Win for Love

by Isabelle Peterson

  Win for Love

  Isabelle Peterson

  Win for Love

  Copyright © 2018 Isabelle Peterson

  All rights reserved.

  Published by I.K. Peterson, LLC

  Fairfield, CT USA

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  No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Under no circumstances may any part of this book be photocopied for resale.

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and co-incidental.

  * * *

  Cover Photography by April Inskip

  Cover Model: Alexis Michelle

  Created with Vellum

  To my mother,

  a strong woman, who occasionally plays the lottery.

  Contents

  1. Finders Keepers

  2. Now What?

  3. A Weekend with Possibilities

  4. Setting Things in Motion

  5. Look Out Windy City!

  6. I'm a Chicagoan

  7. New Life, New Friends

  8. Fish Out of Water

  9. As Luck Would Have It

  10. An Invitation

  11. Classy Dinner Date

  12. After Dinner

  13. The Boat

  14. A Breather

  15. A Little Song

  16. Home Sweet Home

  17. A Gentleman

  18. Ruining Me

  19. Beyond Words

  20. New Heights

  21. Left Alone

  22. Disco?

  23. Making Amends

  24. Fateful Friday

  25. Hung over

  26. The Dawning

  27. All Is Good - Except Me

  28. Back to Museums

  29. Confessions

  30. Thinking of the Future

  31. Meeting His Parents

  32. A Million Questions

  33. The Results

  34. The Ugly Truth

  35. Help

  36. Meeting Everyone Else

  37. Will you?

  38. Epilogue

  Social Responsibility Statement

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Isabelle Peterson

  About the Author

  1

  Finders Keepers

  CRYSTAL

  My skin crawls hearing my mother’s squeaky bed in the next room through the paper-thin walls. It’s as clear as if her bed is in my room, a major flaw in the construction of this ‘box on blocks’ we call a home. Even after pulling a pillow over my head, I can still hear her and a man groaning and grunting and spewing profanities. The only way to block the babel is to hum quietly to myself, so I do, yet it only blocks so much. I don’t want to hum loudly enough and have them hear me.

  “Oh, God, Carol! Yes! Just like that!” the guy bellows. I don't know his name, and I bet my mom doesn't either.

  Choking on the bile rising in the back of my throat, I can no longer hum.

  “It’z Ssshhherylll,” my mother corrects him, her speech slurred from way too much booze. There are many in town who think it’s just the way she talks. I know better.

  “Who. Th’ fuck. Cares,” he grunts just before he howls loudly with his release.

  He sounds like a brute.

  His feet hit the floor, apparently his boots still on. Good move, I think to myself. One never knows what one will step on in her room.

  It’s not entirely her fault—my mother’s. She has a disease. She’s an alcoholic. She can’t help it. This is what she’s told me since I was seven, anyway. It’s what I was told by the social worker at my school. And in Al-Anon. She has her good days. She has her bad days. But don’t we all?

  When I hear her bedroom door open, I grab the metal baseball bat I have kept next to my bed for the past ten years or so. I have used it more than once when one of my mother’s prize-winning assholes brought home from whatever dive bar she was at has come into my room. They were never serious, and they rarely stayed the night. I started keeping the bat there when I was fourteen and had been molested by one of my mother’s guys. What hurt most was that my mother actually blamed me. And at fifteen, I believed her. True, she was drunk as shit at the time, but she said I must have done something to be suggestive to her ‘boyfriend.’ That said, I expected my mother to be outraged equal to my fear and humiliation. That’s not what happened.

  ~

  “Well, look at you, Crystal,” she scoffed, pointing to my tank top and running shorts, my sleeping attire for the warm summer night. “Your perky tits are practically hanging out for the world just to touch and grab.”

  “I was in my room. My door was closed,” I protested.

  “Well, he must have seen somethin’. Or smelled you,” she scowled. “I need another drink,” she muttered and staggered down the hall.

  ~

  I had asked my mom if we could get a lock on my doorknob, but she laughed as if I’d asked her to install a state-of-the-art security system in my room.

  My mom also benefitted from my security bat. Once, I actually used it to defend her when the guy started punching her for God knows why.

  ~

  “Leave her alone!” I shouted, busting into my mom’s room, fully clothed in sweatshirt and sweatpants despite the 70℉ night, lest I run around scantily clad inviting unwanted advances from Mom’s Beau du Noir. Tonight’s gem’s fist was raised and just about to come down on my mother’s already swollen and bloody face, so I swung the bat making direct contact with his elbow.

  “Motherfucker!” He grabbed his elbow with the hand he’d been using to pin my mom down, so he could hit her without her moving.

  “Get the fuck out or the next thing I hit will be your head!”

  “You’re just as fucking batshit crazy as she is.” Then he looked at me and then my bat and started laughing.

