Authors: Bryant Delafosse
Lara tried to control her slowly rising panic as her children disappeared from her view into the next room.
She wouldn’t give this woman the luxury of the fear she knew from experience that she coveted.
The little white dog started after the children but Charlene gave a single snap and it scurried immediately to her heel.
She turned and started down the hallway, turning into the first room to the right, not taking a look back, only assuming that she would be followed.
“He’s well trained.”
“Should be,” Charlene chirped, stepping around a heavy oak desk in the darkened office and drawing a pack of cigarettes from the top drawer.
“I paid enough for the little bastard.”
She waved Lara to the leather couch beside the door.
Lara edged back into the couch and sunk into its plush cushion.
She immediately pushed herself up, leaning forward--elbows on knees--hoping to appear somewhat business-like, despite her floundering confidence.
Andy gave her feet a few sniffs,
then
pranced out the door and down the hall.
Charlene cracked the blinds on the window behind the desk, sending a harsh ray of dying sunlight from the hazy Houston sky into Lara’s eye line.
She was nothing more than a silhouette to Lara now, a dark smoking shape that could be Beelzebub for all she knew.
Perching herself on the corner of the desk, Charlene’s silhouette sat that way for a few silent moments.
Lara gave a long and heavy sigh and scooted even further out on the edge of the cushion as if preparing for a quick launch off the starting line.
“Listen, Charlene…”
“What kind of trouble have you gotten yourself into this time?”
Lara swallowed awkwardly.
So it was going to be this way, she concluded.
“Truth is me and the kids are temporary without a place to stay.”
“Evicted?
Again?”
Lara opened her mouth then snapped it closed again.
She shut her eyes and counted to three.
“Charlene, I would appreciate you putting your grandchildren up for a few days until I make arrangements.”
“Why were you evicted this time?
Boyfriend trouble?”
“The owners defaulted on their loan and kicked us out, which as you might know is illegal under state law,” Lara replied, her voice gathering momentum as she gained courage.
“I have a friend, a lawyer.
He said he would talk to the owner and
try
and get him to forego legal action by letting us stay through the end of our lease.”
Charlene said nothing.
The embers of her cigarette glowed brightly as she drew on it in the darkness.
“I know that you would never have turned to me unless you had exhausted all your other options.
What about friends?”
“I had something lined up with a coworker.”
Tabitha, a data entry technician from the accounting firm where she worked, usually reliable in a pinch, had a family emergency and left town suddenly, abandoning Lara to her own fate with a series of sincere, and ultimately ineffective, apologies.
“But her mother had a stroke early this morning and…”
“So you’ve known you were homeless since this morning?”
Lara attempted to remain quiet, but her frustration spurred her on.
“You know that I’m an only child.
Both my parents died when I was eight and my only surviving aunt is in a state hospital.
I have no cousins…”
“My brother has several children,” Charlene stated bluntly.
To anyone else, this might have seemed like a non-sequitur, but Lara knew the way Charlene Myers-Cartwright’s mind worked.
She was simply pointing out her inherit superiority, in case Lara might have forgotten.
“It might surprise you to hear, that not one of them returned my phone calls,” Lara replied, attempting to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.
When Tabitha had fallen through, Lara’s first instinct was to try and find a way to get back into the office building where she worked.
She soon remembered from past experiences, having forgotten some prescription medication in her desk drawer several months ago, that on the weekends the card readers did not allow her access.
“And before you ask, I’ve been meticulously going through the list of everyone I’ve ever known from high school until the day I started work a year ago as a secretary, hoping for just one other option, but I came up with zip.”
The figure continued smoking in the darkness, adding nothing to the interrogation.
Taking this as a sign of encouragement, Lara added, “Charlene, I do not want to expose my children to a homeless shelter.”
She had planned on playing the guilt card only if she’d had no other options, but it was starting to look grim.
“Please.
Just a few days.”
“Lara, I would be happy to take my grandchildren in.”
One dark appendage trailed off from the main body of the silhouette and turned a green shade lamp on atop the desk.
As Lara blinked back the stars from her eyes, the other swept what appeared to be piece of paper to the edge of the desk.
“But I’m going to need you to sign this document first.”
Something cold and fluttery awakened inside Lara’s stomach.
“What is that?” she said with dull dread.
“It’s a letter of guardianship.”
Her chest stiffened.
“Perhaps you m-misunderstood me…”
“No, I think we understand each other perfectly, Lara,” Charlene replied.
