Chapter 1

The following characters appear in the first few chapters:

Jacob Rust (Jake)

Adopted father, 6’-6’’ tall, 260 pounds, 38 years old, brown hair cut short, gray eyes

Hollie Rust

Jake’s non-adopted daughter, 4’-2’’ tall, 57 pounds, 8 years old, strawberry blond hair, green eyes

Birdy

Restaurant owner, babysitter, 5’-8’’ tall, 185 pounds, mid 50s, gray hair, blue eyes

A young woman is cleaning up her mother’s bedroom and finds a small book under her pillow. It has her name on the cover on a small white label in bold handwriting. She sits and starts to read it forgetting about the cleaning. On opening the book, there is a page pasted inside the cover of the book with this written in a very neat handwriting.

“I found this book under Mama’s pillow while cleaning out her room after she had passed away.” There was no signature, or name on the page, but she didn’t need one. It was her mother’s handwriting. The handwriting on the following pages was in the much rougher and bolder handwriting.

“I’m writing this a number of years after finding Hollie, so some of the details are a little fuzzy,” the handwriting proclaimed at the top of the first page before the actual story began.

I found Hollie on a Friday night in late October. I was passing an alley when this guy called to me.

“You looking for some young pussy?” he asked and pulls a small girl out of the dark behind him. She was short, really short, thin, and crying. He slapped her in the face and says, “Shut up.”

Now, I’m just a guy, a big guy, but I don’t believe in striking women and especially very young women or girls.

“You want to try this?” he asks again. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“Don’t hit the kid,” I tell him, and he gets all snotty on me.

“Don’t tell me what to do with my sluts,” he tells me in an aggravated voice.

“Yeah, right,” I think to myself. “An eight year old slut. No Way.”

“Sure,” I tell him and moved over toward him. “How much?” I asked, as I get closer to him, but I didn’t give him time to answer. Instead I hit him. First in the gut to double him over and then in the face. I could feel his nose give-way when I hit him. He flew back against the wall of the building and slid to the ground. He wouldn’t be getting up any time soon. I’m a big guy at 6’-6’’ tall and 260 pounds, and I’ve done a lot of hard work, so I’m real strong. I turned to the girl then. She had moved further back in the alley in fear.

“Are you all right, girl?” I asked.

“No!” she answers in a whisper.

“Did he hurt you? Has he sold you previously?” I asked.

“No, I’m scared,” she answers in tears. She was shivering also. She only had some light summer clothes on, and they were dirty. I could see that even from the nearby street light.

“What’s your name?”

“Hollie.”

“You got any parents, or relatives near here?”

“No.”

“Where do you live?” I asked, but she doesn’t answer.

“Where do your folks live?” I tried.

“I don’t know,” she finally wails in tears.

“Do they live here in the city?”

“I’m not sure if it’s this city,” she finally replies.

What to do with her, I wondered? Had she been kidnapped, or was she a run away? How bad could her family have been for her to run away to something like this, I wondered? I knew that the State took care of kids who had lost their parents or were abandoned, but they seldom did a good job of it. She could wind up back out here on the street again. No, the State wasn’t the answer. What was, I wondered? Still, it wasn’t getting any warmer, and she was still shivering. Damn, it looked like it was up to me to do something again. The last time that I did something on my own in the Army hadn’t turned out all that well.

“You hungry?” I finally asked.

“Yes.”

“Come on, I’ll take you over to Birdy’s and get you a meal. She may know what to do for you,” I told her. She didn’t move for a short time, but I held out my hand, and she eventually took it.

Birdy ran a small hole in the wall restaurant. The food wasn’t expensive, but it was filling, and well cooked. It also wasn’t that far from where we were.

“What about him?” she asked in fear. I bent down and checked the guy, but he was still out. I shook him, but he didn’t move. The light wasn’t very good, but I could see a bit of blood spreading from his back. On checking his pulse, I found that he still had one.

“He won’t be bothering anyone for a while,” I told her, and we moved away from the alley. They didn’t have cameras in this neighborhood, which was a good thing, I now thought.

Birdy was still open when we got there, but there were only two guys in there, and they soon left.

“Hi Jake, what have you got there?” Birdy asked, as we took seats at the counter rather than at a table.

