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At least we agreed on something.
My social worker, Alicia, had told me Santa Cruz was a smallish town, but it seemed huge compared to Manitowoc. Street after street of houses, shops, a huge university, and a Boardwalk with games, rides, and a Ferris wheel that slowly turned in front of the Pacific. Lake Michigan was nothing to the endless blue green of the ocean that stretched along the coast. Turn around, and there were mountains covered in forests of green. Like a mirage after staring at the same hopeless landscape for eighteen years.
I glanced at Nelson, wondering how the hell he ended up here.
“Your grandma left me and Russell everything,” he said, answering my unspoken question. “I got the properties she and Pawpaw invested in a million years ago and your dad got the cash.” He snorted. “Lucky me.”
I nodded grimly, thinking of how Mom struggled to pay bills and keep food on the table with money she earned from two jobs while Russ drank and gambled the inheritance away on fantasy sports leagues and local poker games.
“This is you.”
Nelson pulled the car into a cracked parking lot. It fronted a cement block of an apartment complex in a neighborhood filled with them. Wrought iron bars covered the bottom windows. Peeling paint and exterior cement steps led to the second level.
He pointed at the top corner unit. “That one’s yours for now. Grab your stuff. I’ll show you the place.”
I followed him up the stairs to the corner unit. A gold and black sticker that said OFFICE stuck to the door.
“Typically, managers live on the ground floor,” Nelson said. “But I got a lady in there with her two kids, begging me not to move her upstairs.” He rolled his eyes as he unlocked the door from a ring of keys.
“Why doesn’t she want to move?”
“The ground unit is bigger, of course. I told her it was up to you. If you want to kick the mouthy bitch out, be my guest.”
My shoulders tensed. “I won’t.”
“Take the grand tour and say that again.”
He shoved the door open, and I stepped inside a dark, shabby shoebox. A ratty couch, table, and a single chair were the only furniture in the living room/kitchen area. The bedroom was tiny with a futon and a small window with a view of the street. The bathroom was a shower, toilet, and sink. A few dead bugs in the scratched, yellowing porcelain. I tried to picture a mom with two kids in here and my stomach churned.
“Told ya,” Nelson said, misreading my disgusted look. “The bottom unit’s better.”
“I’m fine here.”
“Don’t be stupid. If I were you—”
“I said, it’s fine.”
He sighed. “Suit yourself. Now let’s get to work.”
Over the next two weeks, Nelson had me meet the tenants of the Cliffside Apartments. The “mouthy bitch” on the ground unit below mine was Maryann Greer—a tired-looking woman in her mid-thirties. She had dark circles under her eyes, but there was a fire in them that hadn’t gone out.
She reminded me of Mom.
Her twin girls, Camille and Lillian, looked to be around six years old. When Nelson introduced me as their new manager, they’d all stared at me with the same suspicion. I told Maryann I wasn’t going to make her move upstairs. Even so, they shut the door on us quick.
“You were too nice to her,” Nelson had said as we moved to the next shabby door in the shabby complex. “Don’t make a habit of it. You gotta watch it with these tenants. Give’em an inch, they’ll take a mile.”
As far as I could see, the tenants weren’t getting much of anything. Nearly all of them had plumbing and heating issues, and their apartments were just as shitty as mine. Or worse. The whole building needed new paint, new pipes, new pavement in the cracked parking lot.
During those weeks, I did my best to fix what was broken—clogged drains, leaky pipes… On my iPhone —a gift from my social worker before leaving Wisconsin—I Googled how to replace heating filaments. I paid for any repair materials out of my own savings because Nelson was too slow, and he was even slower paying me back.
The work kept me busy. The first few days of school at Santa Cruz Central High came and went, but on Thursday, I was caught up enough to go. The school was in walking distance, thankfully, since I had no transportation.
Or a paycheck.
“You live rent free,” Nelson had told me. “I’m supposed to pay you on top of that?”
“How am I—?”
