Chapter 2
Too Many Zeros Here
Savannah
After Catalina helped me wash the dishes, I sent my best friend Alanis a text message.
Call me when you get a chance… and have more than a couple minutes to chat.
To say Alanis was busy was like saying Florida was hot in the summertime.
It didn’t cover the extent of her hectic schedule.
Three kids all under five, her husband, Michael, who adored her, and a side gig to help pay for trips to Orlando or wherever she and Michael wanted to take their littles.
She was living the dream… some days she’d tell you it was a nightmare, but it was her dream nevertheless.
She called twenty minutes later, and I gave her a quick rundown of my situation.
“Let me get this straight… your mom owed someone thirty thousand dollars?” Alanis asked.
I swallowed hard. “Thirty-five.”
The way she sighed over the phone, I could picture her shaking her head. “Your mom’s funeral was five weeks ago. Surely, this asshole doesn’t expect you to pay him.”
I wiped my hand down my face. “He sure does. And he doesn’t care what I have to do to get the money.”
“That’s illegal, Savannah. Report his ass.”
“There’s the problem. I told him I’d call the cops, and he threatened to take it out on Catalina. Then he followed her when she got out of school today.”
Alanis gasped. “How does he even know about her? Is she okay?”
“She knew someone was following her, but she’s all right. This asshole definitely knows more than he should.”
“Yeah. God, I don’t know what to say. If this were like three hundred dollars, I could probably help you, but there are way too many zeros here.”
“You’re telling me,” I muttered.
She inhaled sharply. “I could put together a GoFundMe for you. Then a cop might see it and step in to help. That way you didn’t ‘report’ him… you were just trying to get him the money.”
“Yeah… I don’t know, Alanis.”
“Just don’t do anything crazy like audition to be a stripper or something.”
Now I gasped. “What? I would never—”
“Good, I’m just saying the stupid shit your parents told you for so long is wrong. You are more than just your looks, Savannah.”
“You’re right,” I whispered, to hide my lack of conviction.
“Now that you’re Catalina’s legal guardian, it’ll be tricky, but you can still get an associate’s degree or work toward a different goal.”
The only thing Mom did right was protect my sister from Dad. The day after my eighteenth birthday, Mom went to a lawyer and made me Catalina’s guardian in the event of Mom’s death. She’d already set it up so that I’d get the house without it going through probate.
“Nothing’s gonna happen to me, but this will put my mind at ease,” Mom had said.
Maybe she knew six years ago that her ticker was bad. I doubted it though because she never shied away from cheese, red meat, or fried food. Hell, bacon-wrapped, cheese-filled fried jalapeno poppers were her comfort food. Just thinking about her poppers brought tears to my eyes.
This ache in my soul would never go away.
What surprised me was my anger. How could she not know? Why didn’t she take better care of herself? And that made me feel like a horrible daughter and guilty to boot.
“Don’t you clean a rich lady’s house?” Alanis asked, pulling me from my ruminations.
I just kept myself from rolling my eyes. “Muriel lives at Epping Forest and has a view of the river. That doesn’t always mean someone’s rich. She could be in debt, too.”
Alanis scoffed. “You left off the last two words of her ’hood… yacht club. She lives at a flippin’ yacht club, and sure, she could be carrying some bills. I’m just saying, you won’t get thirty-five K over night, but she might be able to help.”
My head tilted as I thought about it. “Asking her for help would get me fired.”
“Okay, fine,” she trailed off. Then she said, “We ought to call my brother.”
I stilled. For years, I crushed on her older brother.
He was everything I’d ever wanted, but couldn’t have.
He’d left for the Navy, came back, got a motorcycle (a Harley - hot), and then joined a motorcycle club.
Now he had the edge of a bad boy, but during the rare instances when I saw him, I saw he was still the dependable, loving brother he’d always been.
“Why would we call Ted?” I asked.
She chuckled. “I bet one of his motorcycle club brothers knows about this loan shark.”
Part of me had no doubt she was right, but I despised the idea of breaking the law… even if Frank was already breaking the law. It was the by-product of watching Dad commit minor (and maybe even major) crimes when I was young, too young to know what was happening.
I took a deep breath. “I don’t want to do anything illegal or ask someone else to break the law for me.”