  “You find this funny?” I asked, waving the bat overhead, ready to strike.

  “You’re holding a bat. And you’re batshit crazy! I finally get where that word came from.”

  I swung again, narrowly missing him, and then he turned tail and sauntered out of the room closing up his pants muttering something about ‘not worth the piece of ass.’

  ~

  It took four weeks for all my mother’s cuts and bruises to heal. At least she was sober for most of that time if you don’t count the pain meds, which I kept with me, so she didn’t plow through the entire prescription in a matter of days.

  I hold my breath as tonight’s Jerk du Jour walks by my door, into the living room, and out the front door. I breathe a heavy sigh of relief that tonight I won’t have to defend myself. Sure, I’d installed a lock on my door, but the door frame was another thing altogether. With gaps between the frame and the wall, it wouldn’t take much for someone to bust through.

  I hate the men part of my mother’s addictions the most. Seldom does a guy stay with her for more than a week or two. Most are just a ‘one-and-done’ and don’t even stay until morning.

  It isn’t that she can’t commit. She did once. She was married to my half-brother’s dad, Alexander Jameson. He was the ‘love of her life.’ Until she wasn’t the love of his life. He had fallen in love
with someone else and left my mom and my half-brother, Jude—named so because the song Hey, Jude was playing when our mom went into labor. That was when my mother’s disease started. Some of the crueler kids in school used to say that she had really been attracted to my brother’s dad for the last name—Jameson, a quality whiskey. Almost four years after she had been left high and dry—well, not ‘dry’ since she, according to gossip, was often sauced—she discovered that she was pregnant. With me. And here was the kicker—she had no idea who my daddy was. She thinks it was some guy named either Nick, Adam, or Peter. But maybe it was a guy who went by the nickname ‘Goodwrench.’ She seemed to favor this guy over the other possibilities because he had red hair, and mine is a reddish color or something like that. She never knew that guy’s real name. Bottom line—no idea who my dad is. I’m not proud of the fact, but I can’t change it, so I don’t dwell on it.

  The only upside of her getting pregnant was that at least she stopped drinking for a while. It was probably the longest time she’d been sober in the past twenty-five years. After I was born, though, she went right back to drinking. According to neighbors, when I turned five, it got worse.

  Surveying my bedroom, I feel like crying. Here I am, twenty-four and still living with my mom. Why? Because my mom doesn’t have anyone else to look out for her. True, there’s always my brother, Jude. But Jude is in jail. Again. He’s been in for three years already. This last offense was for stealing a car from a junkyard and having a large enough stash of weed on him that made it look like he was distributing.

  It’s not that I haven’t thought of leaving home, leaving this all behind, but the last time I did, it was a disaster. It was just after I’d fought off one of my mother’s men seven years ago. He’d made it into my room, and I had been too tired to stay up until he left. I wasn’t ready with my bat. I guess I fought him well enough that he decided I wasn’t worth the effort. But I was done. I thought I knew everything, and my boyfriend of two years, Leo ‘Disco’ Dyskowicz, convinced me that we should get out of town and get a fresh start.

  We had both just graduated high school and hadn’t any real plans for the next year. Half of the kids in our small graduating class of only fifty-seven students from not just Harton but also two neighboring towns, were going to college. The other half had jobs lined up either in the surrounding corn and soybean fields or various technical trades like auto mechanics or construction. I wanted to go to college, but I didn’t have a way to afford it. School loans seemed frightening, so I decided I’d work for a couple of years and save up. I hadn’t gotten a job yet, so Leo’s plan sounded good.

  ~

  I fought with the key and the keyhole of the door to the fleabag motel in northern Tennessee that Leo and I were staying in while he looked for a job. On the first day, I had gotten a job working at a truck stop just off the highway and only a half-mile walk from the motel. I was hopeful that Leo had been successful in landing something since, as we learned the second day after running away, landlords wanted to know where our jobs were, how much we earned, how long we’d worked there, and so on. Landlords apparently want you to be gainfully employed, and one day of waitressing didn’t cut it. We’d been in the motel nearly a week already, and at thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents a night, our modest savings would be gone before long. Yesterday, Leo heard from a guy that the lumber yard was looking for some workers. Good money, a union job, and even healthcare benefits. Leo was a hard worker, but only having a high school diploma was hurting all of his chances for a decent job. Not that my job at the diner was anything to be ashamed of. I was fine with hard work, but today I’d only earned fifty-two dollars after tipping out to the busboy and host. But it was more than we had this morning.

  Finally wiggling the key in to be able to unlock the door, I turned it and used my shoulder to push the door open through the sticky jamb. I headed inside and dropped my purse on the dresser. Leo wasn’t parked in front of the TV, but I saw the light from under the closed bathroom door.

