Page 75 of Ask Your Mom If I'm Real

I hadn’t wasted any money.

I didn’t have any money.

The only thing that I had was what the government gave me. I had money on my food stamps card. I had free healthcare for Anleigh.

And that was it.

He didn’t give me money to live.

I bought the groceries for the house.

I cooked.

I worked as many hours as necessary.

What I didn’t do is get a paycheck with money to burn.

The money I’d gotten to pay for tonight was from Mrs. Rawls.

The only time I ever got to go out to eat was when Gisela took me out.

“I didn’t waste any money, I promise,” I said.

He scoffed. “Go get your daughter and go to bed.”

Never Anleigh.

He’d never called her by her name before.

He wasn’t the nice grandpa that you saw all over the internet.

Hell, he’d never even held her.

Anleigh seemed to instinctively know to stay away from him, too.

Not once had she tried to go to him.

“Okay,” I said as I stood up.

If I went fast, the redness of my face wouldn’t be as noticeable as it would if I gave my face time to settle in with the bruising.

Rushing out of the house, I ignored the bite of cold that assaulted me—yet another reminder that I needed a damn coat, and so did Anleigh—and hauled ass to Mrs. Rawls’s door.

Mrs. Rawls was a rather new addition to our neighborhood.

Her husband had died a couple of years ago, and the house she’d been living in had been too hard for her to keep up. So her grandkids had found her a new place that was closer to the eldest granddaughter. A granddaughter that lived three houses down and had a daughter Anleigh’s age.

I loved all of them, but had to keep my distance to ensure that they didn’t cotton on to my reality.

Honestly, I wouldn’t have even taken Mrs. Rawls up on her offer to watch Anleigh had she not caught me arguing that I ‘didn’t have a babysitter’ with Gisela in the driveway earlier.

Mrs. Rawls opened the door before I could reach it to knock and smiled at me.

She was a rather plump woman with a ready smile, rosy cheeks, and the most calming presence that just made you want to sink into her arms.

This was the kind of grandparent that Anleigh deserved.

Not one like my father, who was a disgrace to male kind.

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