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“I’m so glad you have them in your life,” Pixie interjected the single sentence. She seemed to understand that Doug was onlygetting started, and she was showing him patience. Letting him tell things at his own pace.
The better memories he’d been recalling, faded.
“The day my father died, he was already in the harbor, his boat idling as he waited his turn to unload his catch.” Doug always teared up when he thought of that day. “A party boat, with a guy at the helm who was stinking drunk, rammed into his boat and sent him over the side.” He swallowed the bile that rose in his throat. “Dad would have survived, but as he was ejected, his foot got caught in some of the netting on the deck, and dragged him under. The knife he always carried in case of just such an emergency had been in his hand because he was gutting fish for our dinner. He lost the blade as he went over, and…he wasn’t able to cut himself free.”
Pixie sent a hand out toward him tentatively, and without hesitation this time, he took her warm palm and the comfort it offered, entwining their fingers.
It felt good.
“I was sent to my aunt and uncle’s house, which is where I thought I’d end up. Hell, everyone thought so until the day of the funeral. There…” Doug could still recall the ugly scene, as clear as day, “…my mother showed up. She was drunk, or on drugs, or just letting her crazy out, but the bottom line was she had a huge fit, ranting about how she should have custody of me.
“She was eventually restrained and dragged off by some officers who’d come in support of the family, which meant we’d won that battle, but…” he sighed. “Uncle Frank knew, beyond a doubt, that we were going to lose the war. My matriarch, it seemed, had all the rights. My father had never filed any paperwork stating differently. To give Dad a pass for that oversight, though, you have to understand. There’s longevity on his side of the family, and he figured he’d outlast her, or that he’dat least be with me until I was old enough to head out on my own. It just…didn’t work out that way.”
Pixie hadn’t so much as twitched.
Now was the hard part. He’d told this story to a very few people, and only in detail to Will and his long ago teacher, Mr. Jenkins, but Pixie deserved to know everything if she was going to give him a chance to become part of her life.
And yes. If he were honest with himself, he wanted that. He wantedher. A family. A…wife. His aunt and uncle had given him that vision, showing him every day how two loving partners really acted toward each other, and he yearned for that. It wasn’t until he met Pixie that he’d even imagined that might be possible for himself.
“I went to live with my mother the next week,” Doug went on. “I’d just turned ten. She somehow managed to convince the judge at a custody hearing that my aunt and uncle were incompetent, failing to oversee their own son, Dieter, so they couldn’t be trusted with my care.”
“What? That’s ridiculous,” Pixie railed.
“It was,” Doug agreed. “But Dieter was in the hospital, having suffered a fall from a treehouse they allowed him to build, so the judge sided with my matriarch. Needless to say, when I arrived at her house, I’d never witnessed anything like it,orwhat went on there. It was a ramshackle old Victorian, in need of…everything. The paint on the façade was nearly nonexistent. Every board on the porch was loose and a danger to traverse. And when you got inside…there were buckets everywhere. The roof leaked, but instead of having it fixed, the residents went with what was easiest. And yes, I said residents, plural. My mother wasn’t the only one living there. She had five women roommates.” He spat the last out, bitterly.
Doug refocused, and traveled back in his head to those first few weeks of hell. “In the beginning, she… I’ll call her by hername, Lotus, because I can’t stomach calling her my mother. Anyway, Lotus was…simply there. She wasn’t nice or nurturing, but at least she noticed me occasionally, and made sure I got off to school every day.
“Coming from my father’s home, then my aunt and uncle’s where I’d also been loved, it was a tough adjustment being no better than a piece of furniture, but it was my new reality, so I sucked it up. Then just as I was coming to grips with my new life, I was given a job.”
This was where things began to get messy. Not as horrific as what occurred later, but still awful.
“Drugs, you said,” Pixie interjected softly.
Right.He’d shared that small part of his story with her already.
“That’s correct. The six women ran a meth lab in a shack a half mile into the woods in back of their house. I didn’t know anything about it when I first arrived, but that’s how they made their money and stockpiled something to trade for other drugs they used. I found out quickly what that meant for me when they tagged me as their delivery and pickup boy.”
It had sucked, mostly because he’d known how wrong it was.
“After school—a few times a week—I was required to make the rounds of the scummiest properties on earth, delivering drugs, collecting cash and…substances. There were times…” A hard lump formed in Doug’s throat. Even though this wasn’t the worst of what had happened, he still had a hard time revisiting those horrific trips.
“There were times,” he began again, “when a customer couldn’t, or wouldn’t pay. And when I told them I couldn’t give them their drugs, they’d go nuts on me; stealing the other cash I’d already collected. I was beaten up, stabbed, and even set on fire once.”Thatwas a memory he didn’t want to revisit, and he had some small, faded scars on his shoulder to proveit. “I couldn’t quite believe what had happened, but after the first incident when I went home black, blue, and bloody with no money to hand over, I not only didn’t receive sympathy, I learned that punishment at home was far worse than the bruises I’d already sustained.”
“How is that possible, Doug?” Pixie asked, horror clear on her face.
He snorted. “It’s possible because I was under the care of an alcoholic, drug-addicted whack job,” he answered bitterly. “The first time my failure occurred, Lotus locked me in the basement for two days without food. It was cold and damp, and dark. Very, very dark.” Doug shivered, remembering. It had taken him years to be able to sleep in a room without some kind of light. “The second time I ‘screwed up’, my incarceration lasted three days, with a few power bars thrown down the stairs so at least I wouldn’t starve.”
Pixie chewed her lip, clearly nervous to hear more, but she didn’t stop him.
“I quickly learned that when I did my route, I’d hide the money I’d already collected,andthe surplus drugs beforeI approached the next of Lotus’s customers. If the customer beat the crap out of me and took their stash, at least it was only a single parcel I’d be missing when I got home. That seemed to suit Lotus just fine, and we…coexisted like that for the next few years. Life was pretty awful, but it was my new reality, and I learned to survive.”
“Who cooked for you?” Pixie asked, biting back a sob. “Who did your laundry?” Leave it to her to bring up those every day, mundane tasks. At the time, the loss of those things was actually what nearly broke him.
Doug needed to ignore her tender heart, or he might get choked up, too. He cleared his throat.
“My dad had taught me well, so when there was food, I cooked. When there wasn’t…I stole from the local market. I believe…” He’d thought over this many times as an adult. “I believe the owner saw that I was taking stuff, but he’d known my father, and me…before, and I think he must have had some kind of understanding of my new situation, so he let me get away with it.”
Doug closed his eyes as Pixie squeezed his hand, still talking. “My laundry was hit or miss. Sometimes I managed to get the old washing machine they had in the house working, and other times it took a while. I’d learned a lot from my father, so I wasn’t afraid to take the thing apart. But there wasn’t always money to buy parts when they were required. When that happened, I had to bide my time until I could coerce one of the women into footing the bill. In the interim, I rinsed my clothes out in the sink when they got too gross.”
