Joe Beggar and his fourteen-year-old daughter Mindy Beggar have lived in the same dilapidated trailer since Mindy was a baby. Mindy knows no other home. The trailer resides in a tiny RV park, only 9 spots for old wasted trailers, a camper shell on bricks, a truck and a few illegally propped tents. At night, crack addicts and prostitutes roam the streets. The darkness of the Beggar residence is illuminated by the light of Goddess Television, for Joe Beggar, a loyal worker of the Goddess, comes home to no wife and no mother for his child. In the secret hollows of his mind (and his home,) Goddess fills the lonely emptiness.
Joe bangs around the cramped kitchen, like every evening, putting a few disparate items from the refrigerator in a pot. Then opening a cheap can of watered-down beer, Joe falls into a recliner in front of the TV and waits for Mindy to come home. Joe can't relax till he hears her footsteps on the steps.
Moths congregate around the porch light as Mindy mounts the steps to the trailer. The bare bulb hurt her pale blue eyes. Turning her head away her dishwater blonde hair becomes a sickly green. She steps inside she welcomes the signature scent of home. It's a dark smell, an old carpet baked in the sun smell, magazines, cigarette butts and booze smell.
She pauses one step in the doorway ready for her father to chide her. "You're late, Mindy," he says, but always says that. He isn't really mad, just concerned. Always concerned. He doesn't want her getting too friendly with the hookers and pimps or the drug dealers or the local men. Mindy is a pretty girl.
"Sorry, dad." Pretty. Like her mother, sort of. Not quite all the way there. Her mother was something.
Mindy doesn't feel like anything except a huge gaping howling hole.
Her father grunts something indistinguishable and Mindy drops the garbage bag of crushed cans against the kitchen wall and sinks into the crush of their home.
There is a suffocating quality inside the trailer that didn't exist before. Everything is lit by the golden image on the television. The table, directly in front of her is heaped with old gossip magazines; overworked crossword books, sudoku books; and the depressing collection of ceramic angels, all belonging to mother.
Joe stares for a moment, unsure what else to say to his daughter. She's growing too bold. She needs the blunt and harsh warnings only a mother should give in the privacy of a bedroom. He has a vague notion of what these warnings might be, but he can't be sure and he is terrified of getting it wrong. Don't make eye contact with strange men? Perhaps. Don't get into strange cars. Certainly. If they ever get a hold of you, kick, scream, bite.... knee them in the balls! Something like that. Nicole would know what to say just at the right moment. But these are words he cannot seem to say. What he does knows the streets are no place for twelve-year-old girls with blonde hair, delicate bones, and twilight blue eyes, and it scares him to death.
He wished his daughter would get a job at the Goddess. Then she could be more near him during the day when summer gets out in a few days. Then she'd be more like other children, and he wouldn't have to worry so much.
"Supper's on the stove," Joe says, loose, already a few beer in. "How was your day?"
"Terrible!" Mindy says from behind the bathroom door. "I lost my phone."
Joe takes a deep breath. He cannot afford to buy another phone
"Somewhere between school and the
dollar mart." She does not mention her math teacher, Mr. Alvarado, holding her after the bell and fat fingers brushing up her leg, perspiring armpits, heavy breathing and a demonic voice saying if she wanted to improve her grade maybe there was something they could work out. Mindy spat in Mr. Alvarado's face and left amidst a volley of curses.
