Page 19 of Psycho

Things were going a lot better for Dad now, financially speaking, but he still lived in the rundown trailer he had been in for twenty years.

And it was rundown.

The paint was peeling on the outside, the grass was dead, and weeds popped out across the lawn.

Our next-door neighbor was out, sitting on a lawn chair and smoking weed.

He was a man that moved in next door to us about three years ago. A quiet man, though a little too rough for me to try to befriend. He was a huge man that went by the name Edger, which would be cool if I didn’t think it was his gang name or something, even if the gangs we had around here were small.

He was a big man, and I had seen him working out at Dad’s boxing gym several times.

Dad had tried to recruit him, to get him to fight for him when he first opened the underground fighting ring, but Edger didn’t bite.

Though Dad hated that, he couldn’t do anything. One look at our neighbor, and we both knew Dad wasn’t a match for the man.

He was in running shorts and a black muscle shirt that showed off all the tattoos on his body, including his neck and face.

That just added to the intimidating factor of the man, and though he had never given me a reason to be wary of him, I had learned early on to be wary of men who looked like him.

He set his eyes on me the entire time I had to walk past his trailer to mine.

I hurried away, keeping my head down, and trying to ignore the intensity in his eyes. He always watched me like that.

I hated living there.

There was nothing I hated more than living there, but I was stuck.

Sacramento was expensive, and there was no way I could find a full-time job and go to school at the same time. What was more, Dad had threatened to stop paying for Grandma’s place at the nursing home and leaving her care to the state if I ever left when I was seventeen, on the cusp of my eighteenth birthday.

I didn’t know why he wanted me home with him so badly.

Why he was so insistent that I stayed and helped him with the fights, when it felt like he didn’t even want me near him half of the time.

Not when he had told me multiple times what a mistake it had been to get involved with Mom in the first place, because it had resulted in me.

I closed my eyes as a sharp, piercing pain entered my chest.

Being unwanted by my parents wasn't anything new.

I had known about it since I could understand that parents were supposed to love their kids, but some parents didn’t, and mine just happened to be in the latter category.

It shouldn’t hurt anymore… only it did.

Dad’s car was in the front, so I knew he was home.

I opened the door and entered with caution.

The trailer wasn’t all that big, and I could see everything in the place except for the room from the entryway.

Dad was sitting down by the table filled with sunflower seeds, beers, and an ashtray almost filled with ash. Cigarette smoke flowed in the space in front of him, and across from him, sitting in the other chair, was a man I had never met.

I paused and took them in.

They hadn’t noticed me yet, and I debated if I could turn back around and leave before either of them did. When the man looked up suddenly and met my eyes, his gaze pinned me into place and made me freeze on the spot.

He smiled, and I felt my heart stutter harshly against my chest.

I didn’t know who this man was, but I knew a dangerous man when I saw one, and this man had danger written all over him.

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