The Reckless Oath We Made - Bryn Greenwood Page 0,135

strip the hill bare. I saw my dreams turned to rubble and dust.

CHAPTER 52

Zee

The City of Wichita used a Bobcat to clear Mom’s front yard, while she stood on the porch, screaming and crying. When they were done, there were no waterlogged china cabinets, no boxes, no books, not even any grass left. Just a patch of dirt with a few broken bits of china here and there.

Mom didn’t speak to me for a month.

I went back to waiting tables at the Cantonese place, and I picked up some shifts at a biker bar, where I got my ass grabbed ten times a night. With both of those, I could keep Mom and me afloat without dipping into the money from Uncle Alva. I moved that, a hundred a week, into a savings account for Marcus. Not enough to make anybody suspicious, but it would add up to fifty thousand dollars by the time he was eighteen.

I hired a lawyer, who took my retainer in cash and started filing paperwork to get me visitation with Marcus. Because the Gills and I were all nonparental relatives, the lawyer thought I had a good chance.

I rented a house off Craigslist. A little run-down bungalow on Seneca with scuffed wood floors, a pink-tile bathroom, and a fenced yard for Leon. I furnished it with a bed, a dresser, and a coffeemaker. When I wasn’t working or sleeping, I laid in bed and read, so that was all the furniture I needed. I wondered if this was what prison was like. It was what I deserved.

I still had Gentry’s Yvain book, but I put it away after I got to the part where Yvain overstayed his year and a day, just like I knew he would. Laudine had given him a magical ring to protect him, but she sent a servant to get the ring, and to tell Yvain not to come back. After he realized how badly he’d screwed up, Yvain wandered off into the woods like a crazy person. A whirlwind broke loose in his brain, so violent that he went insane. If I let myself think too much about what I’d done, I might go insane. He hated himself above all else, the book said, and that was how I felt. I drank too much and smoked too much, trying not to think about it.

I’d never lived alone before, and sometimes it felt like being the last person on earth. At night it was worse. I started taking Leon for walks along the river when I came home from the bar shift at three o’clock in the morning. Leon helped me remember that I had obligations, that I couldn’t wander off into the woods like a crazy woman.

I thought I might go on that way forever, until the social worker, Ms. Alvarez, called to schedule my home visit. She gave me a list of what she wanted to see, including where the minor child will sleep. So I bought a bed, a dresser, and some toys for Marcus’ bedroom. Plus a table, two chairs, a couch, and a coffee table. By the time I was done, it looked like a house instead of a prison cell.

Ms. Alvarez looked at everything, marking stuff off a checklist on her clipboard. She even opened the kitchen cabinets to see what kind of food I had. When she finally came back to the front room, I shooed Leon off the couch, so she could sit down.

“The dog is yours? He lives here?” she said.

“Yeah. This is Leon.”

I snapped my fingers at him and he came slinking over to me. When I squatted down to pet him, he rolled onto his back. The Internet said that was a submissive display.

“Is he good with children?”

“Yeah, I mean, you can see he’s— Somebody used him as a fighting dog, but he’s really a big baby.”

I rubbed his belly while he laid there looking sheepish and pathetic. Right then I realized that Leon was the dog equivalent of me: shabby and broke down and ugly with his hacked-off ears. The kind of dog you pay fifty bucks for and chain out in your yard. Why would a judge ever give me visitation?

“Is everything okay, Ms. Trego?” the social worker said.

I’d worried so much about not looking like a stoner and the house being clean, but I’d never even thought about Leon.

“If it’s a problem for me to have him, for Marcus to come visit—” I couldn’t say it without