Chapter 2
KENDRA
Isqueeze a dime of hair gel into my palm and drag my brush from hairline to nape, smoothing everything into a ponytail that’ll last the next twelve hours.
The face in the bathroom mirror has dark circles under her eyes that concealer stopped hiding months ago, but her hair is neat.
She looks like she’s got her shit together, and that’s gonna have to be enough.
The shower helped, but I’m still running on fumes. I used to wake up before my alarm, ready to move. Now I hit snooze four times and drag myself out of bed feeling like I never slept at all.
I rinse the gel off my hands and head back to my bedroom where my socks and boots are waiting on the floor next to the bed.
The socks are thick wool, expensive but worth every penny since my feet go numb after a few hours working out in the cold.
The boots are waterproof and ugly as sin, clearance rack at Meijer, but they’ve held up for this brutal winter.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand while I’m lacing up the left boot.
I grab it and swipe the notification open, forcing my face into something that isn’t a scowl even though nobody can see me.
Weather Advisory: Winter Storm Warning in effect for Wayne County.
Uber Eats will add surge pricing and weather bonuses for deliveries completed during this period.
Weather bonus. Desperate people who don’t want to leave their warm houses pay extra for someone to bring them food, and Uber throws a few dollars my way for being dumb enough to drive in a blizzard.
I should feel some type of way about that, about being the one who risks her neck so someone else can stay comfortable, but I’m too worn out to care.
I finish with my boots and push myself up.
The fridge is rattling again, that sound the compressor makes when it kicks on.
I need to call maintenance about it but I keep forgetting, and honestly I don’t want them in my apartment anyway.
Last time the maintenance guy came he looked at me like I was a piece of furniture he wanted to rearrange.
I pull open the fridge and grab the Tupperware of spaghetti I made on Sunday.
Red sauce from a jar, ground turkey on sale, noodles gone soft from sitting in liquid for four days.
I pop the lid and stick it in the microwave, mashing the buttons because the two is sticky and sometimes doesn’t register.
Four days of the same meal. Spaghetti this week, rice and beans last week, chicken thighs and frozen vegetables the week before that.
Five meals on rotation, cheap and easy, big batch on Sunday that stretches through Friday.
Thinking about food takes energy I don’t have to spare.
Sometimes I fantasize about walking into a nice restaurant with cloth napkins and a server who brings you water without asking, ordering whatever I want.
A steak. Lobster. The whole damn menu. Eating slowly, savoring every bite, not even glancing at the check.
Just handing over my card like I used to.
The microwave beeps and snaps me back to my kitchen.
I grab a fork from the drawer and carry the container to the counter where my mail has been piling up for over a week.
I’ve been avoiding this stack. Every time I walk past it I tell myself I’ll deal with it later, and later turns into tomorrow, and tomorrow turns into next week.
Now the pile is too thick to ignore, so I start sorting while I eat, standing up so I don’t sit down and never get back up.
First few envelopes are garbage. My name spelled wrong, credit card offers promising zero percent interest for twelve months like I’m dumb enough to fall for that again.
Coupons for Kroger that I clip and stick to the fridge even though I’ll forget to use them.
A notice from my car insurance that my premium is going up. Of course it is.
And then my hand stops.
Red envelope. DTE Energy printed in the corner. URGENT stamped across the front in big block letters that might as well say YOUR LIFE IS ABOUT TO GET WORSE.
I set down my fork and tear it open. Final Notice: Your account is past due. Service will be disconnected in 3 days if payment is not received. The amount due is printed below, and it’s more than what’s sitting in my bank account. Not by much, but enough to matter.
Of-fucking-course. January in Michigan, a blizzard rolling in, and my electricity is about to get shut off because I’ve been too busy working to open my own damn mail. I want to laugh but nothing comes out. I just stand there holding the paper, reading the same line over and over.
No electricity means no heat. No heat means the pipes freeze.
Frozen pipes mean water damage, and water damage gives my landlord grounds to evict me.
He’s been looking for an excuse ever since I was three days late on rent back in October, smiling while he screws you over, all apologies and shrugged shoulders while he explains that his hands are tied.
If I get evicted, I’ve got nowhere to go.
My parents moved to Toronto two years ago, following my aunt who’d been there for a decade.
My brother is in Windsor with his wife and their new baby.
They all asked me to join them, but something kept me here.
