Page 94 of Coast

“Yeah?”

“What do the arrows mean?”

“There are fifteen of them,” he said. “Each one represents one kid.”

“Kid? What kids?”

“The ones I raised. Temporarily.”

“Did you come from a large family?”

“No. No, it was just me and my parents.”

“I don’t understand then.”

“My parents were—are—a bunch of losers. Never kept a job for long. Longest was probably when he was a driver. But there was no money, so we went everywhere with him, just staying out of sight if we were anywhere near the businesses. But he was always mouthing off to bosses or saying offensive shit tocoworkers. Think we spent the first twelve years of my life nearly homeless.

“Actually, looking back, the ‘camping trip’ we took once—for three months—was just a way for them to romanticize us having no place to stay.”

“I’m sorry,” Zoe said, her hand giving my thigh a squeeze. “You deserved stability.”

“Yeah, well, there was no hope of that. When they weren’t working and were stuck at home, all they did was fight and drink. And come up with asinine schemes to try to make a buck that didn’t involve actually having to put in some work.”

There were a few months where they went around on trash day, picking up everyone’s crap, and swearing they were going to make a fortune selling it online or at local flea markets.

There were times when the only way we ate was if they did product testing or sold plasma.

They once filled the backyard with chickens, swearing they were going to start an “egg empire,” but never remembered to collect the eggs, let alone set up a stand to sell them.

They’d pretended to be home stagers for real estate agencies, despite all the furniture in our house being mismatched and straight from twenty years before.

They entered sweepstakes like it was a profession.

Oh, and then there was the time they wrote a fucking book called“How to Become a Millionaire in a Year (Without a Job)”and sold it for fifteen bucks a pop. Despite not having two nickels to rub together themselves.

They’d sold thousands of those, actually.

If there was one thing a hustler could count on, it was the gullibility of other desperate—and uneducated—people.

“Then, one day, my paternal grandfather died. And he left my parents his house. Why, I have no idea. They were no-contact for years. I guess he just had no one else to leave it to.”

“It must have been nice to have a steady place to live.”

“That part, yeah.”

To someone who’d been living in short-term rentals and camping tents most of my life, the place felt like a mansion.

It had been a two-story building with five bedrooms and four baths. I had a whole fucking bathroom to myself. No more pounding on the door when my parents were in the shower. Or having to go outside to piss in the yard.

“I’d been over the moon,” I admitted. “Until I realized they were working on yet another scheme.”

“Was it a daycare or something?” she asked.

“It was becoming foster parents.”

“But… isn’t there a law in place to prevent people from relying on the foster care system for income?”

“That’s where the scheming came into play.”

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