Total pages in book: 94
Estimated words: 90098 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 450(@200wpm)___ 360(@250wpm)___ 300(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 90098 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 450(@200wpm)___ 360(@250wpm)___ 300(@300wpm)
“Of course, of course. Was Luisa working?”
I nodded and handed her a mug.
“Good. How much do I owe you?”
“Not a damn thing.” I didn’t want her money. It was bad enough she was forced to stay in this sham of an apartment.
Ma scowled up at me. “You know how to annoy me, son.”
I smirked into my mug and took a sip.
She huffed on her way over to the couch. “You spend too much money and never let me pay you back.”
Bullshit.
She took care of Alvin when I couldn’t. She gave him a roof over his head and offered stability when my life was chaos, which…it’d been for years now. Years of temporary gigs—some semi-permanent too, but life was too expensive to cover everything. Alvin had an anxiety medication that wasn’t covered by his insurance, and neither were his sessions with a psychologist. Because it had to be Rose, a woman he’d been seeing since he was a kid.
You couldn’t just tell an autistic person they had to see another psychologist when it was so fucking hard for them to click with someone. And he knew better than anyone which meds worked for him. If he claimed the one that was covered by his insurance made him nauseated and feel too drowsy, he wasn’t lying.
I leaned back against the counter and sipped my coffee in silence, and Ma went back to knitting. Though, her silence never lasted long.
In the meantime, I enjoyed the quiet and made a mental list of people to call tomorrow. I should charge my phone right away too, because I never knew when Garrett would call. He’d been where I was, so he knew. I was the first guy he called if something opened up at his scaffolding company.
What killed me wasn’t work, to be honest. In the winters, sure, shit got tougher. But the worst was all our expenses. It just felt like I could never get off the ground. Last year, I’d had a full-time job for six months, and I’d still struggled to pay rent at a tiny place I’d shared with a friend of a friend. I had to give it up. Even the months we got welfare or food stamps or…whatever the fuck. Assistance wasn’t free. It didn’t come without conditions, and Alvin couldn’t handle conditions. If I wanted to keep him happy, that meant the medication that helped his anxiety, it meant his staying in this shitty place, it meant three therapy sessions every month, and it meant food that was often more expensive because of his issues.
The alternative was out of the question, because I’d witnessed my son’s panic attacks. I’d seen the sheer fear and hurt in his eyes. I’d held him while he’d trembled and hyperventilated.
The smallest surprise in his day-to-day routine could set him off.
I suppressed a sigh and took another swig of my coffee.
“Something’s troubling you, sweetie.”
I grunted quietly, finished my coffee, and put the mug in the sink. “Same shit as usual. I wanna get yous outta here.”
With the rent she paid, she could afford a bigger place somewhere else, one we could share. We could have more stability, and I could have a home base. Not knowing where I’d sleep tomorrow was fucking exhausting. It was time-consuming, too.
Ma hummed and reached for another color yarn in her yarn basket. “While you work on that, I’ll keep myself happy by blaming your father we ended up here in the first place. May he rest in hell.”
I grinned and scrubbed a hand over my jaw.
She was a firecracker, my ma.
An unbidden vision showed me Ma and Trace in the same room, and I just knew they’d get along.
Goddammit.
I couldn’t think about Trace. It fucking hurt.
I’d recognized it from the beginning, but not the extent. I’d seen that he was one of those people who made me feel shit more intensely. I couldn’t explain it. I didn’t know why it happened, only that Trace was the first one I’d also felt a mad attraction toward.
The soup kitchen service had made things clear to me. I’d caught myself staring countless times. His fucking eyes, his smirks, his softer grins, his sense of humor…
His body.
I shook my head to myself, at myself, and decided I needed something to do. I was hungry, so maybe some pan bread would work. But first, I went back into the hallway to charge my phone.
I had to get back to Angie too. She was worried and wanted to know my plans now that I’d lost my damn car.
Precisely two family members had stood by me the day I’d told everyone I was gay—my mother and my cousin. Angie was also the one who knew everything about my sad excuse for a life. She worked nights at Northwestern in the city, and she had a parking spot there. So that was where I’d parked most nights to sleep, and then I drove her home in the morning.