“I left him here to fend for himself,” he said, his voice virtually breaking.
“Who?”
“Mason. I left him alone in this fucking pit.” He sounded disgusted with himself, and Daff very carefully—as if handling a wild animal—took his hand in hers.
“It couldn’t have been this bad sixteen years ago, Spencer.”
“It was a cesspool. Most of the broken glass in this yard came from Dad’s rum bottles or Mom’s crack pipes. Malcolm, Anita”—his parents—“and their friends did so enjoy their creature comforts. Malcolm and his cronies would sit on that sofa all day, just drinking and shooting the breeze. All things considered, they were okay parents. Didn’t ever hit us or allow their friends to get handsy with us. Malcolm stuck around long enough after our mother died to give us a fighting chance at life. Left the day I turned eighteen. Happy fucking birthday to me, right?”
He ran his free hand roughly over his face and shuddered. Daff’s hand clenched around his, and she just ached for the boy he’d been. The kid who suddenly found himself sole guardian to his underage brother, who worked several jobs just to get by. The boy she—Daff—had treated like dirt just because his scrupulously clean clothes had been threadbare, his shoes had been scuffed, with worn-down soles, and his hair had never been touched by a barber’s scissors. While this was his home life, she’d made his school life hell of a different kind, and he’d never once had a bad word to say about her.
Her eyes flooded with tears, and she strove not to let him see them, knowing it would demolish his pride. He would misinterpret them as pity when all she felt was regret and shame.
“I’m sorry, this isn’t why I brought you here,” he said, his hand tightening around hers. “I wanted to see if the place was salvageable or if we’d be better off razing it to the ground.”
“Why?” she asked hoarsely.
“I’m considering donating the land and everything on it to the town, on the condition that it’s used to build a youth center. The main aim of the center should be to provide a safe haven for at-risk kids to come and play sports, learn skills, new hobbies. I was imagining a library, a gym, a sports field, tennis court, maybe a swimming pool and a cafeteria . . .”
“It’s ambitious,” she ventured cautiously.
“Unrealistic?”
“No, I just wonder where the funding would come from. Not just to build the place but to maintain it afterward.”
“I spoke with Mase last night—before the drinking started—since he co-owns the house. Both he and I are willing to donate enough to kick-start the project. But we agree that the community should chip in as well, as this is to the town’s benefit.”
“That’s where you’re going to run into obstacles—a lot of the townspeople would be happy to help, but there are always a few who will be vocal about using the town’s money to build something so expensive for kids from the poorer areas.”
“Assholes, you mean?”
“Yes, but some of those assholes are pretty powerful,” she reminded him, and he grimaced, acknowledging her point.
“This benefits everybody—if we make these kids feel valuable, give them something to do, keep them off the streets, there’ll be less petty crime. And petty crime can lead to much worse.”
“Did you ever . . .” Her voice trailed off; it wasn’t her business.
“Yes,” he said in answer to her incomplete question, and her throat went dry at the thought. Whatever he’d done was for survival, but she shuddered at the thought of what would have happened if he’d been caught. “After our mother died, our dad stuck around and sometimes threw money our way for food. Other times he used it for alcohol. At first we hung out behind MJ’s a lot. Like hungry dogs. Occasionally, Janice Cooper . . . remember her? Played the piano a lot and then married that dentist and moved to Durban? Anyway, she used to sneak a few bread rolls and leftovers out to us. But she was terrified of getting caught and losing her job. I didn’t want to put her in that position, she was nice. So I started shoplifting. I tried to keep Mase from figuring out where the food was coming from—I knew he’d follow my lead and I didn’t want him to get caught. But of course he worked it out and took it upon himself to ‘help’ me. We only took food, nothing else. We knew people already thought we were troublemakers, and if we were caught stealing—” He shook his head, no need to elaborate. “So, yeah, I know what I’m talking about. I know what desperation can drive a kid to and how lethal boredom can be as well.”
“So how do you start something like this?”
“Well, we’ll have a look through this dump to see if anything’s worth saving. Then I’m going to have to figure out how much it will cost to renovate this place versus just razing it completely and building from scratch. Once we know exactly how much everything will cost, we’ll have to figure out where the money will come from.”
“And you brought me because—”
“Because I value your opinion, and because—” He sighed before slanting her a quick look. “Mason bailed on me. Apparently Daisy’s completely useless today after you guys got her drunk last night, and that means Mason has to sort out the cooking for the dinner party tonight . . . and I didn’t want to come alone.”
Daff felt warm and gooey inside—okay, so she was his second choice, but she understood why Mason was his first choice. They had history with this place and maybe a few ghosts that needed to be laid to rest. But Spencer thought enough of her to bring her in his brother’s stead. And he valued her opinion. Nobody had ever said anything like that to her before.
“So let’s have a look at this place,” she said, and, still holding her hand, he tugged her toward the raised porch. He stopped at the steps and winced.
“I’m not sure how safe this is,” he muttered, assessing the broken slats in the steps.
“Just be careful,” she said and gingerly stepped onto the first step. It only barely held her weight. Spencer decided to skip the stairs completely and climbed straight onto the porch. The boards groaned beneath his weight, but held.
The front windows were all shattered, and the walls—which had once been white—were covered with mold and years’ worth of graffiti. The front door was nonexistent.
She watched him square his shoulders and take a deep, bracing breath before moving over the threshold into the gloomy interior.
Spencer was only dimly aware of Daff’s hand tightening as his childhood came flooding back. There, that was where he had once found his mother passed out in a puddle of her own vomit with a needle sticking out of her arm. All of six years old, he’d been terrified that she was dead. Over in the corner was where—when one of his parents remembered to feed them—he and Mason had eaten. Here’s where the TV had stood. Mason and Spencer had sat for hours just staring at the screen, flipping between only three channels and fantasizing about the glamorous lives those rich soap opera people led. Pretending to be them and learning from them. Of course, one day they’d come home to find the TV gone, sold for “Mommy’s medicine.”
It seemed like a lifetime ago, and yet he could still remember everything so vividly. The fear, the hunger, the sadness, and the uncertainty. It had been no way to grow up, and he wanted this place to become a symbol of hope rather than of poverty, desperation, and fear.
He clung to Daff’s hand, his only lifeline in this turbulent tsunami of memories, and continued to walk through the nightmare that was his childhood.
Daff trailed behind Spencer; she wasn’t sure he was aware that he was quietly narrating as he went along. Just little snippets of information, like finding his mother passed out with a needle in her arm when he was six. God. It was horrible to imagine him growing up like that, to imagine any child growing up like that, and she was beginning to understand his need to offer help and guidance to as many at-risk kids as he could.
It was a pretty big house, all on one floor, and when they reached the last room, he stopped before going inside and looked at her.
“Mason and I shared this room. Malcolm said we didn’t have to share, but I liked to keep Mase close to me. He was a scrawny kid, and while our parents kept their shadier friends away from us, I still didn’t trust them not to hurt my brother. So we shared a room until the day I left.”
“It must have been hard leaving him here when you went to college.”
“He was only sixteen. I was going to stay. Or try to figure out a way to take him with me. But he was stubborn. Insisted he’d be fine, said that me getting a degree would eventually improve both our lives. I would have lost the scholarship if I got caught sneaking him into student housing with me. It would never have worked.
“By then he was already working at MJ’s and had a few other jobs, so he’d have money for food and stuff. I sent extra money every month. It helped that the house was ours. And we both knew that nobody cared enough to check how Mason was getting along after I left. He just kept telling the teachers, when they bothered to ask, that Malcolm was back.”