Excerpt of The Key to Circus-Mom Highway by Allyson Rice

Without looking back, Jesse flipped him the bird over both shoulders as she walked out, passing Amber just outside the door. Without a glance in her direction, Jesse said, “He’s all yours, Amber. Good luck with that...”

Amber’s response to that was a loud snap of her gum as she braced her olfactory senses and headed back in to Kyle. Jesse, holding her stomach, made a beeline for the restroom down the hall where she immediately vomited. Not because of Kyle’s internal combustion system, but because the stress of life these past few weeks had been taking a toll on her own internal system.

“Shit,” she mumbled as she wiped her mouth with the last three squares of cheap, 1-ply toilet paper on the roll.

She rinsed her mouth in the stained porcelain sink, and wiped her face down with a handful of cool, wet paper towels, absentmindedly running her fingers along the scar on her collarbone as she so often did. She stared at herself in the cracked bathroom mirror, her reflection adorned with a crude drawing of a penis and hairy balls that some neighborhood Michelangelo had scratched into the glass at forehead level. She looked like a mutant unicorn from Three Mile Island.

“Now what?...” she asked her defeated reflection. No response came.

It had been a rough five years since her parents had died. Their sudden deaths had sent her into an escalating tailspin, which is what precipitated the difficulty she began to have holding on to jobs. Her living situation changed almost as frequently, which is the only reason she had ended up living with a creep like Kyle. Par for the course these days. She was repulsed by him, but a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do to make ends meet, she figured. Now here she was again, starting back at ground zero. Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect $200. Not quite the life she had imagined for herself by age almost-forty.

She stared at the scar running along her collarbone. Most people’s emotional scars were easily hidden, but she had to look at her emotional scar every time she saw it reflected in a mirror, or a window… or in the eyes of every single goddamn person I meet, she thought. She had tried to camouflage it with the fire-breathing dragon tattoo, but all that did was put an enormous spotlight it. She couldn’t win for losing.

Dwayne was busy with a customer and didn’t see Jesse when she ducked back behind the bar to hastily grab her personal belongings. On second thought, as she was about to leave, she turned back, grabbed two bottles of the most expensive top-shelf liquor they carried, and set them on the bar in front of some customers.

“Help yourself, fellas. Kyle said it’s on him. He’s starting ‘Free Booze Tuesdays – All You Can Drink’. Tell everyone you know!”

The men practically pounced on the bottles of free tequila and whiskey. Jesse, with a deep breath, headed out the side door into the bright light of day, like a POW exiting captivity.

***

Jesse climbed three flights of stairs, then unlocked the front door and entered Kyle’s third-floor walk-up. His studio apartment was about as nice a place as his dingy office, except for a few touches here and there that made it seem like a woman had at least attempted to make it better than a frat boy’s dorm room, Chicago Bears bedspread notwithstanding.

Jesse darted around the apartment quickly, gathering her things and shoving her clothes and personal items into an old canvas duffel bag that she pulled down from a shelf in the closet. Once the duffel bag was full, she supplemented with a few plastic grocery bags that she pulled out of a broken kitchen drawer. Her thoughts as she raced around -- ranging from anger at Kyle, to relief at being rid of him, to panic about where she could land next -- bounced around in her head like a pinball machine. While snippets of her phone conversation replayed in her head on endless repeat mode.

Kyle’s puppy, in a dog cage in the corner, watched her curiously, head cocked to the side, wagging his tail as Jesse hurried about, mumbling to herself. He was a mixed breed puppy that Kyle said he found sleeping in the bushes outside their building. Though Jesse was pretty sure that was code for “I stole him from a neighbor who was distracted doing laundry in the basement.”

Kyle had grandiose plans to train it and make money in the underground dogfighting scene in their neighborhood. But since Jesse thought the sweet little thing might actually be part Golden Retriever and part Beanie Baby, she figured the odds weren’t good for the success of that business plan in the face of disgruntled Pit Bulls and Rottweilers.

Right on cue after Jesse mumbled to herself, “What am I forgetting?... What am I forgetting?” the puppy gave a tiny little yelp.

“Ohhhh, sweetie,” she purred at him.

She stood in the middle of the room facing the cage, conflicted, the two of them locked in a staring battle. The puppy won.

“Okay, I don’t know where we’re going to live, but I’m not leaving you here with that fucker. He doesn’t deserve you. Come here, baby,” she said as she set her bags down, pulled him out of the cage, and kissed him squarely on his soft, furry, blonde head. Then she set him down on the floor and picked up the dog cage. She carried it across the room where she proceeded to turn it sideways and dump the dog shit out of the cage and onto the center of the bed.

“Who’s the shitty lay now, Kyle?” she said to no one in particular.

Jesse walked back to the corner, set the cage down, picked up her bags and the puppy, and grabbed her guitar case that was leaning against the wall next to the front door. Then she walked out of Kyle’s place for the very last time, stealing his dog as she went.

©2022 Allyson Rice