Never gamble with your children as your stake
SATURDAY MORNING AT 8 AM on his only day off work. Benjamin worked 10-hour shifts starting at 7 am Sunday through Saturday at the Come Quickly Mart on the corner of Guadalupe and First (Texas not being a labor friendly state, and convenience stores not noted for sympathy to employees). He turned on his pillow, only to be wakened by someone banging on the glass of his bedroom door.
His bedroom door also being the street door to the apartment, which the landlord had converted from an old house to a duplex several years before.
Benjamin groaned and shouted, “Go away! It’s my only day off.” But the banging continued, which didn’t surprise him since she banged on his door every Saturday morning at 8 am. Not an angry, rejected girlfriend looking for a confrontation that would end with make-up sex. Benjamin could have lived with that, and there were plenty of ex-girlfriends he’d still be glad to sleep with. Just not on a permanent basis.
Benjamin groaned and shouted, “Go away! It’s my only day off.” But the banging continued, which didn’t surprise him since she banged on his door every Saturday morning at 8 am.
He tossed his bed sheet aside and slipped into his jeans. “All right, goddam it. I’m coming.” The “goddam it,” he added with cruel deliberation since he knew goddamn well who stood on the other side of the door. He didn’t bother with a shirt or shoes. Instead, he grabbed from his dresser a Barrington House Jamaican cigar, a cigar that, when lit, smelled so foul it made a room smell like a room filled with the ashes of kittens cremated in mass by veterinarians.
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