I wonder how far she’s willing to take this.
As I start to get dressed, I realize the question isn’t how far she’s willing to take this, but how far amI?
The answer to that, of course, is as far as I need to.
Chapter Three
Then
I was three weeks shy of fifteen years old when Casey-Marie Blaine first walked into my life. Mom and I were living at a homeless shelter in Nashville, where we’d been staying for the past two weeks.
Both of us were still shell-shocked, I think.
This day, we occupied a small conference room in the administration building of the Catholic church that ran the shelter. I remember sitting there and watching Ms. Blaine as she talked with Mom, going over things with her, listening to her as she described Mom’s options.
We had…well, nothing.
Literally, the sum of our belongings was the clothes we had packed into two suitcases in the tiny room the two of us shared.
And a photo album.
Not that we had a lot to start with in the decrepit, one-bedroom single-wide just outside Murfreesboro that we’d lived in all my life. Mom and Emma had shared the bedroom, while I slept on the ancient couch in the living room.
I remember feeling impressed that Ms. Blaine spoke Spanish fluently, meaning I didn’t need to translate for Mom. Mom could do okay for work, usually. She didn’t have to know a lot of English while working as a housekeeper at a local hotel, which was what she’d done for as long as I could remember.
For something like this, legal issues, it went beyond Mom’s limited English. She also couldn’t read much English, other than price tags, menus, or street signs.
I also remember feeling vaguely relieved that we might not be forced to flee to Mexico after all, a place I’d never visited despite Mom being from there and still having family there. I honestly didn’t understand why Mom had floated that option a few days ago. She had her green card but had never become a citizen. Emma and I were both born here, in Tennessee, and our father was an American citizen.
We were, however, Terrance Ronald, Sr.’s dirty secret. which was a fact Mom and Emma both managed to keep from me for most of my life.
Until two weeks earlier, when our world disintegrated.
Ms. Blaine’s voice sounded low, soothing, gentle, her Spanish flawless and unhesitating, as if she grew up speaking it natively. I could tell Mom liked her.
Mom had spent most of the last two weeks crying and practically paralyzed with grief and fear.
Which was something I didn’t understand, at first—her fear. I thought Emma was simply another victim of a random crime, murdered after she returned home from work. She’d quit school four months before, after she turned eighteen and Mom couldn’t stop her, and went to work full-time to help pay the bills. I was a sophomore in high school. Emma told me she’d get her GED later, but she wanted me to go to college because I had the grades to possibly get a scholarship.
I wasn’t home that afternoon. After school, I went to my friend Corbin’s house, to help him study for his Spanish test. Otherwise, I might have been dead, too. Corbin was one of few friends I had in school. I tended to get snubbed because we were poor and Hispanic. I had to file paperwork for free lunches every year, which always led to nasty comments being slung at me in the halls.
It meant I spent a lot of time studying, because if I wasn’t going to be popular, at least I’d show all those fuckers I was smart. Some of them knew Emma had dropped out. That led them to sneer at me, tell me they thought she’d probably gotten pregnant, told me I was a worthless wetback, that I wouldn’t amount to anything.
You name the slur, I heard it.
But not Corbin. He wasn’t one of the popular kids. He was, however, wicked good in math and helped me with my algebra homework in exchange for Spanish tutoring.
That’s why, on that day, Corbin’s dad drove me home after they fed me an early dinner. Fortunately, the man hadn’t pulled away yet when he heard me scream after opening the trailer’s door. He came running, gun in hand, just to reholster it. Then he grabbed me by the arm and dragged me outside while he called the cops from his cell phone.
There was no doubt Emma was dead. Even I could tell that from the brief look I got. Between all the blood, and the fact that she was lying there with her eyes wide open…yeah.
He kept me outside, held on to me, refused to let me go back in there to her. He talked to the police when they arrived, still holding on to me.
Hell, thank god he was there, and could vouch for my whereabouts all afternoon, or the cops might have tried to blame me for her murder.
Later, while the cops followed us, he drove me to the hotel where Mom worked so the cops could break the news to her.
Because Mom didn’t have a car, the man then drove both of us back to the trailer. Mom made me sit out in the car with him while she packed for us, grabbed the photo album and paperwork, and we never went back. We couldn’t now, even if we’d wanted to.
