Last Breath (The Good Daughter 0.5)(10)
She ate a handful of Dotiros as she passed an open semi-trailer filled with chickens. The chickens stared at her, but Charlie’s thoughts were squarely on what Belinda had said about how being pregnant changed everything.
Charlie supposed that was the point, that things changed when you had a baby, but from what she had noticed, it was like any big life event: either it brought you closer together or it pulled you apart. Ryan, Belinda’s husband, had done a tour in Iraq as some kind of technical support person. So, he’d been in the desert, but not in the middle of combat. For a while, it seemed like he only came home to yell at the television set and make Belinda pregnant. War had changed him. Not just war, but the niggling suspicion that the war he was fighting was more like running in quicksand. The sense of futility was only part of the problem. The other part was the nature of his extended deployments. His long absences had given Belinda time to get used to making all of the decisions. When Ryan came back with different ideas about how things should be run, the tension had spilled over into every aspect of their marriage.
To Charlie’s thinking, their main issue was usefulness. Both Belinda and Ryan wanted to have a purpose, to give their family direction, and both of them were making each other miserable because they couldn’t share the responsibility.
Charlie laughed at her Oprah-esque observation. She had to blame her mother for this line of thinking. Charlie’s childhood had been shaped by her mother’s constant refrain—
If you’re not being useful, then you’re being useless.
Was Charlie being useful? Flora was so eager to carry out the life that her mother had envisioned. Charlie felt that same sense of urgency. Was she honoring her mother? Did her life have purpose?
It sure as hell lacked focus.
She’d been so zoned out that she had passed right by the cinder-block apartments.
“Shi-i-i-it,” she drew out the word as she glanced behind her, catching the two-story building in her side-view mirror. She pulled a wagon wheel of a U-turn across the empty four-lane highway and pulled up at the two-story cinder-block building tucked down in a ravine behind a long stretch of busted guard rail. To her surprise, she saw that the apartments had a name. A discreet sign welcomed visitors to the Ponderosa. Ropes twined around the border in homage to the Bonanza TV show, but this was no place for Little Joe to hang his hat. Unless he wanted to crack open a light bulb and smoke a bowl.
The majority of the parking spaces were filled with beat-up old cars; not a good sign, considering most people should be at work this time of day. She drove to the end of the parking lot on the off-chance she would see the Porsche that Belinda had told her about, but Charlie’s three-year-old Subaru wagon was the sportiest car around. She took a space near the exit, thinking that was smart in case she needed to make a quick getaway. She remembered what Ben had said about the building being surveilled. It made her feel safer, knowing that some cops, somewhere, were watching her back.
Or, if you looked at it another way, they were watching her go into a place known for drug traffickers and junkies.
Charlie stared up at the sad, squat building. Twelve units total; six on the bottom, six on top. Cinder-block walls painted a dull gray, a rusty railing lining the second story, rotted-out wooden doors with faded plastic numbers, a low roof with a rotting overhang. Every door had a plate-glass window next to it, and every window had a whining air conditioning unit underneath. A steep pathway led to a filthy-looking pool. Unlit tiki torches circled the chain-link fence. The place reminded her of the airport motels her mother had forced them to stay in every vacation because they were cheap and close to mass transportation. Charlie’s clearest memories of Disney World were her night terrors that the wheels of an airplane were going to hit her head while she slept.
“What do you think we’d get in the lawsuit?” her father had asked when she had shared with him the reason for her screaming.
Charlie pulled her purse onto her shoulder as she got out of the car. Hot air hit her like a slap to the face. She was sweating by the time she turned around and locked the car door. The smell of fried chicken, pot and cat urine—which was either from a bunch of cats or from a bunch of meth—stung her nostrils.
According to the Girl Scout roll, the Faulkners resided in unit three on the bottom floor, smack in the center, which was probably the worst of all worlds. Neighbors on each side, always waiting for the other shoe to drop upstairs. As she walked across the parking lot, she heard the distinct bass of Petey Pablo’s “Freek-A-Leek”.
Earring in her tongue and she know what to do with it…
The music got louder as Charlie navigated the broken sidewalk.
With my eyes rolled back and my toes curled…
“Ugh,” Charlie groaned, repulsed by the words and also irritated that she knew them by heart. She hated to trot out one of those in my day sentences, but she could still remember how reviled Madonna was for singing about her feelings of renewed virginity.
Without warning, the music stopped.
The silence tickled the hairs on the back of Charlie’s neck. She had the distinct feeling of being watched as she walked along the uneven path to unit three. The wooden door was warped, painted a dark red that did not hide the black underneath.
She raised her hand. She knocked twice. She waited. She knocked again.
The curtains rustled. The woman’s face behind the glass looked older than Charlie, but in a hard way, like the few years had been spent on a construction site or, more likely, in prison. Her eyeliner was a thick black line. Blue eyeshadow. Heavy foundation reminiscent of the coating of Doritos dust on Charlie’s steering wheel. She wore her shoulder-length bleached blonde hair in a “Barracuda”-era Nancy-Wilson-style feather.