I’m watching. And I don’t often forget.

You know how some writers write about places and people so perfect it makes you a little jealous? I’m not one of them. Sometimes I wish I was.

I was in the dollar store checking out picture frames a few years ago in a tiny, scorching Arkansas town. At the end of the row, a girl, probably about twenty-one, was getting fired. I don’t know what she did, but I remember the greasy manager who fired her and the barely suppressed panic on her face when she turned toward me to walk out of the store. I followed her to the door and watched her walk out of the parking lot and turn left onto the highway out of town. She walked along the side of the road until it turned enough that I couldn’t see her. She was still wearing the red employee vest and her name tag when she disappeared.

I never forgot her. I wrote a story about her that will never see the light of day because it’s too gritty for anyone, and I don’t blame them. It’s about what happens when the safety net that people assume everyone else has, like family, savings, or just the luck you need to get another job before the goddamn rent is due…doesn’t exist.

Brace yourself, it’s not pretty. Here’s an excerpt:

I lost my job at the dollar store. They were just overstaffed, the manager said, adjusting his name tag as he spoke. They’d hire me back at the holidays. It was August, so I told myself as I walked into the blinding sun it was fine because I’d have more time to spend at the river. But that was a lie; I was nervous like I’d never been before. I counted the money I had in an envelope taped behind my dresser into stacks in my head while I walked the Arkansas highway from town back toward the trailer. I didn’t want to go back home, but there was nowhere else to go. All my friends were heading to college. They’d all talked about was how ready they were to leave, and I smiled and nodded like I was going somewhere too.

Mom met some guy last Sunday at the bowling alley and brought him home. I knew someone was there before I’d even gotten out of bed. The air was still, but occupied, and I found them passed out on the couch, the front door left swung wide open behind them. A lit cigarette had fallen from his fingers at some point and was burning a slow hole through the crotch of his jeans. The falling embers dissolved the denim into a smoldering black ring, and I was aware that I’d continue to watch even if his entire body caught fire. It didn’t. Mom opened her eyes enough to ask me to hand her a beer.

“This is Carl,” she said, “He’s gonna to be staying with us for awhile.”

He was in my room later that night when I got back from the shower, standing at my dresser holding a picture of me and Mom at high school graduation in May. It was one of the only times I can remember she showed up when she was supposed to, and one of my friends took the picture just as she started checking her watch. She always said she felt like people were looking at her. She did have a desperate look like she was always searching for the nearest door. I didn’t know if I’d wanted her to come, but I’d bought a frame at work anyway and set it on my dresser.

“What do you want?” I said, pausing at the door, pulling my towel tighter around me.

He didn’t answer, just set the picture down. I edged past him, feeling crowded like he’d somehow filled up all the space in the room. I sat on the bean bag under the window and shoved it open with the heel of my hand. The trailer sat close to the highway, and there was always the constant noise of traffic, but even that was silent now, waiting for him to move.

His gaze wandered down to my shoulders and across my thighs.

“You’re old enough to look after yourself, ain’t ya?” He backed up, touching a few more things on his way out, and left the door wide open.

I left before dawn with what money I had and some clothes in a backpack, walking out of town along the line in the center of the road. I figured Mom either wouldn’t notice or she’d be glad I was gone. I’d walk until I found something better. It didn’t take long.

I slept in a church doorway the next town over that night. There was a tall collection box for a clothing drive on the steps, and I turned it on its side in the corner of the doorway and slept behind it. The stone was cold, but I had my backpack for a pillow and I slept about as well as I ever did. The city paper the next morning had a few rooms for rent and I took the first one I saw. It was in a run-down motel that rented by the month, but it was clean enough, and I didn’t have to share space with anyone. I found a job waiting tables, but it was only part-time. I thought I’d be able to find another job, but the high school kids were still out for the summer and no one was hiring.

