Release by Lesli Richardson

Author:Lesli Richardson [Richardson, Lesli]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lesli Richardson
Published: 2019-05-28T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

Then

I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. Back then, most kids my age didn’t spend the amount of time I did contemplating the best way to die. Sometimes, I could manage to go a few weeks without thinking about it, until he’d enter my bedroom early one morning, and I’d once again try to decide how to best do it.

I guess it’s a good thing my parents didn’t have a lot of money. We didn’t have a computer in the house, so I didn’t have ready access to information my peers might have had.

Because of my secret, I didn’t have a lot of friends, either. I was afraid to trust, afraid of being discovered.

Afraid of being labelled a “bad” person, and my father’s dire warnings coming to pass.

That I’d never see my mom again.

Better, then, to not be alive at all.

After I turned thirteen, when school ended for the year, I spent that summer mostly at the library during the day. I claimed I was reading books on our list for school, so I’d be completely caught up and ready when school started again in the fall. Not only did I read all of those, but I discovered a love for hard-boiled and noir mysteries, classic detectives, pulp crime fiction, suspense, and thrillers.

I eagerly devoured them, not even having to take them home because I could read them so fast. That summer was all about Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, John D. MacDonald, and others.

I learned there was evil in the world, and maybe I wasn’t as bad as I thought I was.

That maybe the villain in my life was my father, not me.

In my secret longings, I wished for the money to hire a cop-turned-detective to extract revenge for me and fix my problems. I imagined with no small amount of satisfaction how the gumshoe would terrorize my father before running him off forever, leaving me and Momma to have a good life together.

My father had an irregular work history. I knew he drank and smoked, but it wasn’t until later I learned what a miserable fuck he was long before my ordeal started. How he couldn’t hold a respectable job for more than a few months at a time. How, for the last three years of his life, what Momma and I both thought was “real work” was, in fact, him being a bouncer paid cash under the table at some seedy bar or strip club.

Momma was actually the true breadwinner in our house. She didn’t know at the time what he was really doing, though. She thought he was working for a legitimate employer. He brought home cash every week, and she was too tired, between her own job, taking care of me, and taking care of the house to keep tabs on him.

My father kept swing-shift hours. During that summer, as long as I was paying close attention, I could complete all my chores either the evening before, while he was gone, or arise very early in the morning before he awakened, and then I could scoot out of there.

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