Chapter 3
When life seemed hard and you felt like you were running to outpace the steamroller coming up fast behind you, there was only one thing to do: dream it away.
I pulled my blankets under my chin and pictured my new apartment, which would be in a building downtown where I’d heard that some of the real Woodsmen lived.
You knew it was nice if they were there, and in fact, I decided that there was a doorman and the parking garage was heated.
My place was on the top floor, the whole floor, so that I could see Lake Michigan in one direction and the rolling country that turned into farmland and forest in the other.
Everything in it was new and functional, and I lived there by myself. No roommates. No family.
Tonight, I would be having a party with all my old friends from high school and also my boyfriend.
It was a little hard to picture his face…
well, I knew that he had a dimple, just one in his left cheek and you could only see it when he smiled, and he had soft brown eyes.
I also knew that he was tall and very strong, and handsome in a way that grew on you, like the more you looked at him, the better he seemed to look.
I could definitely imagine his arms around me and how he buried his face against my neck, tickling me.
He didn’t mind doing that in front of other people because he was happy for them to see how much he loved me. He—
“Zoey! What the hell?” Willow reached across the bed and pinched my arm. “I can hear you giggling. Will you stop?”
The problem was, it was difficult to daydream your life away. People were always doing things like pinching you, and there was also the problem of having to get up and get ready for work. I did that, and then my sister and I had a brief conversation about what she was supposed to do that day.
“I can’t,” she told me flatly.
“Yes, you can,” I answered, as patient as I could be.
We’d had this same conversation so many times already, with both of us saying the same things and with the conclusion not changing: Willow had to get a job.
As much as she didn’t want to and as understandable as her reasons might have been, nothing altered the fact that we needed the money.
Fortunately, we didn’t have to worry about utility bills anymore. That was because we didn’t have utilities, because we didn’t have a house. I had explained it to Jannie, framing it in the most practical way.
“I wasn’t going to be able to stick to that payment plan for our debt to the water company, and we couldn’t have kept paying for the heat, either. It’s for the best,” I’d told her.
“That’s bullshit,” she had answered. “Your mother royally screwed you.”
That was also correct. It had been really hard to find out that Mom had taken out a few loans using our home as collateral.
It was the place that my grandparents had paid off and where my sister and I had grown up, and she had risked that without seeming to care or bothering to tell me about it, when most of my salary had been going to her to help with upkeep and bills.
I hadn’t known, but my mother also had a huge car payment that she hadn’t been dealing with.
A few days after she’d left us, a wrecker had shown up.
It was amazing how quickly and efficiently those guys repossessed a vehicle and it solved the mystery of why she’d left it behind when she’d taken off.
So far, nothing had cleared up the other mystery of whom she’d taken off with.
I could have solved that myself if I’d thought fast and had run to the kitchen window as she’d marched away with the duffel bag.
Too bad I’d stood there in frozen, stunned shock for so long.
“Your father left that house to your mom so that she and his daughters could live in comfort,” Jannie had raged, shaking her fist until her beret had slid off onto the floor.
But like everything, her statement was both true and false.
My mother had received the house after his death but he hadn’t “left” it to her in a will.
There hadn’t been one of those or any other provision set up for what would happen when he wasn’t around, because he hadn’t thought about our future or worried about our stability.
I had to do that now. I was powering through the school year because I was determined to finish so that I could get a teaching position next fall, and I was also powering through with a second job that I’d recently managed to get.
Jannie had offered to give me more shifts at the bar, but I had seen her finances—at least, what she had on paper but not the numbers she only kept mentally and sometimes mixed up, and not the parts that she had forgotten.
There was no way that she could have afforded to pay me anything else, and she really shouldn’t have had me there at all.
But she had been a friend of my dad’s, which was also why she had defended him and excused his behavior.
She was happy to pin all the problems on my mother.
And yes, the latest issue of utility shutoffs and foreclosure were definitely Mom’s fault.
It made sense that she’d stopped paying for the gas and electricity on a house that she wasn’t going to own anymore due to defaulting on her loans, but it hadn’t been very nice to keep all that a secret from its other two inhabitants.
But I didn’t have it in me to excuse or blame either of my parents.
This was just where we were and we all had to deal with it.
In order to deal, Willow had to find a job, no matter if she didn’t want to.
“I applied for you,” I explained as I was leaving.
“Please text them back and set up the interview. That’s all you have to do, except if you get it, you’ll also have to go work there.
Here, have this energy bar.” I pressed it into her hand and thought that the offer of food, which we wouldn’t be able to purchase without having money, would help to convince her.
But she tossed it onto one of the boxes of stuff from our former house, and I had to leave.
There was no more time to repeat my arguments and try to make her listen, so I walked out and closed the door of the motel room.
“Lock this,” I yelled through the metal, because they refused to give us more than one key and I’d been leaving it with my sister.
I had been encouraging her to use it when she went out to do things—anything.
She could have taken the bus (except that it was hard for her to wait at the stop in the cold), she could have ordered a rideshare (as long as she wasn’t going far, which would have been expensive), and she knew how to drive, (but she’d never gotten an actual license, and she wasn’t very good at it).
It wasn’t like I was leaving her trapped in a depressing motel room…
well, I was, but she had the opportunity to go, if she wanted to. She had the literal key.
After school and then more school, I went to my new job.
It was at a different motel, one that was too expensive for my sister and me but not the nicest, either.
I was saving up, not so that we could rent another temporary spot like the one we had now, but to have enough for a security deposit for an actual apartment or at least a room we could share.
Motels wouldn’t work long-term, and I knew that I had to think long-term even though the future was vast enough to make both my head and heart start to pound.
But if I didn’t look ahead, I could get bogged down in everyday details like, “Your license plate renewal is coming up. Can you pay that fee?” There were a lot of concerns of that type, way too many.
The second shift at the reception desk was pretty quiet, since there weren’t a ton of visitors to our area right now.
The days were still short and dark, and there was no football.
Well, there was no Woodsmen football, but the Junior Woodsmen were still playing.
Since the game that Willow and I had attended, I’d been keeping up with them more.
They had traveled to Boise to face the Junior Garnets and had come away with a win.
They’d also played in Austin where they’d lost, but it had been close and from the grainy, fuzzy clips I’d been able to watch online, it looked like the officiating was bad. In my opinion, anyway.
The roads were thickly covered with fresh snow but I’d had to drive fast anyway in order to arrive at the motel on time, since the owner wasn’t as forgiving as Jannie about my schedule.
But once I was there, it was quiet again.
There wasn’t much to do for the job but I had other stuff to accomplish, like lesson-planning and writing some journal entries that were due soon for one of my college classes.
I also searched listings of rentals and made some inquiries, but soon enough, I started to dream about my new apartment, the one I might rent someday (but definitely not any of the places I had been looking at tonight).
Maybe I would even buy it so that it was mine forever and not just until the end of the lease.
I didn’t have a lot of ideas for furniture besides knowing that I absolutely wanted some, but I had definite plans for a big hot water heater.
The motel where Willow and I had been for the last two weeks had a very poor system and I was tired of cold showers.
I was just tired, actually. The nice administrative assistant, Anita, had been asking what was wrong. “Everything ok?” she’d wondered again today as she’d helped me un-jam the copier. We were down to one working machine in the school, and there had been a line of people behind me.