“They’re not worth it,” she said. “I don’t know what it is you think you’ll find in those papers, but there’s not a man in this world you can count on to fix your life.”
I wanted to tell her the same thing. That the money they threw at her wasn’t worth it. That taking her clothes off for strangers hadn’t fixed anything. But we both knew this argument wasn’t about just any man. It was about the one who’d left us overextended on credit, without money for bills. About how he was the reason their only car was repossessed and Mona would never be able to leave her job at Gentleman Jim’s, the only job she could walk to that paid enough to hold on to the lease on our trailer.
We had the same argument every Friday—about how men can’t be trusted and if you depend on them, you’ll be left alone with more problems than you started with. It was the same argument that drove me to buy a train ticket to California two years ago, because I’d started to believe her. “Even if he did come back, it would only make things worse,” she said.
“Look around, Mona. Could it really get any worse?”
She sucked in a thoughtful drag. “Be careful who you put your faith in,” she said in the sultry deep rasp that sounded ancient and sad, but had everyone else fooled. “You’re lucky. Born with a head full of brains. Don’t make the same mistake I did.” She pointed her cigarette at me. “Your education is the only thing you can count on to get you out of this trailer. If I’d spent more time on mine instead of chasing after a boy, neither of us would be here.”
Lucky . . . she thought I was lucky. Of course she couldn’t accept the possibility of my father’s genetic contribution to my intelligence. He was dead to her. And some days, her grief and anger hurt me more than his absence.
Ash balanced precariously from the tip of her cigarette. She looked tired, and so much older than her thirty-five years. “A diploma. A college degree. That’s the only thing that’s going to get you out of here.” She shook her head and exhaled a long smoky sigh, the ash falling to my floor.
I sighed and pointed at the sign I’d tacked to my door. “Do you mind? This is a non-smoking room.”
Mona raised a brow, and amusement tugged at the corner of her mouth. Her smile was painted on and clung outside the natural line of her lip, making it look fuller than it was. But I knew better. Beneath the gloss, she had forgotten how to smile when my father left.
“Don’t you ever wonder where he is?” I asked, tossing my own hope at her as though it were a life raft. “If maybe he’s thinking of us?”
She leaned against the door. “He’s never coming home, Nearly. That much I know.” She stubbed out her cigarette in her empty mug, the life raft abandoned and drifting in the murky waters between us. “Get your studying done.”
4
I pushed open the door of my trailer, pausing to look up and down the street before dragging the full trash bag onto the front porch and down the rickety wooden steps. Sunny View Mobile Home Village was shaped like a fish. Or at least the decaying remains of one. Run-down trailers lay in parallel rows alongside short alleys protruding like ribs off Sunny View Drive. The crooked backbone of my neighborhood began as a dead-end street, a rutted narrow blacktop that hadn’t been tar-coated since the 1960s. Almost as old was the playground, a skeletal collection of rusted metal wrapped in remnants of yellow police tape where the fish’s tail would have been. On the other end, Sunny View Drive spit into an intersection of a sixlane highway, and beyond that, the parking lot of a run-down strip mall: Anh’s parents’ store, a coin Laundromat, Ink & Angst Tattoos, Gentleman Jim’s, and a video store that would have been obsolete had it not been for the red curtain room at the back. A half-dozen small businesses feeding the addictions of the chewed-up residents of Sunny View.
Our trailer sat on a corner lot, right in the middle of Sunny View Drive. The trailers across the alley were staggered, set back from the street, and from my front porch, I could see all the way to the traffic light at Route 1. Mona had almost reached the end of the street, the sashes of her long coat dangling beside her heels. I slung the trash bag a little too hard and the dented metal cans rattled together before toppling over. The echo bounced off wall after wall of rusting aluminum. My neighbor’s window blinds were drawn shut, her cautious hands prying them back to check the noise.