it—well, not really friends, just people I went to school with. It’s ugly shit.” I glanced her way. “So it’s just something to…pass the time, sort of?”
“More to distract me from my lack of purpose. Also, it’s just a nice way to relax at the end of the day, because I’m not really a huge fan of getting drunk. Tried it a couple times with my roommates, and the hangover is so not worth the feeling of being out of control. Weird, maybe, but alcohol just is not my thing.”
“You’re very self-aware,” I said. “Most people would just be like, ‘I dunno, I just like it.’”
“You asked me why, I’m not gonna pass the question off with a blah answer.” She looked at me. “You have any vices?”
I shrugged. “Honestly? No. Work, maybe. I’m a workaholic. This is the first break or vacation I’ve ever taken, and I’m fighting feeling guilty about it. Time away from work is time I’m not making money, and I have this fear, irrational maybe, that I’ll go broke and have to move back with my parents, and there is no way in motherfucking hell that’ll ever happen. I’d be homeless first.”
Her expression was confused and speculative. “You have a complicated relationship with your parents, I think.”
I laughed. “Yeah, I do.”
She chewed on the lower right corner of her lip. “You don’t have to talk about it, but I am curious.”
“Well.” I sighed. “There ain’t much in my life I don’t like talking about. Most shit, I’m an open book about. Grew up poor white trash, lived in a single-wide trailer, wore my dad’s old clothes half my life even when they were eight sizes too big because we were too poor to afford anything else, even from the thrift store.”
She blinked in shock. “Wow. That’s…that’s…”
“It sucked. I think I mentioned there were times we couldn’t afford both groceries and electricity, or electricity and water, so we had to choose, which meant no plumbing for a couple weeks, or no electricity, or no food.”
“So you’ve gone hungry, not had lights…”
“Had to carry buckets a couple miles to the shop where Dad worked to fill ’em up with water, so we could flush the toilets and make Mac ’N Cheese and hot dogs, which, most of the time, we made over a fire in the backyard because it was free.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. So you asked before why I want to make a million? That’s why. I won’t ever feel that way again. Not ever.” I let out a breath. “But my relationship with my parents is something that’s hard for me to talk about.”
“You don’t have to.”
“It’s cool. I trust you.” I waffled, trying to get started. “So. Mom…I told you she worked at a bar. Little dive bar, piece of shit place that served watery beer, dollar store whiskey, and literal backwoods, homemade moonshine, which, by the way, is illegal.”
“Yikes.”
“Yeah. She worked at a gas station as a cashier in the day, and at the bar at night. The bar was our main income, actually. Dad got paid shit, but it was steady, whereas Mom might make fifty bucks one night and a hundred another.”
She nodded. “I know about that all too well.”
“Right.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “So, um. Yeah. I’ve never told anyone this.” A long, long pause. “Sometimes, if things were really, really tight. Like not enough to pay any of the bills, Mom would, uh…go home with guys from the bar. For money.”
She was silent a long, tense moment. “Like…prostitution?”
I blew out a breath. “Yeah. I don’t really remember how I found out. I think…it woulda been in middle school. Or ninth grade, maybe. I had been out late with buddies, blowing off firecrackers and racing dirt bikes back in the hollers. We’d passed behind some houses—trailers way out there, you know? The places you gotta know are there to know how to get there. And I think I saw her. It’d have been late, like two, three in the morning. I saw her leaving some guy’s house. Standing on the step, shoes in hand, barely half dressed, and he gave her money.”
“You were allowed out at three in the morning in middle school?”
I laughed. “That’s what you fix on? Yeah, I mean, not allowed. But Dad worked early and slept like a dead man, and Mom worked late, so I just did whatever the hell I wanted. If I wanted to hang out with buddies till dawn drinking and cutting