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, butduring 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?
