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1. Cadence

My brother isn’t a bad kid. He isn’t some wannabe gang-banger thug. Michael was still in high school, got good grades, and never caused problems.

He just got in over his head. An act of desperation by someone pushed to the edge.

Because we were desperate.

Everything was crumbling around us, and we were running out of time.

It started when Daddy died. Even though he was a soldier, we never thought it would happen to us. Sure, he was in Afghanistan, but things like that happened to other people. Daddy was never in real danger.

It was a rude awakening for me and my brother, and Momma never was the same after those people showed up at the door. She smiled and tried to pretend for us, but she was a ghost of the woman she had been before. Even at twelve years old I could see it.

When she started losing her memory, I hated myself for thinking it was a good thing. She started laughing like she used to, and the haunted look in her eyes faded. We didn’t realize what was going on until she stopped in the hallway one day and stared at the picture of Daddy, Michael, and I.

She asked me who that man in the picture was.

It wasn’t too bad at first, and it was chalked up to long-term stress. It was a couple years before it started to affect her day-to-day life, and we had to consider that it may be more than that. By the time I finished high school, we were in trouble.

She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease.

Momma struggled to make ends meet on her own once Daddy was gone. She did everything she could, but once she started forgetting things at work, they let her go. She’d been an administrator at the hospital, and the job was too complicated for someone who would forget if she’d brushed her hair that morning, much less if she sent in the supply order.

I picked up a waitressing job while still in school, and once I graduated, I found a second one as an assistant at an office. Michael tried to get a job too, but as Momma got worse, someone had to look after her. I didn’t even like her being alone while Michael was in school. If no one came home to tell her to eat, she would completely forget, and there had been a few times when she tried to fix dinner and almost caught the house on fire because she got distracted.

We couldn’t afford to put her in a home no matter how many times she begged me to so I could ‘have a life.’

“Sell the house, put me in a home, and go have fun!”

She didn’t know I couldn’t sell the house because she didn’t remember taking out a second mortgage on it. One I was struggling to pay because the interest was so high and the house wasn’t worth enough after years of neglect and a falling market.

And now I had to find a way to bail Michael out of the trouble he was in.

I don’t know what he was thinking. Or how he even found these people. He was a nerdy kid who spent his time online or with his nose in a book whenever he wasn’t helping Mamma. He wasn’t a drug dealer.

Yet he managed to get himself tangled up with the local mafia.

He got the idea in his head that he could make some money while still being able to keep an eye on Momma by running drugs. He thought he’d pick them up from point A, deliver them to point B at the designated time, and leave with a bag full of cash.

The problem was that people like the ones he was trying to work for had enemies. Enemies that were watching when some skinny high-school kid picked up a package he wasn’t able to defend.

Michael told me he didn’t know what was in the backpack, or who the men were that attacked him. There had been four of them, and luckily he’d gotten away with only a few scrapes as they taunted him and had a good laugh.

But now Michael was responsible for however much that backpack was worth. His phone was blowing up, and we couldn’t wait for them to decide to make a personal visit.

I wasn’t going to let him try to handle it alone. He meant the best, but his naive idea had landed us in hot water, and I couldn’t trust him to be smart enough to get us out of it.

When the people called him again asking where he was with their drugs, I’d taken the phone. I wasn’t stupid, I knew they were going to make us pay for losing their stuff, I just needed to know how much we were talking about and if we could work out a deal. We’d set up a meeting to talk face to face.

The man sitting behind the mahogany monstrosity of a desk looked like your stereotypical mob boss from any movie. Old, short, round. Wearing a pinstripe suit, complete with fedora, and a cigar hanging from his lips.

The two goons beside me matched the meat-head description, with nothing but muscle between their ears. Intimidating in their cheap MIB suits, but useless without exact instructions.

I kept my chin level and my breathing even, not willing to show the tension coiled inside me. I’d already run the numbers and figured if I took on a few more hours at the diner, I could come up with at least a thousand by the end of the month. If he owed more than that, then I’d have to hope they were willing to work with me on payments.

“So, tell me who you are again?”

His eyes traveling over me wasn’t anything I wasn’t used to. Young, slim, blonde; I worked my assets for tips daily.

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