Sometimes I worry about how many stories she tells, but she’s so convincing I’m more impressed than concerned. I don’t know at what age a child should know the difference between a lie and using their imagination, but I’ll leave that up to Grace and Patrick. I don’t want to stifle my favorite part of her.
I pull onto the street. “You ate a dragon? A whole dragon?”
“Yeah, but he was a baby dragon, that’s how he fit in my stomach.”
“Where’d you find a baby dragon?”
“Walmart.”
“They sell baby dragons at Walmart?”
She proceeds to tell me all about how baby dragons are sold at Walmart, but you have to have a special coupon, and only kids can eat them. By the time I make it to Roman’s, she’s explaining how they’re cooked.
“With salt and shampoo,” she says.
“You aren’t supposed to eat shampoo.”
“You don’t eat it—you use it to cook the dragon.”
“Oh. Silly me.”
Roman gets in the truck, and he looks about as excited as someone going to a funeral. He hates T-ball days. He’s never been a kid person. The only reason he helps me coach is that none of the other parents would do it. And since he works for me, I added it to his schedule.
He’s the only person I know who gets paid to coach T-ball, but he doesn’t seem to feel guilty about it.
“Hi, Roman,” Diem says from the back seat in a singsong voice.
“I’ve only had one cup of coffee; don’t talk to me.” Roman is twenty-seven, but he and Diem have met somewhere in the middle with their love-hate relationship, because they both act twelve.
Diem starts tapping the back of his headrest. “Wake up, wake up, wake up.”
Roman rolls his head until he’s looking at me. “All this shit you do to help little kids in your spare time isn’t going to gain you any points in an afterlife because religion is a social construct created by societies who wanted to regulate their people, which makes heaven a concept. We could be sleeping right now.”
“Wow. I’d hate to see you before coffee.” I back out of his driveway. “If heaven is conceptual, what is hell?”
“The T-ball field.”
CHAPTER NINE
KENNA
I’ve been to six different places trying to find a job, and it isn’t even ten in the morning yet. They’ve all gone the same. They give me an application. Ask me about my experience. I have to tell them I have none. I have to tell them why.
Then they apologize, but not before looking me up and down. I know what they’re thinking. It’s the same thing my landlord, Ruth, said when she saw me for the first time. “Didn’t expect you to look like this.”
People think women who go to prison have a certain look. That we’re a certain way. But we’re mothers, wives, daughters, humans.
And all we want is to just catch one fucking break.
Just one.
The seventh place I try is a grocery store. It’s a little farther from my apartment than I’d like, almost two and a half miles, but I’ve exhausted everything else between this store and my apartment.
I’m sweating when I enter the store, so I freshen up in the bathroom. I’m washing my hands in the sink when a short woman with silky black hair enters the bathroom. She doesn’t go into a stall. She just leans against the wall and closes her eyes. She has a name badge on: AMY.
When she opens her eyes, she notices I’m staring at her shoes. She’s wearing a pair of moccasins with white and red beads in the shape of a circle on top of them.
“You like?” she asks, lifting her foot and tilting it from one side to the other.
“Yeah. They’re beautiful.”
“My grandmother makes them. We’re supposed to wear sneakers here, but the general manager has never said anything about my shoes. I think he’s scared of me.”
I look down at my muddy sneakers. I recoil at the sight of them. I didn’t realize I was walking around with such dirty shoes.
I can’t apply for a job like this. I take one of them off and start washing it in the sink.
“I’m hiding,” the woman says. “I don’t normally hang out in bathrooms, but there’s an old lady in the store who always complains about everything, and I’m honestly just not in the mood for her bullshit today. I have a two-year-old and she didn’t sleep all night and I really wanted to call in sick today, but I’m the shift manager, and shift managers don’t call in sick. We show up.”