I couldn’t fall into that shit again. The nights of drinking until I passed out and days of hangovers on top of my misery were over. They had to be. I was a grown man with responsibilities and parents who’d already lost one son. I didn’t have the luxury of wallowing, even though some days I wanted to. Hell, most days I considered calling in sick and starting the day with a bottle of whiskey, but I didn’t.
I considered losing my brother the worst thing that ever happened to me, and, unlike Henry, I remembered my birth mother and the numerous shitty foster homes I’d been placed in before my parents took me in. I also remembered vividly being taken from the Harrises for over a month because of some bureaucratic bullshit when I was eight. The minute my social worker had led me out the front door had been one of the scariest and worst moments of my life. All of that paled in comparison to losing my baby brother. I would have gone through anything, lived through anything, if I could have been spared that loss.
Chapter 2
Morgan
I wasn’t going to lie—I was struggling. To be fair, I didn’t know many single moms who didn’t struggle on some level. Even the ones who had plenty of money to spend and well-behaved children who never wrote on walls like the ones I was currently cleaning before work struggled. It was just a fact of life. Raising a human alone was a daunting task. When you added in the difficulty of supporting another person financially who couldn’t even wipe their own ass yet and had to be monitored twenty-four hours a day, the struggle became very real.
I wasn’t complaining. I really wasn’t. Life was what you made of it—I’d learned that when I was young—but sometimes I just wanted to sit on my ass and not worry about the next bill that was due, or, in this instance, how I was going to get crayon off the walls of the house I was renting a room in for a fraction of what I knew it was worth. Since we’d moved in, I’d done my best not to mess anything up, which was nearly impossible with an active two-year-old. I knew my friend Max was doing us a massive favor by letting us live with him and watch the house while he was traveling on and off for work, and I didn’t want him to regret it. Honestly, we’d be up shit creek if he changed his mind.
The job I had now paid more and had better hours than the shop I’d been working at in San Diego, but I still wasn’t exactly bringing in the big bucks, and living in Southern California was ridiculously expensive. So far I’d managed to keep us afloat, but I wasn’t sure how long I’d be able to juggle everything without asking for help.
I hated asking for help.
I had a safety net. I knew that. It wasn’t as if me and my girl would ever go hungry or become homeless. My pop would never let that happen, and neither would my sister, Miranda. They offered to help out every time I talked to either of them on the phone, but neither of them lived close and I wasn’t quite to the point when I’d accept moving home to mooch off of them. Besides, my sister was currently in college in Oregon and it wasn’t as if we could move into her dorm room.
I just had to buckle down. Find a way to make some more cash so we weren’t living paycheck to paycheck, and eventually find a place to live that was ours alone so I wasn’t constantly worried that my roommate would decide we were too much trouble.
“Mama,” Etta said, clapping her hands to get my attention. “Waynerot.”
“I have no idea what you’re saying to me,” I replied conversationally. “But we don’t write on walls.”
“Me color.”
“We only color on paper,” I said for the fourteenth time in as many minutes.
“Me color.”
“Right. Only color on paper,” I said again. I was pretty sure she was hearing only what she wanted to hear, which was that she was going to get to color again at some point. If there was one thing my daughter got from her father beyond her looks, it was the fact that she picked and chose what she wanted to hear. I could tell her that we weren’t having ice cream that day, and the only words she would focus on were “ice cream,” and then she’d continue to ask about it all day long.
I hadn’t been around a lot of babies in my life, so I wasn’t sure if her selective hearing was normal, but it seemed like a personality trait to me. I had a feeling it was going to cause quite a ruckus as she got older. It drove me crazy, but a part of me couldn’t help but find her singular focus a bit endearing—probably because she was my own kid and not someone else’s.