finish, her filled ashtrays and empty coffee cups, stacks of newspapers with half-completed crossword puzzles, and her photo album open to the page for Lonny's graduation. "I don't want to hear about it."
"But he scares me. When he's drunk, he tries to touch me."
"You have an evil mind. He's your father."
"It's true, he--"
"He tucks you in."
"No, you're not listening to me," she screamed at her mother in the petulant squeak being fourteen seemed to have forced on her along with pimples, the fits and starts of periods, and the chronic verge of tears.
"Lonny never spoke to me like that," her mother said.
"Lonny never had to."
"Lonny had friends. Everybody loved Lonny. Your trouble is your rotten personality."
"Yes, ma'am," Trissa agreed, defeated. She dropped her books on the table and slammed out the door before the tears she strained to withold could escape her.
"Where are you going?" her mother called after her.
Detecting a glimmer of hope in her slightly softened tone, Trissa turned back and faced her through the screen door. "To the store. I need new gym shorts."
"Get me two packs of Salems, will you? Here, come get some money."
"Yes, ma'am." Trissa spent her gym short money on a lock for her closet door.
She had thought that when her father's strike-forced layoff ended, things would improve. They did, in a way. For a while. He came home earlier, a little less drunk, and a little more amorous. But at least his eyes seemed to have cleared to the respective roles of his wife and his daughter. And the only time he ever touched Trissa was to slap her across the mouth for talking back or breaking curfew.
"What time did your mother tell you to get home?"
"By dark."
"And what time did you get in?"
"10:30. All the other kids get to-- " she started, knowing it was useless but hoping to imply she had friends enough to know the other kids' habits. With school out for spring break, the only contact Trissa had with other kids were those she saw parked along Calvary Drive while she sat huddled in silence in the woods across the railroad tracks, in the descending blanket of a warm spring night.
"Don't give me that crap. You don't need to do what all the other kids do. Maybe their parents don't give a damn."
"Oh, and you do?" she asked with all the venom in her rebellious teenage heart. The slap that time knocked her off her chair.
It didn't matter. She didn't let it hurt her.
Cole
He had his seasons reversed. Instead of packing and heading south as April turned to May, Cole knew he should be unpacking and studying street maps and deciding on routes so that, by the end of the summer, he would have covered all of Grand Rapids. He should be looking forward to a season of smiling brats and whining mothers and money in his pocket.
Instead he counted his spare change and wondered if he needed to once again hock his camera equipment to get enough money to get out of town. He should never have stayed on so long, but Daisy got sick, and the vet bills kept him insolvent, and Florida seemed too far away to even dream about.
On the first fine days of a false spring in March, Cole curried the recovered Daisy and aired out his costumes and picked a neighborhood at random. How could he know it was populated by the foulest tempered hellions ever born? Or that Daisy would grow so quickly impatient at being kicked in the side and tugged at the mane? He should have been more conscious of the pony's mood. He should have realized she was not back to her docile sweetness after being so sick.
Poor Daisy. He would miss her, but he doubted she would waste a moment missing him. She probably much preferred the green pastures she grazed now to trudging the streets with Cole, posing for his camera with bogus baby Billy the Kids and Calamity Janes on her back.
Daisy probably had not even known she had sealed her fate, and Cole's too, when she bit a chunk out of one little bugger's shin, setting its mother to howling and threatening to sue. It wouldn't have bothered Daisy how Cole had had to nearly give her away to see she was cared for, or how he had given a moment's consideration to inquiring what the dog food factory would have paid for her. He was that irritated with this turn of events.