One Good Hustle - By Billie Livingston Page 0,1

want to deal with Ruby. I start fidgeting with the beanbag chair—the orange leather is peeling like bad sunburn.

“Tell me about your mom. Has she been hurting you?”

My eyes jerk up. Hurting? Does she mean hitting? “Shit, I could take my mother,” I blurt. Stupid thing to say. I’m stupid. “No. It’s her. She wants to, like”—I look back at Foxy, the silver gun on her ankle—“hurt herself. She wants to kill herself.”

Ruby’s skinny, pencilled eyebrows rise.

I feel like a fink—but really, it’s barely anything, what I told. It’s not like it’s illegal to have suicidal thoughts. Part of me is relieved. The rest is embarrassed like I just coughed up phlegm. Except it’s not my phlegm and I have no right coughing it up.

“I offered to help,” I add. “No, I mean …”

Ruby’s eyes are sympathetic all of a sudden. I have just become a pathetic little splotch on her daughter’s beanbag chair: some poor, sticky welfare kid with a mother who plans to off herself.

Regular Ruby and her regular husband, Lou, in their regular house with their regular pickup truck. What’s a Regular Ruby supposed to think of a situation like this?

I look at her. She has pink blusher on her freckled cheeks and stubby mascaraed eyelashes that I can just make out in the dim light of Jill’s hanging paper lantern. Jill told me once that her parents were real partiers until they became Christians. Then they gave up drinking and settled right down. It is a fact that I have not seen Ruby or Lou drink since I’ve been here, but I haven’t seen anyone go to church either.

It’s probably true, though. I’m a total magnet for Jesus freaks. My best friend Drew is a Jesus freak but we haven’t spoken since I took off. He probably hates me now. Christian or not, you can only turn your other cheek for so damn long.

“She’s depressed,” I explain to Ruby. “She always talks about it. She’s tried it a couple of times. Sort of. So, when she told me she was definitely going to do it, I offered to help her get pills. But I said I wasn’t going to watch.”

Ruby winces and I go back to picking the orange skin on the beanbag chair. “Yeah,” I say, and suddenly I’m goofing with the ditzy hippie-voice that Jill and I like to do. “Like, a totally bad scene, baby. Not cool.”

Ruby just sits, her stubby little hands on her knees. She has three rings on one and two on the other. I can hear Marlene sing the way she did when I was a kid: “With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, she shall have music wherever she goes!”

I don’t believe that my mother will actually kill herself. But I’m not telling Ruby that. Or the fact that I sort of wish she would. We really are fucked up, Marlene and me. There’s no greeting card for a case like us.

Ruby lifts her hands off her knees, laces her fingers and looks into the empty bowl of her palms. Here is the church, here is the steeple, I think. Open the doors and where are the people?

She lets a slow sigh go. “When’s the last time you saw her?”

“A few days ago. I had to pick up some more clothes. She asked me to get her some stuff at the store.”

Her eyebrows angle up again, then her mouth gets thin and hard and she gives me one of those solid looks of determination that grown-ups sport on kids’ TV. I can see now why little kids might like that sort of thing. It’s confidence building.

“Did you know we used to run a group home here, Sammie?”

I nod. Jill talks about those days sometimes, the harsh chicks and guys who used to stay here, prosti-tots and pickpockets. Jill told me that if one of those girls heard that a new guy was coming to the house, she’d go stand outside on the porch so that her nipples would get hard from the cold. I didn’t get it. Jill explained that it was so the guy would get turned on at the sight of her and then nipple-chick would be first in line for his weed or whatever he was carrying. I found that hard to believe. Jill put her hand on her hip, pushed her fat lips out at me and said, “Look, baby, I know more about sex and drugs than you’ll know in