“Your mom…”
“She died,” I confirmed, shrugging. “I was sixteen at the time. She’d just gotten out of detox. And she went back and tried her usual dose and… yeah. She was gone. I found her the next morning.”
“What the fuck did you do then?”
“Ran,” I told him honestly. “I didn’t want to get sucked into the system, so I took all the cash and anything even remotely valuable in the house, and I got the fuck out of there. Crashed on friends’ couches or shelters or even outside on occasion.
“Eventually, I got myself a fake ID good enough to fool a bar owner who hired me on. I got a little stability then. For the first time in my whole life. But, well, that was up and down too.”
“You were a kid,” he said, shrugging. “No one would expect it was all smooth sailing.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, still trying to forgive my younger, stupider self for some of the many mistakes she’d made that set me back each time, taking months or years to recover from.
“Can I ask you something?” he asked.
After I’d just told him more than anyone else had ever known about me? I guess what was one more question.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Your old man…”
Oh, that can of worms.
Of course he’d want to open that one up.
“Well, up until a little while back, all I knew about him was that he was a rich guy that my mom met—“
“While stripping?” he asked.
“No, this was before the stripping. She had a summer gig as a cart girl at a golf course.”
“A rich guy’s mating ground.”
“Something like that. They had a fling. She didn’t realize until the summer was over and the job was done. Then, well, she said he wanted nothing to do with us. That was all I knew.”
“Until?” he prompted.
“Until he suddenly tracked me down,” I told him, still remembering the day when the private detective showed up at my work, asking all sorts of questions about my mom that I didn’t want to answer in front of my coworkers. So I met up with him after. Only to learn my long-lost father suddenly had a change of heart, thirty some-odd years later.
I’d laughed in the detective’s face, threw back my shot, and told him that he could give my father a message for me.
I hope you rot in hell.
I kind of regretted those words now, knowing what I know.
“What did he want?” Dezi asked as we made our way onto the small wooden bridge half-hidden in the woods, especially at that time of day with all the kids at school and most adults off at work.
“To tell me he was dying,” I told him.
“Oh,” Dezi said, looking uncomfortable. “That sucks.”
“I mean, when I first heard the news, after walking into his palatial mansion that he’d been living in comfortably while I went to bed with an empty stomach night after night in fleabag apartment after roach-infested apartment, I kind of thought less than gracious things.”
“Fair,” Dezi said, shrugging. I liked that about him. Immediate acceptance. No judgment. Even when I was telling him something objectively ugly about myself. “So… this mansion where your guest house is…”
“Yeah,” I agreed, nodding. “That’s my father’s property. Though I wasn’t lying to you about him being my landlord. I was paying him. Except… he just gave me all the cash back today.”
“Not like he needs it.”
“I know. It was just… the point, I guess. I didn’t want him to think I was trying to take advantage of him.”
“Why are you there then? To get to know him before he’s gone?”
“Yes, that. I’m also helping him. And learning about his company.”
“His company?”
“Yeah, well, ah, he… he has no one. He… he wants to leave it all to me.”
“So, what I am hearing now… is that I have myself a sugar mama?” Dezi asked, turning to face me with a big smirk on his face.
“I mean, I can barely afford to pay my phone bill right now. But, eventually, yeah, it’s all going to be mine.”
That still felt really surreal to think, let alone say.
“That’s fucking cool, babe,” he said.
“It kind of sucks that it, you know, has to happen the way it is happening, but yeah. I mean, I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around not having to worry about money. And trying to run a company. But, hopefully, I have a while still.”
“What’s your old man like?”
“He’s… a strange mix of kind of stuffy and very laid back,” I told him. “He knows about Rosita. And you sneaking onto the property, by the way,” I told him, watching as he gave me a whoops look. “He’s fine with it. I mean, you being there, not you sneaking around like a criminal,” I clarified.
“Kind of hard for me to sneak around like a law-abiding citizen, but I could give it a try. So, is that an invitation to come over and have you cook dinner for me?”