BY LISA LAHEY
Trigger warning. Copyright is held by the author.
LUCY CREPT into the house. She stopped using the back door a month ago. It didn’t help. Gloria always knew when she came home.
The house was small. The front door led directly into the TV room and narrow staircase that led to two sparsely furnished bedrooms. The run-down, subsidized houses in the area were fenced in on all sides.
The first thing Lucy saw were the newspapers, two ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts and a pile of used dishes on the coffee table. She’d cleaned the room and left it spotless before she left for school.
Lucy dropped her backpack on the tattered shoe mat and walked past her mother to the kitchen.
“Get upstairs. He’ll be here in an hour,” Gloria ordered. She gulped a mouthful of vodka and picked up the remote. “Hate soaps,” she muttered.
Turning her head towards the kitchen Gloria yelled, “Pour me another one my girl, would ya?”
Lucy grabbed an apple out of the fridge, poured a glass of vodka and went back to the living room.
“Put your makeup on,” Gloria said. “He likes that. And leave your uniform on.”
Picking up her backpack, Lucy did as she was told, treading over the stairs without a word.
“There’s two more after that. God, you’re a cunt.”
Lucy’s room was as tidy as the TV room was messy. Posters of Justin Bieber and Demi Lovato covered the walls. Her vanity table held bottles of perfume and powder. Lucy sat and applied lipstick and mascara. She’d get a good thrashing if she didn’t.
Lucy opened her math textbook and worked on Algebra until she heard the doorbell. She listened to the muffled voices downstairs.
“Lucy!” Gloria sang sweetly. “Pami is here!”
Lucy smoothed her skirt and walked downstairs. Pami was the ugliest man she’d ever seen. He was an Indian man with a mouth that was contorted like a cauliflower. She didn’t know if he’d been born that way or if he’d been in an accident. She didn’t care. He didn’t shower. disgusted her.
“Hi Lucy,” Pami’s eyes roamed over her slender body.
“Go on you two. You’ve got twenty minutes, Pami.” Gloria smiled at him and pocketed the money he gave her.
Twenty minutes might as well have been a week. Lucy did as she was told. She thought about her math homework and her friends at school. She pictured shopping at Urban Outfitters on the weekend while Pami forced her to fellate him.
He never finished. There was something wrong with him.
Gloria bellowed, “That’s enough! Twenty minutes!”
Pami pulled on his pants and winked at Lucy. “See you next week, cutie.”
Lucy went to the washroom and vomited. She brushed her teeth and stepped into the shower. Her tears flowed with the hot water that was never hot enough.
Her hair damp and her body wrapped in a bathrobe; Lucy joined her mother on the couch.
“You’re my good girl, aren’t ya?” Gloria pulled Lucy to her and placed her arm around her daughter. “I love ya dearly. What would I do without ya?”
Lucy placed her head on Gloria’s shoulder. She smelled cigarettes in her mother’s hair and the vodka on her breath. Gloria ran her hand down Lucy’s arm and kissed her on the cheek.
“You’ve got another hour before the next one,” Gloria said. She held up her glass to Lucy.
“Pour me another one, would ya?”
***
Lisa Lahey’s poems and short stories have been published in several literary magazines including 34th Parallel, Adelaide Literature Review, Spadina Literary Journal and others.
