2. TRUTH RENOIS
TRUTH RENOIS
The smell hit me first, like it always did.
“There you go, Mrs. T,” I said softly, fastening the snaps at her shoulder. “All clean now.”
She stared past me at the wall, at nothing, at everything she used to be before dementia took it all away. Her daughter hadn’t visited in six weeks. I knew because I’d been here for every single one of those days, working doubles because the money was shit, but it was still money.
$14.50 an hour to wipe strangers’ asses and watch them forget your name.
I stripped the soiled sheets, balled them up, and tossed them in the hamper by the door. My hands were raw from bleach and industrial soap, the skin around my knuckles cracked and angry. I’d stopped wearing lotion because it just made the sanitizer burn worse.
Down the hall, a call button chimed. Then another. Then a third, overlapping like a chorus of need that never stopped. Those lazy ass nurses at the station refused to lift a finger to help.
Machines beeped. Someone coughed wetly in the room next door. The silence from the residents was worse than the noise—that hollow quiet of people who’d run out of words, run out of fight, run out of everything except the slow countdown to the end.
I tucked Mrs. Thibodeaux into bed and pulled the blanket up to her chin. “Sleep good, okay?”
She didn’t answer.
She never did anymore.
I left the room, peeled off my gloves, and tossed them in the biohazard bin. My back ached. My feet ached. My whole body felt like it had been wrung out and left to dry. Twenty-seven years old, and I moved like I was sixty.
This was my life now. Double shifts at Magnolia Gardens because the divorce had taken everything else.
Phillip had kept the house in Metairie—kept it in his name, kept the title, kept the keys.
Kept the Nissan. Kept the savings account I didn’t even know he’d been draining for six months before he served me papers.
He’d moved his side chick, Destiny, into that house before the ink was dry on the divorce decree.
Twenty-two years old, worked the makeup counter at Macy’s, probably sleeping in my bed right now.
And I was here. Wiping down people who wouldn’t remember me tomorrow.
I clocked out at 11:47 PM and stood in the break room, staring at my reflection in the mirror above the sink.
Hollow eyes. Hair pulled back in a bun that had come half undone somewhere around hour six.
Scrubs that smelled like industrial cleaner and sadness.
I didn’t recognize the woman looking back at me.
I had to quit nursing school because I couldn’t afford it anymore.
Not only that, being a full-time student didn’t pay the bills I still had rolling in.
This wasn’t supposed to be my life.
I pushed through the back door into the parking lot. The cold air hit my face like a slap, sharp and clean after eight hours of recycled air and death. I stood there for a second, just breathing, letting the night wash over me.
Then, I started walking.
The bus had stopped running an hour ago, so I walked the twelve blocks from Magnolia Gardens to Mama’s shotgun house in the Seventh Ward.
My feet screamed in my Walmart sneakers.
My shoulders ached from lifting bodies that couldn’t lift themselves.
But I kept moving because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering everything I’d lost.
The Seventh Ward was doing what it always did at midnight: surviving. Music thumped from somebody’s house three blocks over. A car alarm went off and stopped. Dogs barked. The streetlight in front of Mama’s house flickered like it was just as tired as my ass.
I knew the feeling.
I climbed the three steps to the porch, key already in my hand.
The screen door didn’t close all the way—hadn’t closed right since Katrina—so I had to pull it shut behind me.
Inside, the house smelled like Pine-Sol and whatever Mama was drinking tonight.
Probably that bottom-shelf vodka she kept in the freezer that she dared anyone to touch.
The living room was dark except for the glow from the kitchen. I could hear ice clinking in a glass.
I dropped my bag by the door, kicked off my shoes, and collapsed onto the couch—the one with the sunken middle cushion that had been broken since the flood. My whole body sank into it like the couch was trying to swallow me whole.
I pulled out my phone.
The screen was so cracked. It looked like somebody had taken a hammer to my whole damn life. But it still worked, barely, and I opened my banking app first because I was a glutton for punishment.
Checking Account Balance: $47.23
I stared at those numbers until they stopped making sense.
Forty-seven dollars and twenty-three cents. That’s what I had left after rent (Mama charged me $200 a month because pride wouldn’t let her take more), after the payment plan with the divorce lawyer, after groceries and the phone bill and everything else that kept me barely breathing.
