Page 3 of Happy Harbor
How would she cover the rent next month without a good-paying job? Car repairs had taken her savings weeks ago. Getting into another marketing company and making a management-level salary would not be easy. Her résumé wasn’t even up to date. She’d have to work on that immediately. But first, she was making herself a big plate of French fries and watching those court shows where mothers sued daughters and landlords sued renters.
Just as she was opening the freezer to find the bag of fries, she heard a noise upstairs. Was it muffled voices speaking? Frozen in place, she thought about the decision to not own a gun. Right now seemed like an awfully good time to have one. Knowing her inability to aim and how her hands shook when she was nervous, she’d opted to own pepper spray instead. Of course, she had no idea where that was.
She grabbed a knife from the big wooden block on her counter and slowly climbed the stairs, turning sideways like she saw in the movies. Why did they turn sideways like that, anyway?
At the top of the stairs, she looked left toward her bedroom. The door was still open, and her bed was unmade. Nothing looked amiss there, so she turned right, toward Kendra’s bedroom. The door was closed but cracked, and she could see sunlight peeking through, which meant Kendra had left her window blinds open before leaving for school.
Thinking she’d just imagined the noise, she turned to walk back downstairs.
Then she heard it again, and it was definitely coming from Kendra’s room. She pulled her phone from her pocket, her finger paused over the number nine.
Suddenly, the door swung open. A teenage boy stood there, shirt off, hair a mess. A red plastic cup—filled with God knows what—was in one hand and a cigarette was in the other.
“Who in the heck are you?” Josie yelled, holding up the knife.
The guy held up his hands and laughed the laugh of someone high as a kite. “Whoa, lady! Don’t cut me. I’m just trying to have a good time.”
“Why are you in my house?” she asked through gritted teeth.
Kendra came up behind him wearing a long T-shirt and a tiny pair of bike shorts. “Mom?”
It occurred to Josie that the look on her daughter’s face wasn’t one of embarrassment or shame. Nope. It was a look of irritation that Josie had come home early and ruined their “good time.”
“What do you think you’re doing?” Josie asked, pushing past the shirtless dopehead and grabbing Kendra’s arm.
“Let go of me, Mom!”
“So, I’m just gonna go downstairs,” the boy said, chuckling under his breath. For all Josie knew, he was laughing at the monkeys playing tennis in his tiny pea brain.
“I cannot believe this,” Josie said, pushing Kendra back into the room and slamming the door behind them. “Why aren’t you at school?”
Kendra rolled her eyes and sat down on her bed. “Because school is stupid.”
“No, you’re going to be stupid if you don’t finish school.”
“You didn’t finish school!”
She had a point. Josie had given birth a week after her eighteenth birthday. Kendra wasn’t planned, and her birth hadn’t resulted from a committed relationship—at least not a mutual one. It resulted from too much alcohol and not enough parental supervision.
“I got my GED, and I built a great career. At this rate, you’ll be living in the local trailer park with a mobile home full of babies and the shirtless wonder down there smoking beside the crib!”
“Wow, Mom, you really painted a picture there. Look, I just didn’t feel like going back to that stupid school today. The teachers hate me, the kids are so lame, and I have better things to do with my time.” Kendra walked over and picked up a pair of blue jeans she had slung over the back of her vanity chair. She slipped them on and then ran a brush through her tousled hair.
“I don’t want you to make the same stupid mistakes I did.”
She looked at Josie. “So you think I was a mistake? Because you had me when you were eighteen years old?”
Josie looked at her, feeling regretful of her word choice. “You werenota mistake.”
“Well, I wasn’t in your plans either.”
Josie sat down next to her daughter and sighed. “You don’t need to be hanging out with losers, skipping school, and drinking. It won’t lead anywhere good. Our family has a history of stupid mistakes, Kendra, and you can choose a different path.”
“Why are you home, anyway?”
“Because I got fired today.”
Kendra’s mouth dropped open. “You got fired?”