I had enough money with me to rent the room for a couple of months, but now it was the third month and rent was due. Six days ago, actually. I raked my hair into a ponytail and walked to the landlord’s apartment with the notice he’d pushed under my door the night before. It crumpled it into a ball in my fist and the edges pushed sharp under my fingernails as I rang the doorbell. Gene answered the door in a stained robe. It was bullshit, but I told him I’d have the rent by the weekend. He didn’t say anything, just lit a cigarette and stared at me. I looked for another job the rest of that week and sold my phone Friday morning to a guy for $35. I still had it in my hand when Gene knocked. I let him in and pushed the cash toward him. He counted it and put it down on the counter. 

“That’s not going to do it.”  He looked at everything but my eyes. Still counting. “You’re going to have to work it off.” I didn’t say anything. I had nothing to say. But that’s the moment I understood why people kill themselves.     

The next evening he picked me up outside my door, brushing beer cans and a sweat-stained visor off the seat so I could get in. At every red light we stopped at on the way through town I considered just opening the door and running, but it was pointless. If I did, I wouldn’t have anywhere to go back to. It was pretty simple; I could either wake up in the morning with a roof over my head or not. I chose the roof.

He drove me to a trailer at the edge of the county, unlocked the door and lumbered in. The walls were covered in splintered paneling, and all the appliances had been ripped out. The light switch lit a bare bulb hanging from the low ceiling. The place smelled of mold and trapped air. He jerked his head toward a room at the end of the narrow hall and went back outside.

There was a mattress in the room, no box springs or bedding, nothing to make me believe anyone ever lived here. I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face but the faucet wasn’t connected and fell over onto the counter. In the toilet was a small pool of dark yellow urine.  I told myself whatever happened would be contained within these walls, that no one else would ever know, that I’d leave it behind when I left, but then I just stopped. I didn’t have the energy to pretend to believe myself.

I waited on the edge of the mattress. He’d been outside long enough for three cars to pull up and park. I heard laughing as they gathered in the narrow front room, and then the aluminum door shut tight behind them. I closed my eyes as they walked toward the bedroom door and listened hard to the cicadas under the window. I made myself blank, empty, didn’t look at them, just bit through my lip until the blood filled my mouth with iron. I didn’t open my eyes until it was over.

The next month I steeled myself and picked a spot on the wall to stare at. I figured my eyes were my own, and it would keep me from feeling sick. It didn’t. I felt like I was suffocating; the air in the room perfectly still and heavy. The second guy was drenched in sweat, with nicotine stained fingers and a Tri-State Baptist Promise Keepers shirt over his head. He sank down over me, his breath sour and hot on my neck. I tried to lay there, to just pretend I was somewhere else, but I knew I was going to be sick. I pushed him off as he fumbled with his belt and ran down the hall to the kitchen sink. His cursing was louder than my vomit, but after I stopped heaving I let the water run over my head until I couldn’t hear him anymore.

I found the door handle and shoved it opened to the dirty metal steps outside. It was morning. The sun had risen since I’d been there. I pulled on the shorts I’d grabbed on the way out of the room and listened to the voices from the back of the trailer, but they weren’t as loud now. At least they hadn’t come outside; maybe they’d let me sit here for awhile.

A red truck with scarred chrome fenders drove up and parked near the other cars as I dragged my arm again across my mouth. I let my hair fall cold against my face like a ripped curtain, feeling suddenly sick again. Another one. The truck door slammed and I heard gravel scape under boots, until whoever it was stopped in front of me. I just wanted him to leave.

“I’m here to put a deadbolt on…” he paused, checking the paperwork in his hand. “…the outside of this door. Do you know where I can find Gene Martin?” I dug my toes into the Astroturf and he waited for me to say something, but I didn’t. There were some things I didn’t have to do. He stood there for a few seconds, and I moved to the edge of the steps so there was a path the door. He took a step back and paused.

“Are you ok?” 

This made me look up. I’d assumed it was a man, but something in the voice made me wonder, and she listened after she asked a question like a woman would.  She set her toolbox down and squatted in front of me. I suddenly felt like crying. My eyes burned with tears that didn’t fall.

“Do you have a cigarette?” I said. I didn’t give a shit who she was. I just wanted to cauterize memory with fire. 

