Page 11 of Auctioned

Instead, I flung myself onto the bed and pulled my journal out from beneath a lumpy pillow.

My bedroom hadn’t changed much since I was a teenager, probably because there’d been no time or money for redecorating. The moment I graduated high school, I went to work full time as a server for a restaurant downtown, where we were responsible for memorizing a three-page wine list, daily specials, and the names for a hundred types of dietary preferences and allergies. The tips were good, but there were better jobs in Vegas. Three years had flown by, I’d turned twenty-one, and six months later, here we are. Maybe the window for change had just… slipped by or shut quietly forever.

The walls were covered in an eclectic variety of posters and prints — local bands, one-off Vegas shows, retirement home paint-by-numbers art pieces. All had been donated to me through friends or work, or picked up on the side of a street corner. I like to think it looked homey, though I’m not fooling myself — practically speaking, the decorations probably gave the room a schizophrenic air.

The bedspread and matching pillows were cream with tiny red roses, and well over a decade out of style. A fuzzy pink lamp stood on the cheap nightstand, and one bookshelf was lined with my assigned reading from high school. I used to be a ferocious reader, but since graduation, I’d slacked on the habit, reading only when I had a few minutes here and there. For a moment, I tried to remember the last time I’d actual spent more than half an hour reading. The fact that I knew it was more than two weeks earlier added to my rage against Tate, Dazzlers, et cetera. That was part of the Washington dream — mountains and mountains of books, and the time to write cramped notes and ideas in their margins.

With a sigh, I settled against my headboard and grabbed a pen from next to the lamp. Boy, was my diary gonna get a rant today.

I began, “TATE IS AN ASSHOLE.”

I pondered this for a moment, and then wrote, “And hot. But mostly, an asshole.”

As I was gearing up for a third sentence in what was sure to be another masterpiece, there was a noise from the living room, a gentle banging and grunting.

Could Dad be home already?

No, that wasn’t possible. He ran on a pretty strict schedule — tables ‘til five in the morning, at which time he came home and collapsed until around noon, when according to him, “the game got good again.” He ate most of his meals at the casino, if he ate at all, or heated up frozen meals I’d purchased. There wasn’t much variance to these nightly ambulations. We’d operated on roughly the same schedule since I was seventeen and Mom walked out of our lives.

“Dad?” I called.

No answer.

Great. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood up. That had been a nice two minutes of rest. I quickly shimmied out of my uniform and into some sweats. I know it’s silly, given that my dad has seen thousands of Dazzlers cocktail waitresses over the years and has been in the casino during my shifts for the last six months, but the thought of him looking at me, in our home, wearing that tacky, revealing thing… it just turned my stomach.

Once in my pajamas, I re-entered the living room with caution, half-expecting to find him bleeding out on the floor. I wasn’t sure what else, besides a medical emergency, could get him home this early.

Instead, I found him sitting up in his brown leather recliner, running a nervous finger over his damp lips.

My father had been a strong man once. He was six-three and built like a tank, wide across with bulging arms and strapping legs. He rotated through positions at Dazzlers, but usually did some version of security work. When I was young, he would occasionally come home with a black eye from some uppity kid in line for the club. His hair had gone from a dark brown to shocking white in the course of just a few years, and his eyes, once chocolate, were now so rimmed with red it was hard to see any other shades.

And over the last few years, his body had tucked in on itself like a deflating bouncy castle — you could still see the vague outlines of the robust man he once was, but they were only suggestions or a memory. He’d stopped eating much and started drinking more, and the overall effect made him both rosy and rickety, like he was flush with ill-health. The corners of his mouth sagged and wrinkles carved up his face — but especially the strokes between his eyes, an imprint of his classic tell — his brow furrowed whenever he had a good hand.

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