Chapter 2 #2
“You asked what Mom did to set Dad off,” I said, turning my stare—flat and hard—on Nelson. “He came home after a night in jail for roughing her up. Because they never kept him long enough. Never protected her.”
I didn’t protect her.
I cleared the thickness from my throat. “She told him she was taking me and leaving. So he fucking killed her.”
Nelson hunched his shoulders, his eyes anywhere but me. “Yeah, okay, okay.”
“Don’t talk about her ever again. Not her name. Nothing.”
“Whatever you say.”
“And I’m going to finish school.”
Nelson’s eyes widened. “Full of demands, aren’t we? Watch yourself, boy.”
I didn’t move.
He spat another curse. “It won’t work. You’ll see. Hard for you and harder for me with the tenants.”
I started walking.
“Okay, okay, if you insist, Einstein. Now will you get in the damn car?”
I climbed back in, my bag on my lap, and slammed the door.
“Christ,” Nelson muttered under his breath as he pulled the car back onto the road. “When has anything been easy? Never, that’s when.”
At least we agreed on something.
***
My social worker, Alicia, had told me Santa Cruz was a smallish town, but it seemed huge compared to Manitowoc.
Street after street of houses, shops, a huge university, and a boardwalk with games, rides, and a Ferris wheel that slowly turned in front of the Pacific.
Lake Michigan was nothing to the endless blue green of the ocean that stretched along the coast. Turn around, and there were mountains covered in forests of green.
Like a mirage after staring at the same hopeless landscape for eighteen years.
I glanced at Nelson, wondering how the hell he ended up here.
“Your grandma left me and Russell everything,” he said, answering my unspoken question. “I got the properties she and Pawpaw invested in a million years ago, and your dad got the cash.” He snorted. “Lucky me.”
I nodded grimly, thinking of how Mom struggled to pay bills and keep food on the table with money she earned from two jobs while Russ drank and gambled the inheritance away on fantasy sports leagues and local poker games.
“This is you.”
Nelson pulled the car into a cracked parking lot. It fronted a cement block of an apartment complex in a neighborhood filled with them. Wrought-iron bars covered the bottom windows. Peeling paint and exterior cement steps led to the second level.
He pointed at the top corner unit. “That one’s yours for now. Grab your stuff. I’ll show you the place.”
I followed him up the stairs to the corner unit. A gold-and-black sticker that said OFFICE was stuck to the door.
“Typically, managers live on the ground floor,” Nelson said. “But I got a lady in there with her two kids, begging me not to move her upstairs.” He rolled his eyes as he unlocked the door from a ring of keys.
“Why doesn’t she want to move?”
“The ground unit is bigger, of course. I told her it was up to you. If you want to kick the mouthy bitch out, be my guest.”
My shoulders tensed. “I won’t.”
“Take the grand tour and say that again.”
He shoved the door open, and I stepped inside a dark, shabby shoebox.
A ratty couch, a table, and a single chair were the only furniture in the living room/kitchen area.
The bedroom was tiny with a futon and a small window with a view of the street.
The bathroom was a shower, toilet, and sink.
A few dead bugs in the scratched, yellowing porcelain.
I tried to picture a mom with two kids in here, and my stomach churned.
“Told ya,” Nelson said, misreading my disgusted look. “The bottom unit’s better.”
“I’m fine here.”
“Don’t be stupid. If I were you—”
“I said, it’s fine.”
He sighed. “Suit yourself. Now let’s get to work.”
***
Over the next two weeks, Nelson had me meet the tenants of the Cliffside Apartments. The “mouthy bitch” on the ground unit below mine was Maryann Greer—a tired-looking woman in her mid-thirties. She had dark circles under her eyes, but there was a fire in them that hadn’t gone out.
She reminded me of Mom.
Her twin girls, Camille and Lillian, looked to be around six years old. When Nelson introduced me as their new manager, they’d all stared at me with the same suspicion. I told Maryann I wasn’t going to make her move upstairs. Even so, they shut the door on us quick.
“You were too nice to her,” Nelson had said as we moved to the next shabby door in the shabby complex. “Don’t make a habit of it. You gotta watch it with these tenants. Give ’em an inch, they’ll take a mile.”
As far as I could see, the tenants weren’t getting much of anything. Nearly all of them had plumbing and heating issues, and their apartments were just as shitty as mine. Or worse. The whole building needed new paint, new pipes, new pavement in the cracked parking lot.
During those weeks, I did my best to fix what was broken—clogged drains, leaky pipes…
On my iPhone—a gift from my social worker before leaving Wisconsin—I googled how to replace heating filaments.
