Read Online Fight for Her#3 by JJ Knight - Free Book Online

of me.  
    I feel like I’m six years old, but I don’t care.
    The silence goes on. Neither of us moves.
    “Lily was right, there are monsters under the bed,” I say finally.
    “And who did she call when she wanted to get rid of them?”
    Damn it. He has me there. “She called you.”
    “Did we get the job done?”
    “She went back to sleep.”
    Another long moment. Neither of us knows how to fix this.
    “Do you remember that night we saw your father drinking from empties behind Drake’s Bar?” he asks.
    I do. Mom threw my dad out of the house when I was twelve. He’d always been a drunk, but not the mean kind. The sad, contemplative version. My mother was a shrew, always on his case, pecking at him one way or another. She discovered he was with some other woman and threw his clothes out on the street.
    I came home from school to find him trying to organize his shirts and underwear into piles. It was too much for me. The boxers strung across the yard. My dad, so stumbling drunk he could barely hold himself upright. And then my mom, pacing the house, screaming and cursing into the phone at her various friends who hadn’t told her about this other woman.
    For a while, he was just gone. Then I guess something went wrong with the other lady and he ended up wandering the streets, bumming cigarettes and drinking cheap whiskey from a paper sack. I saw him a few times sitting on park benches. I didn’t try to approach him. I was scared of my mother and she made it very clear I was to stay far away.
    He must have lost his job somewhere in there, as the next time I saw him he was dressed in tatters. It was my fourteenth birthday. I barely recognized him. He didn’t know what day it was, and when he saw me, he just waved. I turned and ran.
    I didn’t start to feel empowered until I turned eighteen. I knew I could leave home whenever I wanted. My mother had no control over me.
    I stayed because I could live more cheaply and always managed to arrange my school and work hours so we were never in the house at the same time during waking hours. We rarely crossed paths. I kept some food in the fridge and tidied up enough that she didn’t fuss. We got by.
    Then came Parker. She despised him. Saw all the no-good in him, living as a fighter.
    The night we ran into my father behind Drake’s was bad. Mom had unexpectedly come home, not feeling well, and flew into a rage when she saw Parker in my room.
    We raced out of there, me feeling upset and embarrassed. We got to our favorite bar, but someone new was behind the counter. He carded me. I was not quite nineteen, so he told me to leave. Instead of going out the front, where some friends of mine were standing around and might laugh at me, Parker steered us out the back.
    I was pretty sore at the world by then, between my mother and not getting a drink. When we heard the clink of a bottle falling in the dumpster, Parker pulled me behind him.
    An overhead light on the back of the bar provided enough light for us to make out the man digging through the trash. Parker relaxed, realizing it was just a hunched-over old man.
    “You got a buck you can spare?” the man asked, and I almost didn’t recognize his voice, as old and gravelly as it had gotten.
    But when he looked up, I knew him. His bushy eyebrows hadn’t changed, nor the sad sorrowful look in his eyes.
    “Madelyn,” he said. “You’re all grown.”
    Parker looked back and forth between us. “You know this man?”
    “He’s my dad,” I said. At the time, I thought Parker might up and leave after all this. My mother hated him. And now he would know my dad was a vagrant.
    But Parker said, “Can we help you somehow? You need a place to sleep?”
    I remember the tightness in my chest that came with Parker’s words. I had done nothing to help my father all this time, just feeling shame, and Parker was offering him his home?
    Dad waved his hand away. “I got my own little spot,” he said. “It works for me.” He kept