Saving Rain

by Kelsey Kingsley

The rent and electric bill were both due, and it wouldn’t be long before the cable bill was late. There was nothing to eat in the kitchen. And Mom had, of course, forgotten to do anything but buy her precious pills and booze with the little money she’d gotten at the new salon in town. She had worked there for a promising two months before Gordon asked me to open the grocery store for a week. Apparently, Mom needed me to wake her up in the morning, and she had failed to show up for work that entire week. “Mom, you need to get another job,” I said with a sigh, holding my head in my hands at the kitchen table we could no longer use for eating. I hadn’t seen the surface of that table in years. I had six hundred expendable dollars in my wallet. That could cover the electric, groceries, and part of the rent, but it wasn’t enough for everything. And while I could maybe beg the landlord for a couple more weeks to get the rest of the money together, that would only solve the problem this month. What about the next or the one after that? “Maybe you can pick up more hours at the grocery store,” she suggested, slumped in her chair. She was taking more pills than usual these days. She could barely keep her eyes open on a good day—and today wasn’t one of them. “I can’t work more hours. They have laws against that.” “Since when do we care about laws?” She might not care about laws, but I did. Maybe I didn’t always do the right thing, maybe I didn’t live my life by the book, but that didn...