“I hear you, but think about it. My last suggestion is the one I know you won’t consider, but think about selling the house.”
Alanis knew me too well. That was the one thing I refused to do even if it could turn a profit.
Mom’s death was hard on me, but even harder on my sixteen-year-old sister.
I refused to put Catalina through any more upheaval.
Moving sucked in the best of times. Moving so soon after losing Mom? I couldn’t even consider it.
I hesitated. “Alanis, I didn’t tell you this because it’s embarrassing, but the house won’t bring in any money. Mom owed more than it’s worth. Thanks for listening, sweetie. I’ll… figure something out.”
“Don’t do anything drastic,” Alanis said.
I agreed and we said our goodbyes. After I put my phone on the charger, I climbed into bed.
As much as Alanis made sense, I couldn’t stop thinking about dancing.
Strippers made money. The kind of money I could only dream about.
Alanis had it right. Mom and Dad’s words had sunk in deep.
All my life, I’d been told how pretty I was. Hell, Dad took me with him on a con, but I didn’t know that at the time. He’d said, “Do what you do best, sweetie. Sit and be pretty. Gorgeous as the day is long, you can do that for Daddy, right?”
It was all I had. All I ever had.
Beauty came naturally to me. Even when I hit puberty, I didn’t get pimples.
Instinctively, I drank more water and Mom taught me how to fight my oily skin.
It was also when she gave me the best piece of advice.
“Don’t read beauty magazines, sweetie. Eat right, drink your water, and wash your face.
God didn’t make it as complicated as Avon, Maybelline, and Cover Girl would have us believe. ”
“But you use makeup from all three of them,” I’d pointed out.
For a fleeting moment, she looked abashed. “On special occasions, yes. All the time like the girls at your school, no. You don’t need to wear makeup every day, sweetie. You’re too pretty for your own good as it is.”
With that outlook, neither one of them cared much about my grades. When I went to Mom for help with algebra, she’d told me I didn’t need to worry my pretty head about it.
After graduation, I got into cosmetology school, and became a certified hair stylist. What most people don’t tell you is that the hair business is really tough.
Most places forced me to rent my station from them and some expected a percentage of whatever I earned each day, and many expected me to have my own clients already.
It didn’t take long for me to recognize that standing on my feet for ten to twelve hours a day and making small talk drained the life out of me.
One day, I overheard a client at the station next to me talking about how unreliable her cleaning crews could be.
“After their probation period is over, if their insurance comes back all right, I even let an employee drive a company car. It doesn’t make sense that they can’t get to a house on schedule.”
At the time my car was on its last legs, and the idea of a job that came with a company car sounded like a Godsend. Since I was between appointments, when her stylist left her for a minute, I asked what kind of qualifications I needed. The rest was history.
Now, I was twenty-three —soon to be twenty-four— and I didn’t have any real skills. Sure, I cleaned houses, but that wasn’t a skill. It was a job to pay the bills, but who expected a thirty-five-thousand-dollar bill to come right to the doorstep?
That warning from Alanis played in my head again like an earworm.
Two years ago, our friend Erica had a bachelorette party, and we all went to New Orleans. During our crazy festivities, we found our way to a strip club in the French Quarter.
Two things surprised me in that club: the fact the stripper poles were connected by a metal bar about six feet in the air, and the sheer amount of gymnastics the dancers did. If a woman wasn’t twirling around a pole, she executed flips and spread-eagle splits on the bar between the poles.
It had been captivating as hell.
I loved dancing. As a kid, I’d taken dance and then moved on to gymnastics.
My coach told me, I had great instincts, before Mom had to pull me from the program because she couldn’t afford it seeing as Dad fell behind on child support.
I hadn’t been on any kind of gymnastics equipment in years.
I figured it would be similar to riding a bike…
it would all come back to me, given the chance.
Could I bare myself to strangers every night?
Hell, from what Frank had said, if I didn’t come up with the money, he’d hurt me and Catalina. Or sic his creepy clients on us.
Alanis might call this crazy, but I really didn’t have a choice.
With my phone in hand, I opened TikTok, but I zoned out. An idea hit me, and it was even crazier than considering a job as a dancer. Being a stripper was a means to an end, but it was hard to say how long I’d have to dance (assuming I got a job). If I could go viral, maybe…
No. Men planning a night out didn’t scroll TikTok.