Normally the muscle who comes chasing after my father’s debts aren’t this tough-looking, and Danny had never managed to rack up quite as much.
“Seems your brother owes my boss some money he can’t pay, and you have nothing worth a shit here.”
I flinch at the insult.
To me, this whole place is priceless, and now most of it is destroyed.
“So what are we going to do now?” he asks, leaning in closer. The pungent smell of cigarettes attacking my senses
“I, uh, a payment plan maybe?”
This makes all three of the men laugh.
“How long would it take you to pay off fifty g’s with your job, sweetie? Twenty, thirty years?” he asks menacingly.
“About that.” I sigh. He’s not wrong. I barely make enough money to pay bills and tuition, let alone put money towards Johnny’s debt.
“See why that’s not an option?” he scolds.
I nod.
He stands up, dusting off his jeans and looking down at me intensely. “You have forty-eight hours to figure this out, sweetie. Or your brother will be paying with his life. Got it?”
I swallow down the golf ball-sized lump in my throat.
“Got it.”
“Oh, shit.” Johnny’s words echo through the apartment.
My apartment, my sanctuary is disheveled. More than disheveled, its a disaster.
The space isn’t big, it’s a small one-bedroom apartment I rent in a somewhat nice area of downtown Providence. The building is old, built in the 1920s, with an ancient elevator that has classic scissor gates. The apartment itself has cream-colored walls, crown molding, and hundred-year-old hardwood floors that have seen better days. The whole place is a little dated, but for the staggering price of one thousand a month, it was the best I could afford. Plus, I loved the charm of the old place.
The creamy walls were looking a little scuffed and dirty after my visitors and the only piece of furniture not overturned in the living room was my trusty old gray couch that my brother was now sitting on.
“Listen, Annie, they were just joking around, honestly it’s fine.” Johnny smiles crookedly from his spot on the couch. He has a wild head of ashy blonde hair, slightly darker than mine. He normally covers it with a baseball cap but today it’s an unruly mop on top of his head. He looks messy in ripped jeans and a baggy t-shirt.
Next to him, our cousin Rob is slumped back on the sofa. We’d been a trio since we could crawl, but of the three of us, Rob was most likely to get us into trouble. The two of them had been brought home in a police car more times than I could count.
Not that we had a good set of parents to correct us, anyway. I had spent most of my childhood taking care of the two of them. Rob’s mom was in and out of rehab, and like our mother his father took off when we were young.
The three of us were mostly left to our own devices.
“Fine?” I pivot on my heel to face my baby brother. “How is this fine?” I gesture to the disaster that is my apartment.
Johnny tries to display himself as easy-going. When we were younger he was. He always had a plan or an idea. As we got older though, I realized that the plan always sucked, and I was the one left to clean up the mess.
He ran a hand through his messy hair. “I have a plan.”
My stomach dropped. Of course, he does.
“They said you owe fifty k.”
He shrugged nonchalantly. “Like I said, banana, I have a plan.”
My lips pursed at him using my nickname. He was trying to calm me, but it wasn’t working this time.
“What did you do, John?”
“I mean, they opened a tab for me Annie. It’s fine, I’ll pay it back. This was just a reminder.”
The other thing about Johnny, he inherited far too many traits from our father.
Alcohol, check. Johnny would drink all night, past the point of being belligerent. He’d walk home in an alcohol-fueled stupor getting himself into trouble.
Drugs, double-check. Our father, the great man that he was, had introduced Johnny to pot at twelve. From there, it was all downhill.
And now, gambling.
I took a deep breath. Yelling at him wouldn’t solve anything, I needed to check my attitude.
“Who did you open a tab with?”
“You know, the casino. That one is Boston they just opened. They opened me a tab so I just gotta give them a few bucks and they’ll be happy.”
“A few bucks?” My nails bit into the palms of my hands from clenching my fists. “They said you owe fifty grand.”
Rob whistled low. “That much?”
“It’s fine.” Johnny declared, again. He leaned forward resting both elbows on his knees, he turned his head to look up to me. “I swear banana, it’s gonna be fine. Rob and I got a plan.”
“What plan Johnny?” Talking to him was exhausting. “How can you possibly get that much money? Do you know what they’re gonna do to you? They’ll kill you, John. That’s what they’ll do. And for all, we know they’ll take me down with you.”
“Hey,” Johnny springs from the couch to put a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “It’s fine, we have a plan, Annie. I’m not going to let anything happen to us.”
I release the breath I’d been holding since those men walked into my apartment.
“Okay, what’s the plan?”
“It’s a good plan.” Johnny shrugged nonchalantly.
In another life he must’ve been a politician, telling people what they wanted to
