Page 18 of The Night We Met

“Eh, let him pay.” She waved me off. “Probably makes him feel good. And don’t it feel nice to let someone take care of you?”

It did feel nice.

I tended not to trust it though. Especially from men.

“So when you two making it official?” she asked.

“It is official,” I said, folding a towel.

She arched an eyebrow. “Reeeeally. So you do like him that much.”

I shrugged. “I don’t want to date anyone else and neither does he. We’ll see where it goes. If it goes anywhere.”

She nodded, gazing out onto the junkpile behind our building. There was a graveyard of old pool chairs that someone had stacked and left there to rot not ten feet outside our sliding glass door. It looked like an art exhibit for black mold.

I hated it here.

I watched Mom, standing there smoking. She looked… old. And not in an age way—she looked old in a worn-out kind of way.

I did not want to end up like she had. The idea terrified me.

I think that’s why I took the job at Donna’s. The restaurant where I’d been working had wanted to move me from the lunch shift to the bar. It would have been more money, it was technically a promotion, but for me it felt like inching closer to the late-night bar shift Mom worked at Buckaroo Bill’s. Like when I finally got there some cage door would slam behind me and I’d be trapped there forever. Waiting on tables was not going to be my career. It was just a way to pay my bills until I could get out. I’d taken the job at Donna’s in a panic, like maybe it would slow the progression of me turning into my mother.

The reality was I probably would turn into my mother anyway. She’d turned into hers. I think the only thing I had going for me was the self-awareness of the path I was on, which was either going to help me or make it that much more depressing when I couldn’t get off it.

Someone knocked on the door. I set my clothes down and looked through the peephole. Lexi.

I unbolted the lock and raked the chain across the door. “Hey,” I said.

“Hey. You know your street is low-key terrifying, right?” she said, coming in.

I shut the door. “It is not.”

“There’s bullet holes in your mailbox,” she said, plopping her purse on the kitchen counter. “Hey, Mrs. S.”

Mom waved and leaned over to stub her cigarette in the ashtray.

“Where have you been, hon?” Mom asked, coming inside.