A pull I can’t explain, a stubborn certainty that Detroit is where I’m supposed to be even though this city hasn’t done me a single favor.
I got laid off in November of last year.
Software engineer at a mid-size tech company, promoted to project manager within two years.
The whole package—salary, benefits, a 401k I was actually contributing to like a responsible adult.
Two promotions in three years. My boss told me I was on track for senior management.
Then one Tuesday morning they called a company-wide meeting and the CEO stood up with his sad face on and explained that they were restructuring.
Twenty percent of us walked out that day with cardboard boxes and severance packages and promises that this wasn’t personal, just business.
Three years of my life, two promotions, a dozen glowing performance reviews, and I got the same sixty seconds of eye contact avoidance as the guy in accounting who fell asleep at his desk every afternoon.
The severance ran out in June. I’ve applied to over three hundred jobs since then, gotten four interviews, zero offers. Every week there’s a new article about the job market recovering, unemployment going down, companies hiring again. Whatever market those articles are talking about, it isn’t mine.
So I turned to gig work. Uber Eats, DoorDash, Instacart, whatever app will pay me to drive around and hand people their food.
Not enough to get ahead, barely enough to keep my head above the waterline, but it beats the alternative.
And the alternative is exactly what’s coming if I don’t figure out how to cover this bill in the next three days.
I catch my reflection in the dark window above the sink. Older than twenty-eight. Heavy-lidded. My skin has that grayish tint from not enough sunlight and too much stress. I wonder if this is just my face now. If I’ll ever look in a mirror and recognize myself again.
Staring at my reflection won’t put money in my account, so I finish my spaghetti and rinse the container in the sink.
I flick off the kitchen light, then the bathroom light, then the lamp in my bedroom, checking each switch twice.
My coat hangs by the door, puffy and black and unflattering, but warm.
I pull it on and grab my purse, digging through it to make sure I’ve got everything.
Mace, because I work alone at night and I’m not stupid.
Phone charger, since my battery dies fast in the cold and the app is my lifeline.
Wallet with my license and debit card and eleven dollars cash.
One last look at my apartment. Small kitchen, secondhand furniture, stack of bills on the counter that I still can’t pay. Mine, and I’ll fight to keep it.
I step into the hallway and lock the deadbolt behind me, then head for the stairs since the elevator’s been broken for a week and nobody’s come to fix it.
The cold hits me the second I push through the building’s front door.
The storm’s already started, fat flakes falling from a low gray sky.
The parking lot is buried under fresh white, at least two inches with more coming down fast, and my car sits near the dumpsters with snow piling on the hood and windshield.
My Lexus. The nicest thing I own, probably the dumbest purchase I ever made, but I bought it when I had that tech job and a future.
Paid off now, which is the only reason I still have it, but the odometer reads like a phone number from all the delivery miles.
I get the oil changed every three thousand miles and rotate the tires twice as often as the manual recommends.
New brakes last month, new battery the month before that.
I brush the snow off the windshield with my coat sleeve, then scrape the ice from the corners with the edge of my phone case since I lost my scraper two weeks ago and haven’t replaced it.
The engine turns over on the first try, thank God, and I crank the heat to max and wait for the vents to stop blowing cold air.
While the car warms up, I open the Uber app and toggle myself online.
The map fills with restaurant icons, little pictures of food floating over the parts of the city where people are ordering.
Surge pricing is already active, multipliers hovering over the busy areas, and I feel a flicker of something that might be hope if I weren’t so beat down.
Higher pay per delivery means I can hit my goal faster.
Maybe, if the orders keep coming, I can cover that bill before DTE pulls the plug.
I tap the first order that pops up, McDonald’s to an apartment complex a few miles east, and pull out of the parking lot into the snow.
The roads are bad and getting worse, but I’ve driven through worse.
Thunderstorms that turned the streets into rivers.
Ice storms that made every intersection a coin flip.
By now I can drive one-handed, the other on my phone checking the GPS, confirming orders, calculating how many more runs I need before I can afford to keep my lights on.
My eyes burn from staring through the falling snow. The ache in my back has settled in deep from too many hours in this seat, and my fingers are stiff even with the heat blasting.
But my electric company wants their money in three days, and the only way I’m getting it is one delivery at a time through this frozen city.
So I drive. The snow falls harder, the roads turn to slush and ice, and I keep going. Quitting isn’t something I know how to do.