Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 77106 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77106 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
“I’m not paying for that fancy shit,” my mother had said in the car when I’d asked her to stop at the store to pick some up.
“I’m having such a hard time imagining someone being so cruel to a baby,” Zoe said.
“To this day, she’s the most selfish person I’ve ever met.”
“What’d you do?”
I’d sold my stereo—the one nice thing I had, purchased with cash my maternal grandmother had sent for my birthday before she died.
“The difference was night and day with the right formula.”
“But formula is expensive.”
“Sure is. And I got good as hell at stealing it.”
“That’s… so much for a kid to have to go through.”
“Baby, I’m just getting started,” I admitted.
“What the hell else could they have piled on?”
“Babysitting. Apparently, I was so good with the kids that my parents thought they could open an unlicensed, under-the-table, child care situation.”
That whole summer, I had my five foster kids—including a toddler and an infant—and a revolving door of different kids from infant to ten, dropped off by parents who had no child care to get them through the summer break.
“There was no one you could talk to?”
“I wouldn’t have had the fucking time even if I did know how fucked up the situation was. And for a long time, I didn’t.”
I got good at being a single parent, though. At making a penny stretch because, despite more money coming in by the day, the grocery budget didn’t increase.
On occasion, a child care parent would see me playing with the kids when they showed up to retrieve their kid, assume I was just being a good kid, and tip me.
That money went right into groceries.
I learned quickly to keep kids fed on a lot of basics: rice, pasta, potatoes, eggs, and beans.
“I’m amazed that you managed to make little kids eat beans and rice.”
“There was a lot of cheese, ketchup, or ranch dressing involved,” I admitted.
“Well, whatever works to keep bellies full.”
“That was my thinking too.”
“How long were these kids with you?”
“The first set, the three of them, that was over a year. The second set was about eight months. But they were quickly replaced. By a larger sibling group. A set of four-year-old twin boys and two girls: ten and twelve. This is where the tallies come into play.”
“The tallies for the… bodies?”
“Yeah.”
“You killed people as a teenager?”
“No, I learned about people worth killing. Those two girls, they came with a speech to my parents about trauma. And weekly shrink visits. Their mother’s boyfriend had been… doing some shit grown-ass men have no business doing to little girls.”
“Oh, those poor girls.”
“Yeah. They were terrified of my father. When they were with us, it was lucky that he was rarely around. He was fucking around on my mom at the time. But she was too sloshed to notice those days.”
“Geez. Coast. This is all too much. What happened to the girls?”
“They were moved to another foster home with their brothers. We got another group.”
“How many arrows are we up to now?”
“The arrows are just for the babies. There were dozens of other kids that came and went. Older kids. Teens. Most of them were pros at foster homes, so they mostly took care of themselves. But I did hang with them. I did hear their stories. I did write down names to look into when I was older.”
“Why? I mean, I get that what these people did was awful, but why did you feel like you had to be the one to do something?”
“Because who the fuck else was going to? That boyfriend who’d been touching the girls? He was a cop. And the other cops didn’t want to believe their comrade could be capable of that. It went nowhere.
“Other parents nearly starved their kids to death, but got to get custody back.
“There were addicts who were so busy getting high that they didn’t know their baby had diaper rash that made their skin peel.
“There was one case where there was a newborn and a two-year-old in the house. While the baby was in the NICU, they took off on a bender, leaving the toddler in the house to dehydrate to death.”
“Oh, my God,” Zoe whimpered, pressing a hand to her chest.
“Yeah. They went to prison. We got the newborn when it left the NICU. But both parents got out when the baby was twelve.”
“What? Shouldn’t they have been doing life?”
“The lawyer got the sentence down from aggravated homicide to negligent. Lighter sentence. My sentence wasn’t quite so lenient when I finally tracked them down and found them up to their old tricks.”
“So, all the tallies, they’re for people who abused kids that you took care of?”
“Not all of them, no. Most of them, though.”
“Honestly, I get that. I ran over that man last night. Sort of. I think. I would have done worse. I was practically feral with the desire to protect my daughter. And, in a way, those foster kids, those were your kids. Even if just for a little while.”