The Vessel - Jenika Snow Page 0,5

do anything but hang around the house and read or run errands. Yet I could use the overtime, not just for me, but for my mother too. Living in the city in a one-bedroom was just a small step up from the rest of the city’s shithole low-income living. It was all I could afford, but one day that would change. I was working hard for the two of us.

For many of my adult years, I lived with my mother. A drunk driver accident caused her to be paralyzed from the waist down, and I wouldn’t have thought twice about not taking care of her. But as her health deteriorated, the round-the-clock care and medication administration she needed, she decided to move out. There had been no arguing or pleading with her to stay, that we’d make it work. She didn’t want to “be a burden on me,” despite me telling her a child takes care of their parents, just like she’d taken care of me when I was a child.

But she refused and now lived with her sister, a retired nurse who’d been more than happy to have her only living sibling move in. To say I was depressed over my mother moving an hour away was an understatement, and even six months later, it was still hard to come home to an empty place.

But that’s why I was working as hard as I could, to be able to buy a home that could facilitate not only me and my mother, but my aunt too, who was getting up there in age and wouldn’t be able to take care of my mom forever.

They were all I had left, and with no other family between the three of us, we needed to stick together.

I wanted to buy a little piece of property—nothing major, but enough that I could have a little garden out back, one where my aunt and mom could tend to it, be out in the sun and fresh air. And we won’t even talk about the smog I practically choked on every time I stepped out of my apartment building. We wouldn’t have to hear the traffic from rush hour every damn morning. And most importantly, I’d have my family close.

Going to Lucius’s house was actually really wonderful, even if I was there to work. The land that surrounded his house was picturesque, always maintained. It was half an hour outside the city, so the air was so much cleaner, crisper. It was as if someone went to the highest top of the mountains and bottled up the air. I could inhale deeply and smell the freshness of it, feel the sun on my face, since no skyscrapers blocked it. And it was so isolated that there wasn’t a single sound of cars honking, people cursing, or the congested feel city life brought on.

But I guess everything was better when you had money, even oxygen.

In essence… it was perfect.

I’d woken up an hour earlier so I could enjoy some coffee and call my mother before heading into work. I grabbed my cell and punched in my aunt’s number. I sat on my tan loveseat I’d gotten from the neighbor down the hall before she tossed it. Carla was a middle-aged woman who divorced her ex-husband five years prior. She didn’t talk much about it, but over the last year of us being neighbors, we’d become close and she opened up about that much.

She hadn’t wanted anything for the loveseat—which was my kind of price—but I didn’t feel right not giving her something. So I made her a couple meals that she could freeze and just pop in the oven when she wanted a cook-free night. I swore the look on her face had spoken volumes. It had said those meals were worth a hell of a lot more than if I’d given her fifty bucks.

“Hello?” my aunt answered after the call connected.

My aunt Frannie was old school. And that meant she only had a landline, had an old-ass TV that only got five channels on a good day, and believed in being self-sufficient. She walked to most places she needed to go, and when she had to use a vehicle, she took the bus. She only had a postage-stamp-sized yard, so gardening was out of the question for her, but she had a little raised bed with some herbs, and it was therapeutic for my mother and her. It brought them the happiness they could get with