Love Songs: The Wrong Note - A Collection of Short Stories

Taken

1

It's never a good time to be poor. But it's worse when everything and everyone around you is going through hard times, too.

The poor, like the elderly, are often invisible, especially when the well-to-do are pinching pennies and praying the monster called The Great Depression will devour itself and things will get back to some semblance of normal.

"Your mama and papa's dead."

That's the line that always let the older children know their lives had taken a tragically terrible turn for the worst.

I oughta know. I was one of Savannah San Sebastian's agents for over twelve years.

It was easy.

For most of my career, I haunted the rural backroads of Appalachia. Kids were crawling those hills and hollows like weeds. Hang out at a country store for a few hours. Catch up on the gossip.

Folks were eager to spread a little mud, spin a story of abandon and sin.

It's always easier to throw rocks at someone caught in the throes of wanton lust. Some called it love. But others knew it was just rutting. And like any feral hog, rut enough, and you're bound to get caught.

Only that kind of catch is usually worse for the woman.

She pays the price while her male counterpart walks away. She becomes the whore. He . . . well, he's stocked with plenty of stories that make all his peers jealous.

So, I'd hang around these knot-on-a-log hicksville communities. Get to know a local yokel. Milk him for the goods on who was in trouble. Who needed a white knight to ride in and rescue the damsel in the moment of her most acute distress.

That's when I'd show up. Knock on the door. Even as the screams and curses were coming upstairs. And after it was over, I'd tip toe in. Tell the young girl – she was always young, uneducated, sometimes pretty, sometimes as homely as soap – but always attentive to my well-rehearsed speech.

"You are not to be blamed for this situation," I'd begin. "You are as much a victim here as this little babe. Time's being what they are, I think another mouth to feed would just about spell the end for your pa and ma. Don't you?"

The shame of her situation, unwed and holding the obvious result of the wages of sin in her hands, she, more often than not, looked at me with confusion in her teary eyes.

And after a few more visits, I'd be headed down the road with a newborn riding shotgun in the seat beside me to Savannah San Sebastian's Home for Orphaned and Unwanted Children.

I was good at what I did. Though, at the time, I didn't know that my old job would later come back and bite me on the butt.