And she refused to become a black hat. She didn’t want to make her living as a criminal, having to always look over her shoulder, unable to trust anyone. If it meant it was hard work scratching out an honest living, then so be it.
Some lines she would not cross. It wasn’t worth it to her peace of mind. Was she broke? Yeah, but she could go to sleep every night with a completely clear conscience.
She sipped her coffee. Horrible, as always, due to the crappy taste of the water and the crappy quality coffee.
“Well, look at it this way,” Lou said. “At least there’s no Kite around here.”
She thought about the news stories she’d seen discussing the sudden spike of overdoses. “Yeah. Lucky us. Hey, is there any way to finagle me a pair of glasses, at least? I priced them out. I’m looking at about three hundred dollars for an el cheapo pair and I just can’t swing that right now.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Either that, or get me a damn movie screen and a projector so I don’t kill my eyesight. I can’t keep doing this.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
She took another sip of the horrible coffee. “I’m not blaming you. It is what it is.”
“Brother still not home yet?”
“Not unless he dragged his ass home while I was asleep. I left my phone at my desk.” She squinted at him. “And my glasses.”
“You need me to get them for you?”
“No, I can see good enough to get back over there.”
“You can have seventy-two off once Tesla comes back tomorrow morning.” Lou turned to head back to his office.
“I’m coming back in yoga pants!” she called after him.
He laughed. “Hell, I’ll take you in a grass skirt. I don’t care as long as you’re here. Show up in your pajamas and a bathrobe and fuzzy bunny slippers, for all I care.”
“Good idea. Multi-tasking.” She sipped her coffee. “Sleeping here most the time, anyway,” she muttered. Hell, working in her PJs would mean she could just curl up under her desk or something.
Office efficiency, right?
She looked down into her mug of stuff that…was worse than horrible. Its only redeeming feature was that it was hot and supposedly contained caffeine.
“Damn, this coffee sucks.”
She dragged herself into the bathroom to use the facilities and splash water on her face. Squinting into the mirror, she tried to study her blurry features and couldn’t, until she leaned in a few inches from the mirror. Couldn’t even make out her own slate-grey blue eyes.
“They don’t get me some new glasses, I’ll have to get a new damn job.”
As it was, she had the zoom cranked up as much as she could on her workstation monitors without impacting her active windows. Her primary monitor that she used for other stuff, that was cranked up well past a comfortable zoom level for most people. That all helped a little, but nothing helped when she had to sit in front of the damn thing for over twenty-four hours straight.
“They are not paying me nearly enough for this bullshit.”
Unfortunately, no one else would pay her more.
* * * *
I’m twenty-nine damn years old and live with my farking parents.
The next morning, Shasta squinted against the glare as she stepped outside the building for the first time in a couple of days. Slipping the nonprescription sunglasses over her regular ones, she headed for her car.
The first thing she wanted to do when she got home was take a shower. Then sleep.
Sleeeeep.
She hadn’t come prepared to stay overnight at work for several days in a row, and she was now, admittedly, a little ripe.
Note to self, pack a shower bag. And a pillow. And extra clothes.
Chances were, she’d get stuck there again. It was bad enough they were already down to a skeleton crew. Trying to ramrod all those hours into same-said skeleton crew was barbaric.
Trying to make them operate two people down when they were already understaffed was draconian and cruel.
I wonder what would happen if I made all the lights in Houston red for about an hour and took a nap.
Everyone had thought about doing that at least once. Especially lately.
She’d heard of someone who’d done it once during an overnight shift, just out of curiosity, but wasn’t sure if that was a real story or merely some sys-ad legend.
Maybe a little of both.
When she pulled into the driveway of their house, of course her brother’s beater wasn’t parked there.
Asshole.
Her parents were barely scraping by as it was. Her dad had gotten hurt while working at the shipyards twelve years ago. They’d screwed him on the workman’s comp claim, and now about all he could do was run a register at a gas station. Her mom was a waitress and worked double shifts several days a week.
Her brother…
She wanted to kick him out and bring in a paying renter, but her parents wouldn’t let her. Stuart was twenty-five, four years younger than her. After going in at eighteen and spending four years in the military, instead of coming home and going to college, he’d come home and opted out of the world.
He’d gotten hurt while on deployment and was supposedly getting VA benefits, but those checks seemed to disappear pretty damn fast despite Shasta demanding he have them direct deposited into a joint account with her so she could dole the money out to him.
He’d tried rehab—on the government’s tab—three times.
To her, that was a strikeout.
She’d worked her ass off all through high school to get a full scholarship to college, including holding down a part-time job for most of high school and college so she could still contribute to the household expenses. Yes, it sucked that her brother had gotten hurt. Yes, it sucked he was still in pain.
But as far as she was concerned, he’d voluntarily opted out of life instead of trying to actually do something to better himself. There were a lot of people who were a lot worse off than him, in a lot worse pain—missing limbs, massive burns—who went on to be successful in life.