“We always have.”
Lara stared at the single sheet of paper beneath her mother-in-law’s long-nailed fingers.
“Let’s be perfectly frank,” the other continued.
“You never wanted those children.
They’ve always been something of an inconvenience to you.
You’ve as much as told my son that on several separate occasions.”
It took a few moments for Lara to realize that her mouth had drifted open.
She snapped her jaw shut and tried to formulate the words coursing through her jumbled head.
“The words that passed between me and my husband—my deceased husband--in the heat of past arguments have no bearing whatsoever to what’s happening here today and I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t bring him up again.”
“Now that’s a little unrealistic, wouldn’t you say,” Charlene answered, giving her cigarette two taps into the crystal ashtray beside the lamp.
“After all, he was my only son.”
Lara rose abruptly.
“I think I should go.”
“Go?
Go where?” Charlene snapped, crushing the cigarette out with a single sharp twist.
“You obviously don’t have the money to put my children up in a hotel room or you would have never come to me.”
Lara had begun to feel light-headed, as if a monstrous animal had taken a deep inhalation of breath somewhere in the room and stolen the very oxygen from her lungs.
She had to get out of this woman’s presence.
Sweeping a pen from the desk, Charlene brandished it before her.
“I’ll take good care of them.
You know I will.
I’ll give them what you could never afford to on a secretary’s salary.
Healthy food.
Warm clothes.
The best schools.
Security.”
Lara shook her head emphatically, but she couldn’t deny the truth in her words.
She had fallen on lean times.
No, “lean” was too kind a word.
“Destitute” was a more appropriate term.
The truth of the matter—the fact that she could never expose to this woman for nothing more honorable than simple ego—was that her last boyfriend, an IT cretin for a software company, had committed identity fraud in her name.
He used her debit card to empty out her checking account. And as icing on the cake, he’d cancelled all her credit cards.
All this in retaliation for rejected intimacy.
Sex, she thought.
She didn’t want it.
Not yet.
If he needed it so badly, he could find a willing donor at some local bar.
Was it so wrong that she couldn’t give herself over to a man until she fulfilled the needs of her children?
Wasn’t that the definition of selflessness, she wondered?
Or was it something else?
An image of Him rose in her mind and she instantly pinched it off like the wick of a candle that stubbornly refused to extinguish.
She could hear his voice, still fresh despite his three year absence.
Cheer up, Gloria.
Things can’t possibly get much worse.
Living from paycheck to paycheck for more than two months now, she had been forced to take in a roommate.
Gabby, a college student in her early twenties, had answered an ad that she had posted on a bulletin board at work.
Even after two bounced checks from the girl, it had taken Lara catching her smoking weed in the bathroom late one night to finally kick her out on the street.
Perhaps this was God’s final irony; the Great Slum Lord on High putting her out on the street.
His idea of high comedy.
She couldn’t pretend anymore not to see the holes in socks and underwear.
She had been surviving on government assistance for going on six months now and she had been forced to stretch their meals farther and farther each day.
She found herself looking at that pen held in those exquisitely manicured fingers, when a horrible screech came from down the hallway.
Lara rushed outside through the living room and into the kitchen.
Both children were standing wide-eyed, apparently safe, though obviously scared.
Andy, the tiny white Bishon, was convulsing on the tiled floor at a rate that defied reason.
The sound that came from its body was unnatural.
Before she could utter a word, Charlene dropped to her knees beside the animal and bellowed, “What have you done?”
Cora ran to Lara and clutched her leg tightly while Owen just stood immobile watching the dog flopping around on the kitchen rug with a sort of morbid fascination.
“We were just playing with him,” Cora sobbed.
“Honestly.”
When Charlene laid her hand on the dog, a blue arc of electricity shot from it.
She screamed and fell back away from it, a look of shock on her face.
The dog yelped one last time, smoke pouring from its open mouth.
From between the tiny jaws, the glistening latticework of its mechanical interior was clearly visible within.
“It’s just a Bot!” Owen cried in obvious relief.
“Just?” Charlene bellowed.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
Cora squeezed a handful of Lara’s pants leg in her tiny fist and pleaded in a tiny voice, “Make her stop, Mommy.
It burns!”
“I just thought I killed it,” Owen muttered under his breath, his eyes wide with wonder.
Charlene reached out and seized Owen’s arm from where she sat and gave it a hard tug.
“Do you know what it costs to repair one of these?”