Claiming Georgia Tate by Gigi Amateau

Author:Gigi Amateau [Amateau, Gigi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7636-5430-6
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2005-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

He found a furnished apartment for us to live in not far from where he works. There are four apartments in our building. Ours has only one bedroom; that’s where he sleeps. He said I could sleep in there with him, but I sleep on the sofa. There is nowhere even for my clothes. He has one dresser, in his room, crammed full of his things. For now, I am putting my underwear and socks in the stereo cabinet.

The sofa is too gross to think about. I saw roaches running around on it when I first got here. I have vacuumed it and sprayed it with disinfectant. It’s awfully hard to fall asleep on it, because all it takes is one thought of one little roach and I feel them crawling all over me. Then I turn on the light and see that they really are not crawling on me; it’s just in my mind. The roaches aren’t even the worst part of the sofa. It’s full of fleas. They eat me alive every single night, and that is not my imagination. I scratch my legs so bad in my sleep that they are always bleeding in the morning. Nana used to tell me that scratching mosquito bites scars up your legs for life.

This sofa is not a sleep sofa like the one at home. I cover the sofa with a sheet that I brought with me, and at least that way my skin’s not touching the actual infested sofa cushions.

At first, this place was an awful mess, worse than anything I’ve ever seen. I have to say that now it’s really not that bad. What is most embarrassing is that he reads dirty magazines. It was hard at first not to look at them, so I did, and some of the stuff in there I just could not believe, both the pictures and the writing. I mean, I have heard most of those words before, from him and also from Ginger. I wonder, does he think in those words about me when he starts wanting me to get all dressed up and go out with him or looking at me in that way? I didn’t say anything at all to him about the magazines; I just stacked them up in a paper grocery bag and put them in his bedroom. He didn’t say anything about that or about how clean everything is now.

We use a card table to eat on; it’s usually stacked with my daddy’s beer cans and our McDonald’s bags from breakfast and lunch. There is a McDonald’s just down the street and a Dollar Store sort of catty-corner to us, which is good to have.

Something is wrong with the electricity in this place, because only one wall outlet works. When we got here, it was so hot and humid that we were alternating running the air conditioner and turning the lamp on, because only the single outlet could be used. I bought one of those things you plug into the wall to get more plug space out of it.

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