Page 81 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

“No, I mean, I already feel better.”

“You do?”

Jinx had gone through the roof when he found out Margo had flushed his stash. He’d spent the whole night sweating and having diarrhea.

“Yeah, I mean, not just the stomach cramping, but my back. I noticed it when I got in the car. And it’s only been, what, like half an hour?”

She could hear the hope in his voice. What if it worked? What if he didn’t have to choose between being in constant pain or being the scum of the earth? What if there were more than just those two choices?

“Well, we’ll see,” Margo said. They had to start the methadone at a low dose because the whole point of it was that it stayed in your system for an incredibly long time. If you titrated up too fast, you might accidentally OD. The doctor had explained that Jinx would probably start feeling withdrawal symptoms that evening. It wouldn’t be nearly as bad as the night before, though. And he could come at five a.m. when they opened for his next dose. It would take at least a few weeks before they titrated up to a perfect dose, enough to keep cravings at bay and manage Jinx’s pain without making him a zombie.

But it was hope. They were both underslept and exhausted, but it was hope.

“You know what I wanna do?” Jinx asked, as they climbed out of the car. He was smiling, and his skin looked normal, and Margo could not stop herself from smiling back at him.

“What?”

“I want to get really into making bread. Like aggressively into it.”

“Okay, now you’re just trying to make yourself indispensable,” Margo said, reaching to take Bodhi from him.

“No, it’s okay,” Jinx said, “my back feels good right now.”

Margo looked at him. He didn’t seem high and was steady on his feet. In that moment, Margo could not think of a single price she wouldn’t be willing to pay for her dad to smile at her like that on the sidewalk, Bodhi perched in the crook of his arm, looking around the dazzling morning like a somber little owl. She tried not to think about the weeks and weeks that Jinx had been lying to her, getting high, and she hadn’t even noticed. She tried not to think about what that meant, those dark air bubbles in the past.

“After you, my sweet,” he said, gesturing her to the door of their building.

She stepped forward and opened it, then held it for him, “After you, my meat!”

There is a desperation to a novel that is unsettling. The world so painstakingly re-created in miniature; this tiny diorama made of words. Why go to all this trouble, to create me, to seduce you, to enumerate so many different breakfast cereals? To make the cunning tiny apartment, the itsy-bitsy Jinx? It’s like going to meet your new boyfriend’s family for the first time and discovering they are all paid actors. It’s almost easier to believe I’m real than to understand what’s actually going on. The desperation that could have caused anyone to invent me in the first place. The urgency and need that would require creating an imaginary space of this size and level of detail.

And it really makes you wonder: What kind of truth would require this many lies to tell?

Chapter Twenty-One

When I called Ward that afternoon and explained the Jinx methadone situation, he freaked out. “Drugs entering into this is bad news, Margo. It will screw up everything.”

I wanted to believe that if I explained the moral conundrum, Dr. Sharp and Mark and even the judge would understand. Wasn’t it the right thing to do, to help a family member struggling with addiction? Wasn’t he in a treatment program actively attempting to recover? Why should it make me look worse to be helping him? Addiction wasn’t contagious.

“No,” Ward said. “It’s one too many things. You have your age, you have the OnlyFans, you have the pro wrestling stuff—you add drugs? It starts to look real bad.”

I knew what Ward meant. He meant it made us look like white trash. Which we were. Which I’d always known.

“What should I do?” I asked.

“I mean, if I were you, I would lie.”

“You would?”

“Not outright, but don’t bring it up. What do you have left, just the home visit, right? Jinx doesn’t even have to be there for that, you could say he’s out seeing a movie. If they were looking for drugs as an angle, maybe they would figure out he’s registered with the methadone clinic, but I’m not even sure with HIPAA if they have access to that. In fact, I doubt it. How many people know about Jinx’s relapse?”

“I mean, right now, just me.”

“I would keep it that way. And when you do that home visit, lie your little ass off. Pretend the relapse never even happened. Do you think you can do that?”

“I think so,” I said. I mean, I wasn’t Shyanne and Jinx’s daughter for nothing. Lineage-wise, I was practically falsehood royalty. How many times had I pretended my own grandmother had died?

JB was coming that Friday, a fact so exciting and scary I almost squealed every time I thought about it. By Thursday, Jinx seemed relatively stable, and I knew I couldn’t wait any longer.

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