I closed the app and opened the job listings.
Babysitting. $12/hour. Must have references.
Dog walking. Flexible hours. $10/hour.
Plasma donation center. Earn up to $400/month.
I’d already done plasma twice this month. The nurse told me my veins needed a break. My whole body was tired.
I kept scrolling.
House cleaning. $15/hour. Must have own transportation.
I didn’t have transportation.
Data entry. Remote. $12/hour.
I’d applied to six of those already. Nobody called back.
Egg donation. Compensation up to $8,000.
I paused. Stared at that one.
Eight thousand dollars for my eggs. I’d thought about it before, back when things first got bad. But eight thousand wasn’t enough. It wouldn’t cover what I owed. Wouldn’t get me out of this house. Wouldn’t give me a life that didn’t taste like failure every time I woke up.
I kept scrolling.
And that’s when I saw it.
The ad loaded slowly, my cracked screen making the image glitch and reform. But the words were clear enough:
GESTATIONAL SURROGATE NEEDED
Compensation: $250,000
Confidential. Discreet. Serious inquiries only.
My thumb froze.
Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
I read it again, certain I’d misunderstood.
But no—the number stayed the same. A quarter of a million dollars for nine months.
The ad was sparse, clinical. No photos. No names.
Just requirements: Healthy female, 21-35, no history of pregnancy complications, willing to undergo IVF and carry to term.
All medical expenses covered. Legal contract required.
At the bottom: Apply here.
My heart was doing back flips in my chest.
“You just getting in?” Mama’s voice cut through from the kitchen. Delphine Renois didn’t ask questions—she made observations that sounded like accusations.
I looked up. She was standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame like she’d been holding up that house for forty years and was getting real tired of it.
She had a rocks glass in one hand, clear liquid catching the overhead light.
Her hair was wrapped in a silk scarf, her face bare except for the lines life had carved into it.
She was fifty-three and looked sixty, but her eyes were sharp as ever.
“Double shift,” I said.
“Mmm-hmm.” Ice clinked as she took a sip. “You eat?”
“I’m fine.”
“That ain’t what I asked.”
My stomach was empty, but admitting it felt like losing. I looked back down at my phone. The ad was still there, glowing like a dare.
$250,000.
I could pay off Phillip’s debt—the credit cards he’d opened in my name, the loans I didn’t know about until the collectors started calling.
I could get my own place. Start over. Actually start over, not this half-life I was living in Mama’s house, sleeping in my childhood bedroom with posters still on the walls.
Nine months.
That’s all it was. Nine months of my life for a quarter million dollars.
Mama moved into the living room, settling into the recliner that was older than me. The springs groaned. “What you looking at on that phone?”
“Job listings.”
“What kind of job makes you look like that?”
I turned the phone face-down on my lap. But my mind was already moving, already doing the math.
$250,000. I could feel Mama watching me, could feel the weight of the house around us—the peeling paint, the water stain on the ceiling from the leak we couldn’t afford to fix, the bills stacked on the kitchen counter.
This house had kept us alive, but it was also a trap.
And I was so tired of being trapped.
“It’s a job posting,” I said finally. “A legal one.”
Mama’s eyes narrowed. “Legal don’t mean safe. And that look on your face? That ain’t the look of somebody who found a regular job. That’s the look of somebody about to do something stupid.”
“I haven’t done anything yet.”
“Yet.” Mama pointed at me with the glass. “That’s the word that’s gonna get you in trouble, baby. Yet.”
I picked up my phone again. The ad was still there. $250,000. I could feel Mama watching me, could feel her reading me the way she’d been reading me since I was born.
“I’m just looking,” I said.
“Mmm-hmm.” Mama didn’t believe me. Mama never believed me when I was lying. “You remember what I told you about things that sound too good to be true?”
“They usually are. But this man is offering 250K, Ma.”
“And you remember what happened the last time you trusted a man who promised you everything?”
Phillip. The name hung in the air between us, unspoken but present.
My jaw tightened. “This isn’t about a man.”
“Baby, everything’s about a man when there’s that much money involved.” Mama finished her drink, ice rattling in the empty glass. “Men don’t pay that kind of money unless they want something they can’t get no other way. And whatever they want? It ain’t never as simple as they make it sound.”
She was right.
I knew she was right.