He’d hurt his back. Okay, that sucked, granted. She didn’t deny he was in pain.
It didn’t, however, give him the right to become a burden to his family. If he really didn’t think he could work, he should be sitting at home, cleaning the house, cooking dinner for them, sell his damn car, and put a good chunk of his monthly check into helping pay the bills. If he did that, they’d be okay. Their mom wouldn’t have to work herself into exhaustion.
Hell, their dad had been injured twelve years ago and was in pain and he still worked a job in addition to trying to keep the house from falling down around their heads.
Stu was eligible for free college courses online and at the community college and wouldn’t take them.
As far as she was concerned, her brother was letting his family down. And it pissed her off.
She kept her bedroom door locked so he couldn’t get in and rob her blind. Finally, she’d put a lock on her parents’ door when he’d stolen the TV from their room. Then she’d punched him in the gut and took three hundred dollars he’d had stashed in his wallet and went and bought them another one.
After she took the keys to his car and tossed them up onto the roof. Then she’d warned him that the next time something disappeared from the house, he would come home to find the locks changed, his car and all his possessions inside it on fire in the middle of the street, and she’d turn him in to the cops for being a junkie, which would likely get him arrested.
Yeah, she’d been pissed off. Still was.
It’d also been the last time anything had disappeared from the house like that, but she wasn’t taking any damn chances. Thank god her parents hadn’t been home for that showdown, because they would have intervened. But she told Stu if he dared breathe a word of it to their parents that he would wake up in a jail cell.
She hadn’t been kidding, either. She loved her little brother, but
obviously coddling him hadn’t worked. It was time for tough love, and if she was the only one in the family who’d give it to him, fine. She suspected it was the last chance he had to clean up his act.
Whether or not he managed that, the last thing she’d do would be to let him drag their parents down with him. If Stu forced her to make that choice, between supporting his ass or protecting their parents, she’d side with protecting their parents every damn time.
He wasn’t a kid anymore. He wasn’t the boy who could adorably wheedle and beg her into “helping” him do his math homework, which had nearly always ended up with her doing his homework for him.
Maybe that was the problem. Maybe she’d been the enabler early on. Maybe she’d trained him that big sis and their ’rents would be his safety net.
No more.
This latest round of bullshit from Stuart was the last straw, as far as she was concerned. He was obviously not going to change, and she couldn’t support her parents and his lazy ass by herself. They couldn’t sell the house and get anything from it to use to move into a smaller apartment, either. Their neighborhood wasn’t exactly a hotbed of real estate investment. They were better off than a lot of people, but it wasn’t a destination location.
Not that her parents would do that, anyway. The house was paid for, paid off, because her mom had inherited it when her dad died. It was the only reason they could live there, but some months it was an iffy stretch to pay all the bills.
Hence why Shasta still needed new glasses.
She was the only one home right now, fortunately. After getting her shower and scarfing down some cold pizza her mom had probably brought home from work—at least one benefit to her working there, free food at the end of the night—Shasta locked her bedroom door behind her and face-planted into the middle of her bed.
There, she dropped into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.
Chapter Three
Shasta awoke twelve hours later to the soft sound of a TV playing in the living room and darkness beyond her window curtain. She fumbled around for her phone, squinting at it and discovering it was nearly ten o’clock that night.
Holy crap.
She stumbled out to the bathroom, used it, and then splashed water on her face. She hadn’t put on her glasses yet despite her blurry vision. Sometimes it helped if she gave her eyes a little rest. Wasn’t like she was trying to drive or something.
Her parents sat out in the living room, watching TV.
“Hey, sweetheart,” her mom said, tipping her head back for a kiss on the cheek. “I was surprised to see you home.”
“Me, too,” Shasta mumbled. She kissed her dad’s cheek. “I can’t even remember how long I was at work. But I got seventy-two off, and just spent twelve of it sleeping, I guess.”
“Wow,” her dad said. “What’s going on?”
She rounded the couch to sit on her mom’s other side and tell them the latest, about the two missing coworkers.
Her parents shared a glance that she spotted even with her blurry vision. “Let me guess,” Shasta said. “Stu hasn’t come home yet?”
“He’s not answering his cell, either,” her father said. “Or texts. He finally texted me around noon today that he was fine and with friends and he’d check in later.”
Shasta groaned as she tipped her head back against the couch. She knew what that meant.
Wasn’t her first rodeo with the kid.
That meant he had hooked up with a group of people with what he considered good drugs, and he would keep hanging out with them until the drugs or his money—or both—ran out and he needed to come home to crash.
“Any idea where?” she asked.
“Not this time, no.” Her father looked at her. “Your mother and I were talking. Maybe you’re right. This is his last chance with us. We don’t want to cut him off without talking to him one more time, at least.”
Her mother sniffled as she leaned over against Shasta and rested her head on her daughter’s shoulder. “You’re working your ass off. There’s a girl where I work, a couple of years younger than you, and she’s got a little girl who’s six. They’re staying at a shelter because her husband beat her up. She could pay a hundred a week, plus buy food.”