She dug into her jacket for the pack and lit one with a zippo before she flipped it over her fingers to hand to me. The lettering on her truck door said MJ’s Lock & Key. She seemed to know it wasn’t going to do her any good to ask a bunch of questions, but I saw her looking up at the trailer windows and around at the other cars. She had lines around her eyes that made her look kind, but she wasn’t smiling. The Promise Keeper opened the door behind me and then closed it. I didn’t turn around; it was clearly time to go back in.

“Need a ride?” she said while she stood, sliding the cigarettes back into her shirt pocket and holding out her hand. She was tan, muscular, but definitely a woman. She held it there and I shook my head. 

“Yeah, you do,” she said, her voice as hard as it was soft. “Let’s go.” 

She drove us to the other side of town before she asked me where I needed to go. I waited a minute before I said I didn’t care and she just looked back towards the road. We were two towns over and almost to Missouri before I lowered my window and followed the wind with my palm. It pushed over my hand and through my mind for miles, cool and smooth, hollowing out corners and space. I could tell she was taking the back roads, letting me have the silence.

The horizon twisted layers of violet and orange fire evening as we turned into The Red Apple Diner parking lot outside Rockford, Illinois. MJ asked me several times as she drove if I was hungry or needed anything, and I shook my head, even though I was starving, until she stopped asking. What I really needed was to never stop; to never get out of the truck. We parked and headed toward the entrance. She opened the door for me and I stepped into a small dining room with booths pressed against the windows and tucked into corners at the end of a long formica bar lined with stools. MJ chose a booth and I slid in, hungrier than I had ever been in my life, but also aware I didn’t have any money.

“It’s about time you came back to town, MJ” The waitress arranged forks and knives across the paper placemats in front of us.  “Where you headed?”

MJ shrugged and glanced at me. “Don’t really know yet.”

The waitress took her order then looked in my direction, waiting for me to order, but I suddenly couldn’t get the words out of my mouth. They waited, watching. I wished I’d noticed where the bathroom was. Finally, she glanced at MJ and said she’d bring me the special. She turned to leave then but hesitated.

“It’s OK,” she said to me, and her nails polished the color of snow, tapped the table. “You don’t have to talk.”

Yeah, I do, I thought. I always have to do something.

I was tired. That deep, sinking, overwhelming kind of tired that makes you sick to your stomach. I couldn’t remember the last time I slept without waking up a dozen times. There was never enough money, or food, reasons you won’t lose your job, or locks on the doors. Diners are different, though. Something about walking through those glass doors made my muscles start to unfold onto my bones; easing enough room to draw a deep breath. They’re all the same; torn vinyl booths and scuffed counters, all quietly safe. Nothing bad ever happens in a diner.

The waitress returned to the table with MJ’s food and the Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes special for me.

“If you don’t like Salisbury steak then you ought to,” she said, sliding it in front of me with a half smile. She and MJ talked for a while and I breathed it in, feeling the warmth fill my lungs and settle into my chest. I was eating in silence, wishing I’d ordered the whole menu when I heard myself speak.

“Do you think there are things…” I said suddenly, glancing at the waitress, feeling the words fall out of my mouth in a rush,  “…That if you do them, just make you worth nothing?“

She paused before she spoke, but didn’t look towards MJ or flinch at the question, as if customers asked these things every day.

“Well honey, I think we just all do what we need to do to survive,” she said, holding my eyes.  “There ain’t no shame in that. You gotta do what gets you to something better.”

Later, she gave MJ a quick hug at the register.  I walked ahead to the door but heard her whisper “You take care of that one.” I didn’t hear what MJ said back.

The second day we stopped at The Silver Spoon in Illinois Falls.  Red Naugahyde and scuffed chrome were everywhere, the air heavy with the scent of potatoes and kitchen steam. I ordered a patty melt and coke and traced the silver flecks in the peeling tabletop with my thumbnail. The waitress, a fading redhead with a sharp laugh, brought our food and asked if we needed anything else. This time I didn’t even try to stop the words.

“Do you ever feel safe?”

Her eyes were soft and thoughtful. “You have to make your own safe,” she said, then leaned forward and paused, dropping her voice to a whisper.  “And for Christ’s sake, if someone steals it, get it back and hide it better.” 

She covered my hand with hers, just for a second, before she walked back toward the counter.