Read Online Moment of Impact by Lisa Mondello - Free Book Online

beach.
    “This is what it’s like when I walk to Scooners,” she says, holding my hand as she digs her toes in the sand. “Quiet. Peaceful.”
    “Do you make good money there?”
    “The tips are great. But I leave there smelling like French fries and eggs just about every day. Don’t say you haven’t noticed.”
    I laugh because I know exactly what she means. “My first job was a dishwasher at an Italian restaurant. I ended up wearing a lot of spaghetti sauce by the end of the night.”
    We walk about twenty feet in silence and then I ask, “You look like your Chinese or something.”
    She glances at me quick and smiles. “Hawaiian. My mother is half Hawaiian.”
    “Yeah? What’s the other half?”
    She chuckles. “Irish. My father make me even stranger. He’s Swedish. What about you?”
    I shrug. I knew the question was coming, but I don’t like talking about myself the way some people do.
    “I’m a mutt.”
    “A mutt?”
    “So they say.”
    “Who is they?”
    The tide is coming in and the surf is spreading over the dry sand we’d been walking on.
    I squeeze her hand in mine and it gives me a measure of comfort. “I lived in a lot of places. In a lot of homes.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Families who got paid to keep me there.”
    She stops walking and looks up at me. Her eyes are sad and her smile is gone. I hate that. I don’t want to talk about myself anymore. How the fuck can I ever keep the past where it belongs without it ruining the present? Every day I wait for the impact. That moment when the good will get ruined by the bad. It always happens. I don’t know anything else. I don’t want it to ruin us.
    But Lily isn’t moving. She doesn’t say anything except with her eyes. She’s waiting, digging her toes in the wet sand and then packing it down again.
    “What do you want to know?” I finally ask.
    “Everything.”
    “The summer will be over before I get to everything.”
    She gives me a hint of a smile. “We have the summer.”
    I take a deep breath of salty sea air and look out at the ocean. It rolls and swells and comes into shore and then back out to sea a million times a day. A different pattern but the same motion. That was my life. A storm of waves that crashed against the rock and then retreated only to do the same thing over and again.
    “My mom was a heroin addict. She died when I was two.”
    She squeezes my hand. “That’s awful.”
    “I don’t remember her. I lived with my dad until I was about eight and then he got arrested for dealing. He was her supplier. He shot her up the night she died.”
    “Where is he now?”
    “Still in prison. I think I’ll be about thirty-five when he finally gets out. I haven’t seen him since I was eight though.”
    “These families you lived with…”
    “Foster homes. Lots of them. Some of them were decent. But I was a handful. It was a lot for them to take. So when I wasn’t living there, I was in juvie.”
    I tug her arm. I don’t want to stand still. I need to keep moving as if that will put all this talk behind me.
    “Who is Edmond? I mean, I know you said he was your parole officer, but it seems strange that a parole officer would want you to stay with a member of his own family.”
    “Edmond isn’t like the others. He’s…kind of like a big brother, I guess. He’s hard on me. He gives me shit straight and doesn’t sugar coat it. The last time I got arrested for assault…” I glance at her and add, “Without a weapon.”
    “That’s good to know.”
    “He told me if I didn’t do what he said I’d end up like my dad, spending my life in prison.”
    “That was enough to make you change?”
    “No. It was an eye-opener though. Thing is, I got into a lot of fights. Edmond gave me a lot of shit about abandonment and stuff. I guess maybe he’s right. He said I was trying to get someone’s attention and I had his, and he was going to set me straight. I fought him hard for a while. But he gave the judge my sob story and