Caring Is Creepy Read Free Page A

clouds.
    “Who the hell are you?” I asked.
    He waited a full thirty seconds before he patted the cushion beside him and said, “I’m your new daddy. Come sit down over here with me and I’ll let you have a sip of my beer.”
    I walked straight over to the hospital and found my mom. She told me he’d only be there a night. One night became a month. And like a bad roach infestation, she needed the help of pros to get rid of him—two orderlies from the hospital. He broke my favorite lamp as they dragged him out. It had a picture of a mermaid made from colored bits of stone.
    5.  Hayes—She met him long before he met her. Hayes was unconscious for several days, after running his truck into a ditch. When he came to, the first thing he saw was Mom changing his IV bag. “My old, sweet mama was wrong about me,” he said. “I knew I’d go to heaven.”
    I tended to agree with his mama, but sadly, he was still here with mine.

Soap Opera Villain
    D ani made me take the empty beer bottles with me. When the knock came, they were sitting in a plastic bag right there on our kitchen table. I should of tossed them in the grass on the bike ride home, but A) I was paranoid someone would see me and tell my mom or the police, and B) that’s littering. I was still trying to think how I could dump them before my mom got back where there’d be zero chance of getting caught.
    A decent breeze was blowing outside, so I’d left open the front and kitchen doors. Our window AC sucked rather than blew. It was a clear shot from the front door, down the hallway to the kitchen, and out the back door beside the sink, so I saw right away who it was. I thought about jumping over the breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from the living room, but it was too late. I’d been spotted.
    “Your mama leave a package for me, cornflake?” Hayes asked through the screen door. He tapped again at the wooden frame with the Lucite cane he sometimes had a need for. He was the cutest of my mom’s boyfriends, I’ll give him that: short brown hair gelled up in spikes and a face like an oversexed soap opera villain. He must of done lots of sit-ups each morning because the times I saw him with his shirt off, his belly looked flat and tight and tan. On that day, however, he looked like the dog’s dirty ass. When I let him in, he took off his sunglasses and his eyes were half hidden by puffy, greenish skin. His feet were bare and moist and blackened. Wherever he walked, he left behind gray moisture prints.
    “I don’t think she did, hoss,” I said. I talked through my teeth, so he wouldn’t smell the beer on my breath. I’d had four to Dani’s two.
    “Are you
positive
?” Hayes did a jittery little dance in the kitchen doorway. He lifted his arms and sent out whiffs of nastiness that smelled like the rotty juice that sometimes collects at the bottom of the fridge’s produce drawer.
    “If she did, she didn’t tell me about it,” I said, finding myself unconsciously imitating his weird jitter dance.
    “I’m just going to go back and have me a look.” He pushed past me before I had a chance to answer and kind of loped through the kitchen, favoring his short leg and wincing each time he took a step. I watched from the doorway and held my breath. He knocked over the sack of bottles on the kitchen table I’d tried to hide with newspaper, and I thought, Oh shit, now I’m doomed, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. Hayes spent a few minutes rummaging about in the kitchen cabinets, before giving up to stumble through the living room, bumping into the shelves that held my mom’s boat-in-a-bottle collection and almost knocking some down. He set them straight before going back into her bedroom. After shutting the door, Hayes commenced to tossing shit around in there and making a sound like a raccoon in a dumpster.
    Our house was smallish, five rooms if you counted the bathroom, six if you counted the carport, and seven if you counted the little