Lost Daughters Read Free

Maureen asked, looking at Loretta, who had tumbled to the floor in front of the baggage carousel. “I heard about the earthquakes out here.”
    â€œWell, Mama, at least it didn’t last as long as the hurricanes we have back in Florida,” Loretta pointed out. She wobbled up off the floor, brushed off her jeans, and looked around. “These people up in here just keep walkin’ around like zombies, like that earthquake wasn’t nothin’. Maybe all of the folks out here do stay doped up on drugs, like everybody told us before we left Florida.”
    â€œUs bein’ in a damn earthquake before we can even get out the airport ain’t a good sign of things to come,” Maureen said in a worried voice.
    â€œWhy did we come out here in the first place? Especially if you already knew about these earthquakes?” Loretta said.
    â€œHuh? Oh, we just needed to get away, that’s why. A change might do us a lot of good,” Maureen insisted with a dismissive wave. “We’ll get used to this place. We’ll be all right.”
    But they wouldn’t be all right.
    They checked into a motel that rented rooms by the hour in San Francisco’s seedy Tenderloin district. There was a massage parlor with tinted windows on one side of the motel and a porn video store on the other. Each day, Maureen and Loretta ate crackers, cheese, and bologna sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Their “neighbors” included hookers, marauding drug dealers, runaway teenagers sleeping under filthy blankets in doorways, and horny men beating a path to the nearby strip clubs.
    Maureen enrolled Loretta in a school that was filled with gang members, some as young as seven. When she picked Loretta up after school one day during the first week, Loretta had a black eye because two mean girls had attacked her and taken her lunch money. That incident, and the fact that Maureen couldn’t find a job or an affordable apartment by the end of the second month, was all she could stand. She used the credit card that Virgil had given her to purchase tickets back to Florida. It was more of a relief than an admission of defeat. She belonged in Florida where everything was familiar and, she prayed, where she would eventually find true happiness.
    Maureen and Loretta returned to Florida on Loretta’s ninth birthday, which was March 15. Loretta was still pouting about having to celebrate her special day with a Happy Meal at McDonald’s near the San Francisco airport instead of a birthday cake. “This is the worst birthday I ever had!” she complained.
    â€œI’ll make it up to you once we get settled back home. I’m goin’ to treat you like a princess from now on, girl!” Maureen promised, ignoring the simmering scowl on Loretta’s face.
    â€œYou better do that, Mama,” Loretta said in a voice that was disturbing coming from a child. “Or I’m goin’ to make you real sorry.” Loretta laughed and Maureen laughed along with her.
    Many years later, Maureen would recall Loretta’s ominous threat....
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    Maureen’s legs almost buckled as she ran toward Virgil in the baggage claim area in the Miami airport. He looked even more frazzled than Maureen. He had been worried about her and Loretta since the day they left.
    â€œLet’s get the suitcases and get the hell out of here and back home,” Maureen told Virgil as she hugged him.
    Loretta glanced from Virgil to Maureen. “Home? Back home to Mama Ruby’s old house with the upper room where Uncle Virgil lives now?” she asked in an excited voice, picking at the dried snot beneath her nose. “Yippee!”
    â€œNo, sugar! I don’t want to go anywhere near that place. I don’t even want to be in the same house where Mama Ruby lived and died. Not for a while at least,” Maureen said quickly, her eyes blinking like an owl as she looked from Virgil to Loretta.