Read Online Cha-Ching! by Ali Liebegott - Free Book Online

onto roofs or rifling through strangers’ medicine cabinets. It was unfortunate to do these things at sixteen, but at nearly thirty—forget it.
    Theo was starting to realize why her room cost only three hundred dollars. Doralina had converted a pantry off the kitchen into a tiny bedroom and hung a curtain for a door, and she’d stay in her cave smoking menthol cigarettes and watching sports all day on TV. Theo quickly figured out that not only did Doralina pay no rent by subletting the rooms, she’d increased the number of them so she was making a profit. When Theo went into the kitchen to make one of her bowls of oatmeal she’d hear Doralina cheering for or against some team through the curtain. She tried to avoid Doralina, because she always wanted a ride somewhere or for Theo to lend her money.
    Doralina’s best friend, Megan, lived across the hall from Theo, where she kept what seemed like ten million rabbits in cages. In letters to Olivia, Theo referred to Megan as “the rabbit hoarder.” The rabbit hoarder worked at a bank and dated a bunch of noncommittal men who all had the same shellacked hair. One rainy day Megan’s car broke down and she devised a plan to go to a Saturn Dealership with Doralina and purposely slip in the parking lot, hoping to get a free car. When she had no other choice, Theo made small talk with Megan and Doralina, but mostly she hid in her room with Cary Grant.
    Two paydays after she started her data entry job she could finally afford a vet visit to get Cary Grant’s cast removed. The dog’s skinny leg look naked without its pink cast, and Theo bought a package of hamburger meat to celebrate its removal. Theo had lost weight since she’d moved to New York, the result of a combination of not drinking alcohol and being broke. Between doing data entry five days a week and sometimes helping Randy on the weekends at the Kwik Stop, she couldn’t understand how she was still having a hard time making ends meet. It was just expensive to be alive; at least that’s what Theo had told her customers when she worked at the Party Store and they were surprised by how much things cost.
    Each day after work, while the dog wandered around the dog park, Theo read a few pages of Lust for Life: The Biography of Vincent Van Gogh . It inspired her to buy a small sketchbook and a box of charcoals. Sometimes she’d sit on the bench and try to capture the variety of poses the dogs made while playing. She loved how filthy the charcoal made her hands and the sound of it moving across the paper, how the smooth page ate up the marks. Eventually the park would fill up with people and someone would make small talk with Theo, especially a carpenter named Danny. He was a stocky white guy with blond hair and a steel-gray pit bull named Baby. A few weeks after seeing each other every day at the park he asked Theo out to dinner. She was shocked. She didn’t know if he had a dyke fetish or if the dating pool in Yonkers was slim pickings. Theo coveted his expensive work boots, endured boring dinner conversation, and watched him get drunk on margaritas while she devoured baskets of chips and salsa at the local travesty of a Mexican restaurant. Even Theo, who was no food connoisseur, knew there was no such thing as a good burrito in Yonkers. When she went on these “dates” with Danny she ate her burrito quickly, letting it slide down her throat the way a snake eats a rat.

four
    Around Thanksgiving, when Theo had lived in Yonkers almost three months, she remembered she’d never called Sammy back. Surely she was done working on a fishing boat by now. Theo dialed her number.
    â€œSammy?” Theo said.
    â€œYes?”
    â€œIt’s Theo, from jail.”
    â€œOh my God! My aunt told me you called,” Sammy said excitedly, “but you didn’t leave a number. Is it true you’re in New York?”
    â€œSort of. I’m in Yonkers,” Theo