My dad started working down by the border for some bikers maybe six months ago? Not your ideal employers, but it wasn’t like I could give him my open and honest critique. I wasn’t even supposed to acknowledge the very real change in his demeanor—I’d have been punished for clocking the shift in his phone use and schedule, for eavesdropping on more than one occasion, for having a brain and a pulse and for paying attention.

So, for a while he sends money. Money transfers that arrived on my phone or Steph’s with no message attached, just a security question whose answer was my name.

And then he stops sending, and we figure, Sure, that’s about right.

I didn’t have to tell Steph he wasn’t coming back anytime soon. She knew. She was good like that.

I’m nothing if not highly adaptable, she bragged the first day she came home in the uniform she had to wear at the gas station. It was just black pants and a black polo shirt with the company’s red logo on the pocket, but it looked way wrong on her. Usually she wore pajamas, flannel ones in pastels or long nightshirts with flowers and teddy bears on them, the kind of thing I’d never seen on an adult before. Or else she’d be done up, red lipstick and hairspray, tight outfits and knee-high boots. Never before in between, until Dad disappearing necessitated the gas station. The work clothes didn’t dull her though. She seemed unbothered by employment in a way I had never witnessed. Sinking into the couch eagerly afterwards, her things spread out on the table within reach. Smokes, lighter, ashtray, phone. A Big Gulp from the gas station and her purse, with its stash of pills.

Your parental units have failed you, Bria, Steph once said to

me, but you yourself are not to blame.

Aren’t you sort of a parental unit? I asked. She was, ostensibly, my dad’s girlfriend and for a few months my equally ostensible guardian.

Exactly, she said.

For a couple of months, we were fine without him. She worked a few days a week and I had my part-time burger bucks, and he seemed to be paying the mortgage and bills on time, or someone was. There was no one to hassle me to keep up with school, I had my own thing going on at night, and soon I met Someboy.