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“He never actually figured it out,” I told Voss.
“You didn’t go to school?” he asked, brows up.
“Nope. I mean, I was taught things. A lot of the guys my dad associated with were surprisingly good at math. They taught me over tables at truck stop diners. I got history lessons from men who’d been there, who’d fought in the wars. Guys threw their old books at me that helped me become a good reader. And my father took me to every museum and science center that we passed by over the years.”
“Guess you can call this homeschooling,” he’d said once. “This being your home. And the world being your school.”
It was great and all. I probably did learn more that way than I ever would have in a classroom. But it also meant that when I was seventeen, I went ahead and enrolled myself in some online GED classes. Then took the test when I’d moved back to Navesink Bank.
“Your dad,” Voss said. “He was an addict?” he asked.
“He was,” I said, nodding, not bothering to ask how he knew. It wasn’t like I hid that from anyone.
I mean, I hadn’t known it when I was nine.
Sure, I knew that he had good weeks and bad ones, that he disappeared, locking me in the rig while he went who-knew where, and came back reeking of something that curled my nose, then sleeping long hours the next day.
He’d been erratic, but functional, most of the time.
And because he’d made decent money, but didn’t have a home to take care of, there’d never been financial worries. Not that I’d ever been aware of, anyway.
As the years went on, though, he’d progressed deeper and deeper into his sickness, leaving me alone and vulnerable a lot more, not shielding me from things he should have.
I was eleven the first time I’d gone into a restroom where there was a hole in the wall that someone stuck their dick through and told me to ‘suck it.’
I was maybe twelve when I’d seen truckers getting sucked off in the lots, or fucking women from behind right next to their trucks.
Then, well, then I’d gone through puberty.
Little girls, they were relatively safe with the truckers. Sure, there were bad guys. Every profession had them. But most of the truckers I’d come across had been family men with their own kids back at home. They’d taken me on as sort of a ‘road daughter,’ and had been nothing but good and kind to me.
But when that girly body became more of a womanly one?
Yeah, things became a lot less about wanting to teach me math, and a lot more about wanting to give me anatomy and ‘health class’ lessons.
I couldn’t tell you how many dicks I saw before I even turned eighteen.
Luckily for me, it hadn’t been worse than that.
Flashing, inappropriate comments, maybe an ass or tit graze.
I couldn’t even focus too much on that when my father kept getting worse and worse, being late on jobs, skipping them for weeks altogether.
“I was all of sixteen the first time I drove my father’s truck,” I told Voss.
I mean, sure, he or his friends had given me little driving lessons. In empty lots or other big, open areas where I couldn’t damage their hundred-thousand-dollar homes on wheels.
So I knew what I was doing.
But my hands had been clammy and my stomach wobbly as I pulled on my father’s big baseball cap, tucking my hair up underneath, wanting to mask the fact that I was too young to be doing what I was doing.
“Why’d you have to drive?”
“Because my father was on a five-day bender that showed no signs of stopping. And there was next to no cash left. He’d agreed to take a job, but was going to be late.”
I’d become aware around then that my father had been fucking up so much lately that a lot of the companies that needed long-haulers refused to work with him.
How long until they all had his number and wouldn’t float jobs his way? Until there was no more money for food or the gas for the rig? Until there was no more money for the booze?
I knew enough at that point to understand that alcohol addiction could and would kill. Especially if you cut it off cold turkey.
And my father might not have been much, but he was all I had. The prospect of being an orphan at sixteen had filled me with enough dread and determination that I was willing to do anything at all to keep it from happening.
So, not even old enough to drive a car, with no real sense of direction, I’d driven us the ten hours to the job site, gotten my father cleaned up, and made him take over.
He was barely functional those days. And I drove probably as often as he did. Just to keep the food on the table. To keep us going as the addiction got worse and worse.
