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“Well now see,” and then Daddy reached into the purple silk lining of his leather jacket and pulled out a folder. I realized: I’m totally sunk. “I don’t think you’d want the police here, because then your lover man would find out he has a lover man.”

I paused. “What do you want?”

He wants the money. All of it, the whole pot of Ginno’s winnings. Daddy didn’t change the channel until he saw Ginno receive an oversized $30,000 check.

The terrible part is that I know I could invent some story that makes it seem like I really need the money and Ginno would have no problem giving it to me. Somehow that means there is no way that I could ever bring myself to do it. He’s the first and only decent man I’ve ever been with. And that makes me a decent woman.

But I wouldn’t be anymore. Not if I did this.

“Ginno already spent it,” I lied. “He owed some people big and used the money to square things up with them.”

Daddy popped a switchblade knife open. I followed as he walked over to our novelty calendar hanging above the dinette in the kitchen. It’s one of those calendars where the month rips off but the picture never changes. In this case it isn’t a picture at all but a giant bowling pin that says 12 MONTHS OF ROLLIN’ right beneath the pin’s stripe.

He used his knife to slice off months and stopped at March. He then stabbed the third Thursday. March 24th.

“Tell me, what happened on this glorious day?”

“It’s your birthday,” I muttered.

“So if this is my birthday, all these months away from now, there’s no way I could’ve been born yesterday, is there?”

I didn’t know what to do. My first thought was to run out to the van with Gogo, but that plan would be a battle of my vodka buzz vs. my 6-inch heels. My secondary concern was that even if we ran, Daddy would find us or find Ginno and tell him everything. I know how Daddy works: if he didn’t come away with something, I would lose everything.

“I’ll get your damn money,” I yelled. “Now get out of my condo.” Of course, Daddy took his time sauntering out the door, looking at pictures of Ginno and making moustache jokes.

The second he left, Gogo whimpered. She knew as well as I did that trouble lay ahead.

Damn him! I wept for hours until my eyelash glue began to run and sting. I attempted the roast and poured way too much cooking wine into the pan. Ginno arrived home to the oven smoking and me coughing, trying to get the roast out of the oven. I forgot a potholder and burned my hand.

“Oh, whoa. What is going on here?” Ginno’s voice was sympathetic but confident. He put on an oven mitt, delivered the roast from the oven, and chucked the entire smoking pan from our balcony into the novelty pond out back. I ran to him crying, “You are my hero,” I gushed, and I meant it.

Why did things get always complicated? Complications had made finally getting off the streets so difficult, and now complications were threatening to send me back. Ginno and I clung to one another in the smoky-hot kitchen like survivors of a brush fire. I gripped him knuckle-white.

“Hey, let’s just go out for dinner, right? To a buffet.” He likes the ones that have soft serve ice cream machines for dessert.

“I don’t want to go out, Ginno. I just want to stay here and be next to you.” I led him to the bedroom and tried to earn it, the way he’s made me an honest woman.

The next morning I decided there had to be another way. Maybe I could hire someone part-time to help make my jewel-T’s and sweats; maybe I could open a store online. I vamped it up and worked my fake nails off and at the end of the week had $600 from consignments, which I Western Unioned to Daddy. Even though our number is unlisted, I got a call from him the next day.

“Oh no you didn’t, caketrain baby.” He was upset.

“$600 every week will add up, Daddy.”

“I want $10,000 by the end of the month or your bubble is boiled.”

Over the next few weeks, my mind went into overdrive. I began to get so desperate that I even started tossing around ideas for stories I could tell Ginno to get the money: that a relative was sick and I’d pay him back; someone needed chemo maybe. I thought about waking him up in the middle of the night and saying I’d just had a dream where God told me to donate $10,000 to charity. And then over the next few months, maybe God could visit me again and tell me to donate $20,000 more.

Each idea was a total stinkbucket. I used to take money from men all the time, but that was because I had to, and I didn’t love them. Things were different with Ginno. He and I were making a life.

I kept sending Daddy my weekly consignment earnings and trying to figure out what to do. I guess the days snuck up on me because one night after the lanes Ginno and I came home to find Gogo strangled to death on the kitchen floor with a large chain lying several inches next to her body. “PAY UP, SUCKERS,” read a note attached to the wall with a switchblade knife. I was crying too hard to tell Ginno not to call the cops and the next thing I knew they were there asking all kinds of things—my name, my birthday, basically everything that was a tell on my gender. I just cried and said I didn’t know where my driver’s license was (it’s fake) and finally they stepped off. I was obviously in the throws of grief.

Ginno told them we had no enemies and we didn’t owe anyone money. They left, assuming it was a case of mistaken identity, and encouraged us to get a security system. Which we did.

Over the next couple of weeks I became a hostage in my own condo. Every time I ran to the store for craft supplies or vodka there were threatening messages on the answering machine when I got back. It was a harsh thing to have to look upon the peaceful life I’d finally built and realize that people from my past could just come in and destroy it for no good reason. My days were filled with drinking and bejeweling—dropping off sweatshirts and picking up consignment checks and going to Winn Dixie to have the money transferred to Daddy. One afternoon I was so out of it that I almost picked up Ginno with just a single eyebrow drawn on. Sure, I was quite a ways away from $30,000—I wasn’t even halfway to $10,000 yet. I was sending steady money though, and making progress. But that wasn’t good enough for Daddy.

He finally did the unthinkable. He took it to the alley.

That day I pulled into the parking lot at four like usual, but Ginno was already outside, sitting over to the left behind the patio. I found this strange because everyone knows that’s where the teenagers throw up on Friday nights. He was squatting down like a dog—I thought of Gogo for a moment, subconsciously—and then I pulled up closer and saw that he was crying. He finally got in the van but wouldn’t let me lay a finger on him. Then he unzipped his bowling bag and pulled out a manila folder.

“This guy with diamonds on his teeth came in and gave me this,” he said. I took it and looked even though I knew what was inside. Pretend to be shocked, I coached myself, but once I opened it up I didn’t even have to act. It was all so far away, really, those years. To have them in front of my face at a moment’s notice was just a lot.

You could say that I met Daddy at the start of my transformation. He had pictures from every step of the way. They were regular photos—they hadn’t been taken to document the change or anything. We’d just had a life with one another, even though it was brutal, and he was cruel.

Ginno was broken. He really didn’t understand. The poor thing dealt with it the best way he knew how, talking about God and Jesus and the whole bible show. He told me that as soon as we got home, I was kicked out. “At least you had the decency to let me drive you home first,” I said, which was kind of mean and cheap, but I loved him. I had made up my mind to love him and I did; if there were parts about him I didn’t know about, I was pretty sure I could make up my mind to love those too. I’d been telling myself the whole time that he felt the same way, and now that it was clear he didn’t, it hurt more than I knew how to deal with.