HATE LOVE

I rubbed my temples and cradled the phone between my ear and shoulder. The television blared from the living room with some wrestling show that seemed to be more trash talking than actual fighting.

“Girl,” my father hollered from his recliner. “Get me another beer.”

I ignored him as I took stock of the refrigerator. “Mr. Herndon, it only puts me over for one hour. I can clock out for that hour and still work. Please.”

“And what happens if you get hurt?” he demanded. “What happens if a supervisor comes in? How are you going to work the register if you aren’t logged in? I’m sorry, Daisy. I can’t help you. See you next week.”

He hung up before I could argue my case any further. My heart sank a little and I closed my eyes. I’d had to use some of the money set aside for rent to pay for the overdue electric bill instead—before it got shut off. Without that extra shift, we’d really be scraping by.

“Girl!” my father yelled again. “My beer!”

Tossing the phone on the counter, I grabbed the bottle of beer and twisted off the top. We’d be in much better shape if my father didn’t drink all of our money away. Before I turned eighteen, I stashed cash around the house in an effort to hide it, but that turned out to be a horrible decision. My father always found the money and spent it before the bills could get paid. Now, I had a bank account, but my father demanded that his name go on it as well.

If he didn’t spend hundreds of dollars on beer and whiskey a month, we’d be doing just fine.

“Here you go, Daddy,” I said softly and handed the beer to him. He barely took his eyes off the screen as he reached up and grabbed it from my hand. “How was your day?”

“Shitty. How do you think my day was? I swear, sometimes you’re as stupid as your mother,” he growled. “Did you bring some dogs home for dinner?”

Plucking at the worn threads on the tattered green recliner, I tried to smile. “Sorry, Daddy. No hot dogs tonight. I reached my limit of freebies yesterday, remember?” Along with my minimum wage that really didn’t support us, the Fry and Grill let me have free food too—only we weren’t supposed to be bringing them ho

me. Normally, the managers didn’t say anything, but when Jerry was working, he kept a sharp eye on what we walked out with.

“Ridiculous,” grunted my dad. “What’s the point of you working down there if you can’t feed me?” He reached for the remote to turn up the television, and I bit my lower lip. It wasn’t exactly a dream job. The place was crap; my employers were mostly stoners, two of my three managers tried on an hourly basis to get in my pants, and I walked home every night dressed in red and yellow stripes and smelling like a grease pan. Still, I got to meet new people every day, and that was nice.

“So what’s for dinner?” my father asked, not even lifting his eyes from the screen.

“I thought that we’d have breakfast for dinner. Scrambled eggs. Toast. I’ll fry up some ham to go with it,” I said brightly as I leaned down to kiss him on the cheek. “How does that sound?”

“Sounds like shit. I want steak.”

“Daddy, we don’t have any steak,” I reminded him quietly. The truth was that we barely had anything in the refrigerator except eggs, a few sandwich fixings, and beer. The pantry only had ramen, so after my father got his dinner, I’d boil one egg with some ramen for my own dinner to make our last few dollars spread a little further.

My father tipped the beer back and shrugged. “Whatever. I’m hungry.”

“Coming right up.” I headed back to the kitchen to start dinner. As I cracked a few eggs in a bowl and started scrambling them, the phone rang. Picking up the old-fashioned landline, I prayed that it wasn’t a debt collector. “Hello?”

“Daisy?” came a nasally female voice. I instantly winced. “It’s Rosaria. I want to talk to you father.”

“Of course, Rosaria. Nice to hear from you.” I gingerly tapped some salt onto the eggs, and stuck my head around the corner. “Daddy, it’s for you.”

He picked up the cordless next to the chair, and I closed the door before hanging up the phone. The last thing my night needed was to listen to my father talk to his girlfriend.

Because Rosaria hated me. I knew the reason even if it didn’t quite make sense. My father had apparently been handsome and popular in high school. As a talented football player, he had everything going for him. Colleges were lining up to recruit him until he got my mother pregnant. Their shotgun wedding took one second, and all other women were shut out of his life. Unfortunately, Rosaria never got over her high school crush, and resented my mother for her interference. And by extension, me.

But this story has a sad ending because my mom died a year ago. She lost a long battle against drug addiction and passed away quietly as she slept. It didn’t hurt as much to lose her as I thought it might because the truth was that I never really had a mother. We were three people living under one roof, but we were never really a family. My parents were more concerned with fighting each other than they were about raising me.

But family was family. Taking care of my father was my job now, and I accepted that. I’d been working since sixteen, and after high school, I’d started working full-time. Daddy hasn’t had a job in a couple of years. He used to be a car mechanic, but he’d gotten fired when he couldn’t stop drinking, and after that gig, he never really looked for a new job.

Sitting the bowl of eggs on the counter, I reached for the frying pan and stifled a scream when a cockroach ran out from behind the wall. Getting a hold of myself, I narrowed my eyes and slammed the pan down on the counter.

“Why you got to be so damn loud, girl?” my father yelled from the other side of the door.

“Sorry,” I called back and shoved the pan in the sink. Scrubbing it down, I turned on the stove and waited for it to heat up.

Our small apartment wasn’t much. We’d had a tiny but nice house on the other side of town up until I turned fifteen. I was never sure what happened, but things got so much worse between my parents. But I wasn’t too young to understand that the drugs and alcohol had taken over their lives. They sold the house and we moved here. It was rent-controlled, but that was about the only good thing to it. The walls were thin, and at night, I could hear everything. In this neighborhood, those aren’t good sounds.

The walls were cracked and dingy from tobacco smoke. The carpet smelled of alcohol and urine. And no matter how many times I steam-cleaned the carpet, it never seemed to get better. There were two small bedrooms in the apartment, a living room, the small kitchen and dining area, and a small patio looking out over the busy street.