Bill Warrington s Last Chance James King

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.Think sales.Think commissions.She did so now, even though she felt guilty about it.But what was the point of ignoring the inevitable? She guessed that she could get her father a 150K, maybe 200K for his house.With a 2.5 percent commission, that would mean.Oh, hell, she’d figure it out later.The more immediate challenge would be to convince him to move into an assisted-living facility before it was too late and the only option would be a nursing home.His mind was still sharp, but he was obviously losing the ability to take care of the place.Assisted-living feature: no lawn.Benefit: no worries about mowing and raking and shoveling.Feature: smaller living area.Benefit: less to keep clean.Feature: communal dining room.Benefit: healthy eating, no TV-dinner crap.Sad, she thought.He used to yell at me if I didn’t hang up my jacket within thirty seconds of walking in the house.And god forbid it should fall off the hanger and onto the closet floor.Marcy got up and opened the refrigerator.Something smelled, but a quick check of the meat drawer—chicken cutlets thawing for the dinner that she now couldn’t muster the energy to cook—revealed that the source was somewhere else.She closed the fridge and checked the garbage, which she should have known would be the culprit.Emptying the trash was about the only thing she asked April to do every day—and every day, it seemed, she needed reminding.Marcy considered calling up to her to come and empty it, but the thought of even the smallest argument threatened to drain her completely.She pulled the garbage bag out of the wastebasket, tied it, and put a new liner in the trash can.Feeling the heat from the still-warm Camry engine as she squeezed her way to the trash cans in the garage, she tried to see the car through April’s eyes.Was it really that awful, that uncool? Tough.When she was April’s age, she wouldn’t have dreamed about being so picky about what she drove—or was going to drive.Good thing, too, since she ended up behind the wheel of the family’s Dodge station wagon throughout her teen years.April, of course, wasn’t interested in hearing about that.She wasn’t interested in hearing much of anything that didn’t have to do with her.Back in the kitchen, clearing and setting the table was not an appealing thought.She’d been balancing the checkbook earlier, and bills and receipts were spread across its surface.She’d also been reviewing some listings and collating materials for an upcoming open house.Sprinkled in the mess were a dozen or so grocery coupons she had clipped that morning.Ironic, Marcy thought.Less than an hour earlier, she’d been sitting at a table with a different kind of mess.And she’s the one expected to clean it up.Why was she the one the old man called? It seemed that during her visits, if and when he’d decide to string more than a sentence or two together and actually converse, it was always Mike this or Nick that.But it was always she who ended up tending to him, as she did tonight, listening to his harebrained request for a family reunion, blinking away the smoke in her eyes, ignoring his cranky insults and her own daughter’s Nazi cracks.Her illustrious older brothers? Nowhere.Marcy looked out the window.All that was needed to complete this happy moment, she thought, flipping through the mail she’d brought in that morning, was another missing child support payment from the man April so adored.Which reminded her.She checked her pocketbook to see if she had enough cash for dinner out.CHAPTER FOURApril pressed the lock button on her bedroom door as gently as she could, hoping the telltale click wouldn’t echo in the hallway like a cannon and alert her mother to come running up the stairs and start pounding on the door, asking why this door was locked and saying, We don’t lock doors in this house and People who don’t have anything to hide don’t lock their doors and What are you doing in there, young lady? and on and on.And on.Living in this house meant having your every move monitored, like on reality TV—only instead of a bunch of cute guys, there was only her mother.She opened her laptop and keyed in her password to access her list files, which she kept in her algebra folder in case unwelcome visitors—such as her math- averse mother—nosed around.April used to think there was such a thing as privacy, certain rules you just didn’t violate.But then one day she came home from school and found her mother waiting for her in the family room, holding a joint in one hand and, in the other, the sock she’d found the joint in.How lame was that? Not just snooping in a sock drawer, but actually examining each pair.Lame and creepy.April began reviewing her lists.TITS (Things I Think Suck) included such things as cramps, zits, and boys who lie their asses off and still have girls chasing after them.All the items here had first put in time on PU (Patently Unfair), which at the moment included the fact that boys could pee whenever they had to no matter where they were, the age requirement for driving, paying premium dollar for crappy weed, and ridiculously early curfews.She also maintained a SOO (So Obviously Orgasmic) list of her favorite musicians, songs, and television shows, as well as SOIL (Signs Of Intelligent Life), currently empty.The file she worked on the most, the one she clicked now, was PITS (People I Think Suck) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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