I paid for any repair materials out of my own savings, because Nelson was too slow, and he was even slower paying me back.
The work kept me busy. The first few days of school at Santa Cruz Central High came and went, but on Thursday, I was caught up enough to go. The school was in walking distance, thankfully, since I had no transportation.
Or a paycheck.
“You live rent free,” Nelson had told me. “I’m supposed to pay you on top of that?”
“How am I—”
“You gotta get a job,” he’d said, as if I were stupid. “Between work and keeping the units going, there’s no time for school. I told you.”
“I’m going.”
He heaved a sigh. “For now. But if things start to fall apart at the complex, I’m yanking you out.”
Try it.
Central High was like a movie. An open, outdoor campus with trees and classrooms that were cleaner and better lit than my apartment.
I felt like an impostor. I was too old; I’d seen too much.
I didn’t belong with these students and their smiling faces and their fucking pep rallies.
I felt the stares on my tattoos and heard the whispers that I was an escaped convict. A criminal.
Nelson was right.
But I thought of my mom and kept going.
In math class, Ms. Sutter—a sour-looking woman with dark hair and a pinched face—told us to get out our notebooks and pencils while she wrote out equations on an ancient overhead projector.
I tapped a pencil on the bare desk. I’d forgotten to buy supplies.
“Mr. Wentz, is it?” Ms. Sutter asked. “Where is your notebook?”
“Forgot,” I muttered.
She pursed her wrinkly lips. “There is scratch paper by the window. You can use that. For today.”
All eyes were on me as I got up and grabbed a few sheets of paper from an uneven stack on the shelf.
I didn’t give a shit what anyone thought about me, but the math equations on the projector didn’t make any sense.
Me being there didn’t make any sense. I’d missed too much normal life and would never catch up.
Sorry, Mom. It’s too late for me. Too late…
I grabbed my backpack and left the class, Ms. Sutter calling after me. I ignored her and headed down one of the cement paths toward the front walk. But the school was huge. When the football field came into view, I knew I’d gone the wrong way.
“Fuck.”
I started to turn around when I heard voices and some kind of alarm clock going off.
“You don’t look so good, Stratton. Gonna piss yourself again?”
I peered around the corner. Three guys were ganging up on a fourth in torn jeans, a jacket, and a beanie on his head. His watch was beeping, and he swayed on his feet as if he were drunk.
“Get the fuck out of my way,” he said weakly to a scrawny red-haired guy wearing board shorts and a sick grin on his face.
“I’m good right here,” the red-haired guy said, crossing his arms and barring the way. “Kinda curious about what’s going to happen next.”
His two friends shifted nervously.
“Hey, Frankie, he really doesn’t look so good,” one said to the red-haired guy.
“Yeah, and he’s got that alarm…”
“Nah, he’s all right, aren’t you, Stratton?”
The guy, Stratton, looked like shit—pale, sweaty, hardly able to stand.
Frankie gripped him by the back of the neck. “You still wearing that little machine stuck in your guts? What would happen if someone took it out? Just to get a better look?”
The fuck?
I strode into the small crowd just as Stratton threw a weak upward punch that caught Frankie under the chin. His jaw snapped shut with a clack and a spurt of blood.
“You fu-ther!” he howled. “I fu-thing bit my thung.”
Frankie charged, fist cocked. Stratton was in my way. I shoved him aside and slammed my fist into Frankie’s oncoming face. Bone and cartilage gave under my knuckles, and he staggered back, crying and cursing.
I could feel the others staring but kept my focus on Frankie, every muscle in my body itching to go if he wanted more.
I hoped he wanted more.
The vice principal, an oily fucker named Chouder, appeared behind us. “What’s all this?”
“Fu-ther broke my nose,” Frankie whined from behind his hand.
“Go see the nurse, Dowd,” Chouder said and turned his hard stare on me. “Mr. Wentz. My office. The rest of you get back to class.”
Stratton’s beeping watch drew his attention and cooled the blood in my veins. He looked like hell. Maybe needed an ambulance.
“Are you all right?” Chouder asked, annoyed.
“Oh sure,” Stratton said, lip curling. “Never better.”
He staggered away toward a bank of lockers with a kind of tired stoicism. He didn’t rat on Frankie or his friends. Didn’t complain.
“He going to be okay?” I asked Chouder as we headed for the admin building.
“You broke his nose. A little late for concern, isn’t it?”
“Not that asshole. The other guy.”
“Miller will be fine,” Chouder said, leading me through the offices of the administration building where counselors and staff talked or worked at their desks.
“Why were they fucking with him?”