"And it was me who realized first that the cold that Mom had that just wouldn't seem to go away, maybe wasn't a cold after all."
"Shit," Mark said under his breath, eyes sad for me.
"See, while her job was decent enough, they kept her two hours under full-time so they didn't have to put in for her benefits. Luckily, we all just... stayed relatively well. No one ever had to go to the doctor. It never even occurred to her to go. But then she kept losing her weight, then her voice. And finally... she started coughing up blood. Lung cancer, stage three. She and my Dad smoked casually for most of my childhood. Outside, but they did it. And then when he died, she stress-smoked a lot. It... caught up with her. She went to go to her company and begged them to put her on full-time to get insurance, to try to offset the costs. But it was a pre-existing condition. No one would take her on."
"Scotti..."
He was trying to tell me that I didn't have to go on. But the thing was, I did. Because, I realized, I had never gotten it out before. My brothers had always just... known what was going on. I had never gotten the catharsis of purging it out to a sympathetic ear.
"But she started treatment. I guess... you know... she had a lot to live for. She started chemo and kept working and trying to take care of all of us. She seemed to be getting better. Then she had the doctor visit that told her it was getting more aggressive, that in turn, the treatment had to get more aggressive. But she was already up to her ears in debt. We didn't know how much then. We didn't find out until after she passed. It was half a million dollars. And then she got too sick to even work anymore. She died just a couple weeks later," I said, voice getting a little thick. "We didn't know until after she died that she had refused further treatment, knowing it wouldn't help, just prolong her life... and debt."
Mark put his knife down, watching me with a look I couldn't quite read, but it was intense. "Bet I can guess what shitty fucking company she worked for."
I nodded at that.
"We were young and devastated and alone in the world and so fucking angry all the time. There was never a break from that rage. One night, we were just sitting around, kicking around thoughts of vengeance for a company that didn't value its employees enough to try to help keep them alive. And it just... came to us. We all just... knew we wanted them to pay. That they had to pay every last cent of the money that made her decide to offer over her life instead of having to pay any more."
"You couldn't have been more than a kid."
"I was eighteen. In fact, it was the day I turned eighteen that I walked into my mother's old store and I got myself a job. Then Rush got one. And Atlas. Then Nixon. Finally, once he had time, Kingston. We each worked different departments. We each paid attention. We learned every single in and out from how the registers worked to how the security system did. When the money got dropped. When change of shift was. Everything. Every small little seemingly inconsequential detail. Then we slowly gave out notice over the course of several months, so no one was any the wiser. And then we robbed them."
"You couldn't have gotten that much."
"Just shy of five thousand that first time. But to us, that was a lot."
"What then?"
"Then we drove out of town. We had already packed up and pooled our money. We picked another target and started working there. Shower, rinse, repeat. Ten years. Still haven't earned it all back. Some hits were much smaller than anticipated. But we're close."
"Then what?"
"Then get the hell out of here before anything does eventually trace back to us. I mean, we're careful. Fake IDs all the way, and all my brothers wear prosthetic noses or fake tattoos or fake scars during robberies, just enough to throw off anything seeming too similar. Some times, we will only have one of us go in. Sometimes I am the one doing the yelling and gun-toting. We try to keep it fresh."
"Get out of here where?"
"We're leaning toward China or Russia."
"No extradition."
That wasn't something normal people knew.
Somehow, I found it comforting that he did.
It made me feel less like a freak for knowing it as well.
"Exactly."
"So this is all you've known since your mom passed? The road, the planning, being unsettled."
I took a deep breath, holding it until it burned, then letting it out slowly. "Pretty much."
And it had never seemed quite as pathetic as it did right then.