“This is Hollie. I found her out on the street. Some piece of shit was trying to peddle her ass,” I told her.

“Christ, Jake! Has this neighborhood gotten that bad?” she asked. Birdy was about 5’-8’’ tall and maybe 185 pounds. She ate her own food, and she was a good person.

“He won’t be trying it again anytime soon. I just don’t know what to do with her,” I told her.

“There is State custody,” she reminded me.

“Yeah, and she could wind up back out on the street again or something worse,” I told her.

“She needs something to eat,” I told Birdy following that, “and I need something to drink.”

“What you want to eat, Hollie?” Birdy asked.

“I ... I don’t know,” she replied and began to cry.

“How about a nice hot bowl of stew and a couple of biscuits?” Birdy asked.

“Oh ... okay,” Hollie replied in a very quiet voice. Birdy quickly brought her a bowl of stew big enough for me to eat and a couple of fresh biscuits. She then set a mug of hot coffee in front of me.

“That’s all you are getting here,” she told me in a serious voice.

“She’s your responsibility now,” she added following that, and there it was. She WAS my responsibility

“Yeah, okay,” I agreed and put money on the counter for the stew and the coffee. Holly ate about a quarter of the stew and one of the biscuits before she was full.

“That all you can eat?” I asked her. She just nodded. She was practically asleep between having eaten and the heat here in the restaurant. I finished the stew and biscuits. I had already finished the coffee.

“Come on, Hollie,” I called on finishing. “Let’s go home.”

“Here,” Birdy said and threw me a thick new towel. “She needs something more to keep her warm than those clothes will. Bring it back in the morning,” she reminded me. I wrapped the towel around Hollie’s thin shoulders before taking her hand and leaving. She was holding the towel shut with her other hand.

Currently, I had a place in a house a block or so from the restaurant. It was enough for me. There was a living room, a bedroom and a small bath. It wasn’t bad or expensive. It had a TV and a queen size bed. I am a big guy after all and needed the room. By the time we got there, the landlord had already turned down the heat for the night. The place wasn’t cold yet, but it would cool off overnight.

Once inside, I realized that I had nothing that would fit Hollie. I’m a big guy, and all of my clothes would be way, way too big to fit her. What to do? She had been wearing her present clothes for a considerable time, and they needed to be laundered. Additionally, she needed something to sleep in. Something warm. Looking down at her standing there, she was double extra small to my sense of size.

I just didn’t have anything that small. In fact, I didn’t have anything small. It took me more than a minute to realize that I did have something small, but still too large to fit her. We had been standing in the living room while I did this thinking, and Hollie had been looking around at the place. She hadn’t said anything ... yet.

“Hollie, sit on the sofa. I need to look for something that you can wear,” I told her, and she sat on the sofa with the towel still around her.

It took me several minutes to figure out where I had left my favorite shirt from when I was a teenager. It was the smallest thing that I had. I had kept it because of all of the good memories associated with it. I finally located it in a dresser drawer, all folded up. On shaking it out, it was obvious that it was still too big for her, but perhaps I could adopt it to fit her. I carried it to the living room, where Hollie looked up at it.

“Too big,” she immediately said on seeing it.

“I think that I can adapt it to fit you,” I told her.

“How could you do that?”

“By using these pins to make it smaller,” I told her, holding up the large safety pins that I had brought with me. Laying out the shirt on the coffee table, I folded the back in from each side making the shirt narrower and then pinning everything in place. The front was still just as wide, but could overlap and be tied closed. The sleeves were still a problem, but could be rolled up or pinned up.

“Try this on,” I told her, and she got off the sofa and approached me with some hesitation. I just held out the shirt to her. She took it and tried it on, but the sleeves were way too long, just as I had thought.

“Let me roll the sleeves up,” I told her and rolled up the left sleeve past her hand. It made a large lump.

“I could cut the sleeves off shorter,” I volunteered.

“Could you pin them up?” she asked.

“Probably. Let me try that with the right sleeve,” I asked. She needed to remove the shirt for me to do that, and I soon had both sleeves pinned up to shorten them. When she tried the shirt on again, the fit was much better.

“It won’t stay closed,” she told me when she had it on. I had the answer for that and produced a short cloth strap that I had obtained some time ago. A couple of safety pins kept it in place, and she could tie the front closed.