Yaz

Yaz

By

Matt McGuire

I crossed the line from girlhood to womankind after my second husband, Kenny took off with the rent and a replacement, leaving me with my girls Bree and Lucy and a whole lot of nothing else.

That's when I realized--fuck them. Fuck them all. And that's exactly what I did.

I got a job slinging grits at an all night place and signed up for day school. Mama kept the girls and I'd sleep a little at the kitchen table with a pencil shoved up my face and my makeup long spent. Mama would make me some coffee and I'd have a cigarette and a Xanax and do it all again.

I graduated near the top of my class with a degree in Business but I didn't walk. I was at work, and Mama tucked the diploma they mailed me in between the light bill and a dollar store card she bought me that she wrote Hallmark on the back of, and placed it by the door so I'd see it on my way out.

About that time Bree, my youngest, was diagnosed with Leukemia. I bit the bridle and cursed God that day, and had to start working doubles to pay the doctors. I picked up a job as a teller and kept serving bacon at night but it was never enough. Never.

They foreclosed on Mama's trailer six months before we buried Bree. All four of us were stuffed in a one bedroom apartment, and I hated myself, I cursed the day I was born, that Mama was the one who held her hand all that time. I was at work.

After Bree died I quit for awhile. I mean, I didn't make the decision to really, it just happened. I slept and cried and sat in the floor with her baby clothes all around me. I was really bad on Xanax then too, and I'd gotten a scrip for Oxys from a doctor who said all I had to do was stop in once a week in his consultation room and he'd keep me loaded as long as I wished.

Then he started having me over to parties and paying me to take my clothes off for him and his friends. It was nothing for me to make six or seven hundred dollars a party, so I quit the diner, kept the teller job, and did him and his buddies two or three times a month. Well, I told my friend Linda about the gigs I was doing and she got a couple of friends who were struggling under the same loads or worse and we started a regular business. Discreet. And very lucrative.

Linda and the girls and I pulled in a cool hundred grand in the first year, and I kicked all the drugs with Mama holding my hand and a wastebasket. Then I realized what an opportunity I'd created for me, Lucy, and Mama. I put what little good my degree had taught me about the real world to work, and at the end of another year me, Mama, Lucy, and Linda moved into a ten bedroom Georgian in the same neighborhood as the scrip writing doctor.

Oh, and I ruined him. I sent four anonymous letters to the three newspapers in town and his wife containing illicit photographs and other materials of interest not only to the public at large, but the DEA and several other government agencies. Then I went legit.

I closed up shop on the sex trade and opened a chain of delicatessens and women's clothing stores with the capital the girls and I had accumulated. I made each of them a partner and a few ended up finishing their GEDs and getting degrees themselves. We have since diversified into any number of holdings and trade on the NYSE under BREE or Bounty Rich / Everything Eve.

Lucy just finished her second semester at Brown, and Mama lives with me and Linda in Key Largo. Linda and I tied the knot in a private ceremony last spring, and we spend our spare time spear fishing and sipping Mojitos.

Kenny tried to contact me a couple of years ago after he stumbled on a piece in Barron's about my rise. He said he was really sorry, and could I loan him several thousand dollars, blah, blah, blah.

I sent him a postcard from one of the local tourist traps. It had a large lighthouse on it with two beach balls at its base and a number of sand crabs scuttling around. It said Wish You Were Here. I scratched that part out and wrote only one word in reply before I mailed it: Hallmark.