Page 9 of All the Ugly Things
I took the card because of the green beneath. I didn’t help him with his car for a tip, but I was no fool. It’d make him feel better, help put food on my table, money for the bus and laundry. Maybe I could splurge on Chipotle, a luxury in my life, if he was feeling really generous.
“Take care, Mr. Valentine.”
He grinned. A wide smile with perfectly white straight teeth. “It’s David.”
Not gonna happen.
He was a customer. He wasn’t my friend. We’d never be on equal footing.
I went back to the diner, went back to work, studying during breaks which I had a lot of because it was a slow night.
And when I got home that night, I dug through my tips, chucked the white business card into my garbage can and unfolded the cash from him.
To find three crisp, one-hundred-dollar bills.
3
Hudson
My office overlooked the Des Moines River with a full view of the glass-bottom pedestrian bridge. The office next to mine was held by my father. I grew up here. Watched it changed from an old, small city in a mainly farming state to a thriving, booming area with all the perks of a large city with the smaller size and family feel. Over the last fifteen years, we’d help build bandshell parks and stadiums, invested in new downtown condos to help stem the brain-drain—college graduates who left Iowa for larger cities like Chicago or Minneapolis. We built outdoor skating rinks, larger parks in the downtown area for growing families. We invested in real estate from condos to row homes to single-family homes and modernizing old buildings to turn them into lofts.
Our efforts worked. Now college graduates from other states were moving to Des Moines due to the lower cost of living and variety of offerings for their new lives. Our population continued to grow.
Our small empire was thriving.
My dad was a king of a small community, and I, its prince.
My current focus was just west of downtown, an area loved for its natural lifestyle and walkability footprint. Centuries-old homes, long ago turned into apartments, were crumbling and those who could afford to do so were hightailing it out of there, leaving those left worse off with higher crime rates and fewer jobs as mom-and-pop stores closed up their doors either due to poor business, or higher break-ins and thefts.
Des Moines might be a smaller city, but it faced all the issues of larger ones, at a comparable scale.
I was desperate to fix it. To give everyone who lived there an equal beginning and the same chance at creating a safe home for their children and themselves and the ability to work at something they took pride in. Granted, I couldn’t fix people or their internal motivations, but I could give them something beautiful and affordable to desire, perhaps sparking a new goal in them.
I was scouring over the final proposal plans, analyzing a row of homes near dilapidation status we would soon raze and then rebuild when my dad walked in.
He didn’t bother knocking, but I didn’t expect him to. And when I did expect it, years ago, he didn’t do it then anyway, so I quit. Now, I showed up early in the mornings, grabbed my coffee and got to work, leaving my door open until we had our morning catch-up.
He was more tired than usual and while I could brush it off, irritation made my jaw tight. My eyes hardened.
“You saw her.” I didn’t have to ask. He never slept well on those nights, and it wasn’t due to the sugar in the damn pie.
He didn’t confirm or deny, just came in and slumped into the chair across from my desk. One elbow went to the armrest, his chin fell into his palm. “What’s this?”
He reached for the papers in front of me, and I brushed his hand away. “Did you talk to her this time?”
“Of course I talked to her.”
“About anything more than her schooling?”
An ex-con going to community college to get a degree so she could be an office administration assistant. I already knew she was too smart for that, even if I hatedhowI knew it.
“Gave her your card. Told her we’d love to help her find a job.”
“My card?What the hell, Dad?” This was his gig. His sudden new drive and while I understood it, it wasn’t my thing. I was all for giving people second chances and it wasn’t because she went to prison. Hell, it wasn’t even because she pled guilty to killing someone.
It was everything else about her that ate away at my generally large amount of compassion and kindness and grace.
This woman would bring trouble into our lives, a lot of it. She’d bring pain and heartache and suffering, and my dad had been through enough in the last ten years.