Holy. Crap. A hundred a week would almost pay their electric bill. Coming into winter, normally they had a lower electric bill. Except last winter had been freakishly cold and they’d used the central heat a lot, meaning an electric bill almost as high as in the summer.
This winter was predicted to be just as bad.
A hundred a week was way more than Stu was contributing. And if they were buying or providing food, it meant less of a drain on their budget that way. Hell, that hundred a week would mean maybe she could buy some new glasses.
Her parents struggled to keep their health insurance paid so that her father could get the meds he needed to function, and to pay for their vehicles. Not to mention property taxes and homeowners insurance and flood insurance and all the upkeep and repair expenses required of a sixty-year-old house.
On paper, their basic monthly housing expenses didn’t look bad…until you factored everything else into the mix.
Which was why she wished she could talk them into walking away from the house and getting into an apartment. Then, all they’d have to pay would be rent and utilities and renter’s insurance. No more repairs or taxes or any of that stuff.
Hell, she could almost afford that on her own, if she had to, leaving their pay available to get them caught up.
They had no retirement savings. The house was their retirement. Or, was supposed to be, before the world went to shit with Kite.
Goddamned Stuart.
Shasta didn’t know when the tipping point between loving her brother and being ragingly angry at him had finally hit. Maybe it was seeing the pain in her father’s eyes, or the exhaustion in her mom’s face.
Somewhere, in the past couple of weeks, she’d hit her “done” point.
“I’ll find him and talk to him,” Shasta said.
“Maybe he’ll listen to you.” Her father didn’t sound very hopeful, though.
“Not sure if he’ll listen to me, but I might be able to scare the crap out of him.”
“Whatever you have to do,” her mom said. “Sorry we’re not much good right now.”
“No, dammit, you shouldn’t have to ride his ass. He’s a damn adult. Don’t you two feel in any way guilty about this.”
Her mom smiled but it looked sad. “We’re parents. Hard not to feel guilty. We should be taking care of you guys.”
“That ride ended when we became adults,” Shasta insisted. “If we were kids, yeah, I’d agree. But we’re not kids anymore even though he’s acting like one.” She got up and walked down the hall to his bedroom. She opened the door and surveyed the space.
A mess.
Not a hoarder kind of mess, but still a mess. Dirty clothes on the floor, the bed unmade, and who knew how long it’d been since he’d washed his sheets.
“Ugh.” She grabbed his garbage can and cleared off the top of his dresser of old food. Three plates with stuff crusted on them had been stacked there, as well as two glasses.
She carried those out to the kitchen sink and got them soaking in hot water while she emptied the garbage can and put a clean bag in it. Normally, she wouldn’t do that for him, but if his room got bugs in it, that would be one more damn thing for them to have to take care of before they could rent it out.
More work for us.
Now that she was on a tear, she grabbed another garbage bag and scooped up all his dirty clothes from the floor and dumped them in, shoved the bag into his closet, and closed the door.
That alone helped a lot.
He could get them washed somewhere else if he wanted once he moved out.
She damn sure wasn’t doing it for him.
Her parents had gone to bed and she was cleaning the kitchen when she heard the front door open around one a.m.
Grabbing a butch
er’s knife from the block on the counter, she crept around the corner to find Stu sneaking in.
She flipped on the living room light, scaring him. He flashed those baby blue eyes at her and sheepishly grinned. “Oh. Hi, sis.”
She brandished the knife at him. “Don’t you ‘hi, sis’ me, asshole,” she practically growled, keeping her voice down. “Where the fuck have you been?”
She knew from the look on his face exactly where he’d been. Getting high somewhere, and he was still high.
“Um, you know. Around.” He spotted the knife in her hand and backed up a step. “Hey, you want to point that somewhere else?”
“No. Mom and Dad and I had a talk. This is your absolute last chance to straighten the fuck up. You’re not paying money into the household expenses. You show up whenever the hell you want and eat our food and you don’t do a lick of work around here. Time’s up. You have twenty-four hours to either start cleaning yourself up, and paying for your keep, or I’m shoveling your shit outside and getting someone in here who will pay rent and help us around the house.”
“Whoa, calm down!” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. Opening it, he pulled out some bills and handed them to her with a smile. “There. See? Money.”
She counted it out. “Five hundred dollars?” He wasn’t due for his next benefit check for another week. He never had five dollars in his pocket this time of the month, much less five hundred. “Where the hell did you get this?”
He grinned. “Got a job. Now don’t you feel stupid?”
Her bullshit meter went off. “Doing what?”
“Sales, sort of.”
She shoved him back against the wall. “You bring drugs into this house and I will kill you myself. Don’t you fucking dare jeopardize Mom and Dad and me.”
He held his hands up, trying to appease her. “Whoa, sis, calm down. Would I do that?”
“Yeah, you would.”
“I’m not bringing drugs into this house. Don’t worry.”