Chapter 1

October kicked the door in, home-invasion-style, when it arrived assaulting our weary house-trailer with drafts as cold as a witch’s pussy on Halloween night. I pulled my fuzzy, thrift store sweater tighter around my thin shoulders as I poured hot water over a cup of Sanka and lit a Doral off the gas burner of the stove.

I sat down at the fake plastic wood dinette table ... the edges pocked with black cigarette burns. Larry (my step-dad) was still in his room asleep snoring and farting like a shot rhino while I tried to enjoy the early morning peace and quiet while I could.

After my initial dose of nicotine and the black swill that passed for instant coffee, I would have to cook breakfast for Larry ... it was part of my job.

My Mom took off four years earlier when I was fourteen years old ... not the best time in a girl’s life. She took off with a long-distance trucker she met at her job at the Golden Griddle inside the truck stop on highway thirty-nine. Or at least that’s what Larry says.

So it was just Larry and me after that.

The day she left, Larry sat me down at the same rickety table and broke the news that Mom had gotten bored with her life and hit the road with a trucker. Hell I don’t even know if it’s true or not.

I haven’t heard a word from my Mom since she left for her night shift at the truck stop four years ago. Larry might have her buried in a shallow grave in the woods for all I know.

What I do know is that living with Larry is a full-time job with lots of unpaid overtime.

Larry broke it down to me very plainly that if I wanted to continue having a roof over my head and food in my belly I was going to have to abide by his set of rules and requirements. I was going to have to do all the cooking and cleaning and laundry and anything else he decided he wanted me to do.

The way Larry put it, my mom hadn’t been much of a wife in the first place so her choice to run off was no big loss to him. He lit a cigarette and adjusted his belt underneath his ample beer gut; “All the bitch knew how to cook was canned spaghetti and couldn’t fuck her way out of a wet paper bag. Good she’s gone”.

It was crystal-clear to me that I was going to be the “Wife” now.

Larry had been a truck driver when my mom met him. She was a single mom waitressing at the Golden Griddle and Larry was a beefy trucker with an nicotine-stained beard who never wore shirts with sleeves and constantly chewed on a match stick.

To hear mom tell it, their meeting was magic. She leaned over to pour him a free coffee refill. In the swirl of steam from her coffee pot Larry told her she had a nice pair of tits.

Two weeks later they were married in the wood-paneled office of the justice of the peace surrounded by the odor of stale cigarette smoke and non consensual sex.

Larry’s trucker days are over now. He draws a disability check for a bad back from when he crashed his rig about a year after he and mom married. He claims a car cut him off on the highway but mom always said he was jerking off to the midget-porn magazines he kept in his truck and got too distracted.

So here I am scrambling eggs for a man who pops pain pills all day and watches game shows with his hand down the front of his grease-stained sweat pants.

Welcome to my life.

After putting Larry’s bacon and eggs in the oven to keep warm I headed down the hall to my room to scrounge up enough change to buy a carton of cigarettes. The carton that Larry and I shared was down to one pack and I knew he would be pissed if we didn’t have a back-up.

I passed Larry’s bedroom and the door was half-open as always. I could smell the odor of his lair from the hallway ... cheap cigarettes, sour sheets and dirty ass-crack.

His massive, hairy bulk sprawled on the threadbare mattress like a sleeping ogre. His erection jutted-up out of the fly of his red plaid boxes ... pointing at the stained, yellow ceiling.

Larry’s stubby, fireplug of a dick was already awake ... up and ready with a mind of it’s own and a ravenous appetite.

I tip-toed past his door as if I were walking through a mine field.

I made what money I could doing housecleaning for people around the trailer park and had even started to land a few jobs out in town for people with actual houses that weren’t on wheels.

The people in the trailer park could only pay me a few bucks, but hell it was a few bucks more than I had before.

After cleaning my first two trailers I went to a third trailer around eleven. What I did at the third trailer didn’t involve cleaning.

What I did (or more like who I did) at the third trailer was Arlen Roney. Arlen and I had been bumping uglies since late August when the dog days set in and he stopped by the trailer to exchange a handful of sweaty bills for some of Larry’s extra pain pills.

Arlen had a shock of wiry beard that grew straight off his chin and his arms and chest were covered with jailhouse tattoos. He never wore a shirt and his jeans hung low on his narrow hips. His nails were always dirty and his dick was always hard.

Need I say more?

I let myself into Arlen’s trailer. He always left the door unlocked. I knew he would be in the back bedroom waiting.

The place was a hot mess, as usual. Dirty dishes filled the sink and spilled-over onto the cracked and stained kitchen counter tops. Piles of clothing littered the brown plaid couch, the kitchen chairs and the dirty swamp-green carpet.