That money is yours. I can spare it,” he says with a chuckle. “But I can’t keep my business going any longer. No one wants their house painted by the little guy anymore. It’s all corporations with dozens of guys who can paint anything in an hour instead of one guy taking two days.” He shakes his head, the disgust over big corporations clear on his face. “I just can’t sustain it anymore. Rachael is helping me file for bankruptcy.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “That’s…awful.”
He nods, and the worry lines in his forehead deepen. “Cara, I’m losing the house.”
Maybe I’m just an idiot, but the words don’t really hit me at first, probably because my brain has realized the reality of this situation long before I have. “What do you mean?” I say, looking around. The house seems fine to me.
“I can’t pay the mortgage anymore. I’m behind two months.” He sighs, a heavy drawn out confession. “They’re foreclosing on me, and I’m losing it. I’m going to move in with Rachael, but she has a two bedroom apartment and a son she gets every other week so—” He swallows, and I watch his Adam’s apple bob, feel the waves of regret rolling off him. He doesn’t want to say it, he doesn’t want to tell me this unbelievably bad news.
So I say it for him. “I can’t go with you.”
His lips flatten. “Uh, no you can’t, Cara. I’m sorry.”
“I understand.” That lump in my throat is threatening to cut off my airway. Riley and I are already planning to move out, but we’re nowhere close to being able to afford our own place. I look up at my uncle. “When?”
“A month. Maybe less, but, Cara, I’m not going to leave you on the streets or anything. We can stay in this house as long as we can. I’ve been reading about squatter’s rights and a lot of times if you just refuse to leave, they can’t evict you for some time, so—”
“It’s okay,” I say, cutting him off. There’s a thin line of sweat on his forehead and I suddenly feel like I should be comforting him even though he’s the one with the girlfriend to live with and I have nothing. “You’ve given me a home as long as you could,” I say, forcing a smile. “I’ll figure something out.”
“I’m here for you in any way I can,” he says. His shoulders don’t seem as tight anymore, but I can tell he still feels horrible. “I’m going to sell off all this furniture since we don’t need it at Rachel’s and I’ll give you some of the money, okay? I’ll help you find a place. Maybe renting a room with some college kids or something.”
I nod, even though sharing a house with people I don’t know sounds like a freaking nightmare. “Thanks.”
My smile is tight, but I stand up, pressing my birthday card to my chest. “I’ll be fine, Uncle Will.”
And I almost mean it when I say, “Don’t worry about me. I’ll figure it out.”
Chapter 2
I don’t remember much of my mom. That’s kind of a lie…I remember things. But I don’t allow myself to remember them. I don’t actively reminisce over those days when I was a daughter and she was a mother. Some people are supposed to be there for you and they let you down. That’s all there is to it. Thinking back to the past just seems so pointless. It’s gone, it’s over. It happened before and remembering it now won’t do a damn thing.
As I sit on my couch bed in the room that’s not really a bedroom but has been all I’ve had for the last six years, I find my thoughts drifting to the woman with
sunken in cheeks and wrinkles around her eyes. My mother had white blonde hair like mine that she kept tied into a tight bun on the top of her head because she never had time to fix it between working at the gas station, hooking up with men she’d bring home for one or two nights, and scouring the town for drugs.
Her name is Jenny Blackwell and she’s Uncle Will’s younger sister. But just like how she’s not really my mom anymore, she’s not really his sister anymore, either. I was five years old when a police officer approached me at the McDonald’s on forty-second street and asked if he could sit down. He was a cop and I was scared of cops. I had seen men in uniforms like his take my mom’s friends away in the back of their cop cars and then we’d never see them again. I’d seen Mom’s eyes widen in fear when we’d see a cop on a street corner, and she’d make us turn the other way even if we weren’t going that way. I was scared of this cop, but I also knew they could arrest me, so I said yes, he could sit with me. I didn’t want to disappear and never come back like the drug addicts who lived in our cheap apartments, but in a way that’s kind of what I did. I talked to the officer and then I disappeared and I never went back that McDonald’s again.
He asked me about my mom and why I was alone. I told him I was always alone here at the McDonald’s, but it turned out he already knew all about it. The manager had called the police on me because they felt that my mom leaving me there eight hours a day wasn’t very good parenting. I thought it was okay. She gave me money for food and there was a playground with slides and a ball pit and usually there were some other kids I could play with until their parents took them home. No one else stayed as long as I did.
The cop did not think that was okay.
I was taken away and placed into the foster care system with other kids who spent most of their days screaming and throwing tantrums because they wanted to go back home to their parents. I wasn’t like them. I didn’t really care if I went back with my mom. Here, I had food all the time and hot showers and a bed that had clean sheets to sleep on. A few years into it though, and I could see why the other kids yelled. I had grown to hate foster care. I wanted out. I traveled from foster home to foster home, always being treated fairly nicely but never like a real family member. One time I’d spent six months with this family who had three kids of their own and two foster kids including me. They were all nice and we all got along really well. No one ever fought or yelled. And then their grandparents came over to visit and my foster parents were taking photos of everyone. My foster mom, Shelly, held out her camera and said, “Okay, now let’s get a picture of the real kids with Grandma and Grandpa.”
