Dime by E. R. Frank

Author:E. R. Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

Chapter Twenty-Two

MRS. DUBOSE FINALLY died, right as Daddy pulled off the highway by a rest area sign.

“Get up,” Daddy said. I tried to picture him reading to Brandy longer and longer each day the way Jem read to Mrs. Dubose, weaning her off her drug. How did Daddy help Brandy get clean? I couldn’t imagine it.

“I said, get up.”

I closed my paperback.

On the near side of the diner and the 7-11 were rows and rows of gas pumps. On the far side there were rows and rows of trucks. In the dark, it looked fake somehow, like a painting in a book, or the way I imagined the set of a movie.

Brandy lifted her head from the hammock of her shoulder belt. I saw her wipe drool off her cheek with her palm. She unbuckled. “I’m hungry.”

“L.A.!” When nothing came from the backseat, he flung an empty cranberry juice bottle. I had to dodge sideways so it didn’t hit my face.

I heard it thwap L.A., who made a noise and sat up. “Damn,” she said. “Stop it.”

“Move your ass.”

I thought he meant to the diner so we could eat and use the bathroom, but he didn’t.

“Brandy, you middle. L.A., you at the back end, and Dime, you there where the front at.” He was pointing through the window at that parking lot of trucks.

“You bugging?” L.A. asked him when she figured out what he meant.

I didn’t like the idea. It was one thing to go with dates in Daddy’s territory, but this wasn’t Daddy’s territory, and what if the rules were different here?

“You want us to go inside those things?” Brandy was eyeing the huge trucks all lined up, sleeping in the dim-lit dark.

“Whatever it take,” Daddy said. “Inside, outside. Just make me my money.”

“May I go to the bathroom first, please?” I asked as politely as I could manage.

Daddy tilted his head toward the ground. “Squat and take care of it.”

L.A. sucked her teeth. “Why you being so savage, all of a sudden?”

“Savage.” Daddy smiled, flashing his D. “You got that right.”

I looked across to the sleeping trailers and wondered why he wasn’t worried about us. He knew what I was thinking, like always. “You need something, you scream loud. Enough people around here, someone going to hear you, and your date know it. You scream loud enough, it remind him to treat you nice.”

Brandy glanced at me from the front seat, twisting her head.

Even L.A. was worried. “Easy for you to say,” she told Daddy.

He tapped her cheek. “None of you eating,” he declared, “until I see some coins.”

* * *

I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to get up on one of those giant steps and knock, or if I was just supposed to walk around or what. L.A. and Brandy weren’t saying a word, so I didn’t ask. But L.A. chewed on her fingertips all the way until we fanned out. It wasn’t pitch-black dark because lights from the diner and the 7-11 and the gas station and the traffic and even some of the trucks lit the air.

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