  “Hey, Leo. It’s me. How did things go at the lumber yard?”

  No reply.

  “I brought home fifty-two dollars. Better than yesterday’s lunch. But I much prefer the dinner shifts,” I reported, putting a good spin on the day.

  Still quiet.

  I clicked on the TV and flipped through the brain-numbing programming on the screen while I waited for Leo to come out. I waited for about five minutes and started to get concerned about Leo in the bathroom after ten minutes or so.

  I knocked on the bathroom door. “Leo? You okay?” I’d never known him to have a sensitive stomach or anything. “Babe? Can I get you anything?”

  I pressed my ear to the door but didn’t hear a thing. Terror surged through me as I started imagining the worst. I couldn’t count the number of times I found my mother on the floor of our bathroom coated in her own puke. I’d found my brother high and having a bad trip. Had Leo gone out and gotten shit-faced or high instead of finding a job?

  “Leo? Leo!” Practically hyperventilating, I turned the knob hoping Leo hadn’t locked the door.

  The door wasn’t locked, and it flew open. And inside? Nothing. No Leo. No anything. Just an empty bathroom with the light on.

  I slumped against the wall and thanked my lucky stars that Leo was just still out job hunting. After all, it was only a little after four. Maybe the lumber yard hired him, and he was working already, working toward his first paycheck. It also dawned on me that I shouldn’t expect Leo here since his truck wasn’t in the parking lot when I got home.

  As my vision cleared, something struck me as odd on the sink ledge. Our toothbrushes were gone. The medicine cabinet was slightly open. I stood on shaky legs and opened it all the way. Leo’s razor, Edge Shaving Gel, and Axe cologne were missing, so was my deodorant and our toothpaste. I looked in the shower, and my two-in-one shampoo and conditioner wasn’t there. My heart pounded in my ears and adrenaline again coursed through my body making me sweat. Everything in the bathroom was gone!

  I tore into the bedroom. There was a six-drawer dresser. In an attempt to make the place look and feel like a home until we found an apartment, we had unpacked. Leo had taken the three drawers on the left, and I took the three on the right. But now the left side drawers weren’t closed all the way—mostly, but not all the way. I walked up to the dresser and pulled the bottom one open. Empty. I pulled open the next one up. Cleared out. The top drawer. Vacant.

  I dashed to the bed and looked where we’d stuffed our suitcases. Leo’s duffle bag was missing.

  He… left?

  Then I noticed that my suitcase was also gone. I scrambled back to the dresser and yanked open the drawers on my side. All of my stuff was gone too!

  He left and took everything! Everything, everything! Or maybe he’d taken his stuff, and the cleaning lady had come and cleaned everything out ready for the next guest to check in?

  Feeling unbalanced, my mind spinning a million miles an hour, I could barely catch my breath. And then I thought about the $4,276 we’d had between the two of us—most of it, $2,895 was mine. I stood and steeled my nerves. I knew the answer, but in the blink of an eye—an eye blinking back a tear—I convinced myself that it would be there. The bag I’d repurposed to store our money would be under the mattress, and the money I’d saved for the past three years would be there. The money I had earned babysitting and working the checkout at the grocery store. The money that was left over from paying the electric bill, the water bill, groceries… Maybe Leo got scared and took his portion and left. He would leave me some money, right? He wouldn’t leave me completely high and dry.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and lifted the mattress. It wasn’t there. I lifted the other corner. Gone. Panic and rage poured through my veins as I flipped the mattress clean off the box-spring onto the floor. It was gone.

  Wildly, I pulled all the drawers in the room open, the side table, and the dresser. I pulled the drawers clean out of the units searching for the small bag. I scou
red the bathroom. I looked in the closet. Shelves. Behind furniture.

  It. Was. Gone.

  I was broke other than the fifty-two dollars I had earned today. No car. No place to live. No clothing or even toothpaste. No boyfriend or friend. Nothing.

  Not willing to completely give up, I jumped to my feet and fished out my cell phone and pressed the option to speed dial Leo’s phone. The call went straight to voicemail.

  “Ay-O. Leo here. Leave the deets, I’ll call ya back!” Beep!

  I left a light and quick, “Hey, it’s me. Call me,” message and hung up.

  And there I sat. For four and a half hours… in the dark… waiting. Feeling lost yet holding onto a shred of hope, I convinced myself that everything was fine. That this wasn’t happening.

  Around nine that night I had a thought. I ran to the front desk. Maybe there was a message. Or maybe Leo had left but didn’t take my stuff, and maybe housekeeping gathered it! When I got there, the clerk told me that the account was closed, and he needed my key.

  “Do you know where Leo went? Did he leave any message for me? Does housekeeping have my things?”

  He just looked at me with his dead eyes and a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and shook his head.