HE ONE OF my regulars. I got six here in town. They ask for Charlie not Char. Good ’cause Char ain’t here no more.

I’m sitting on the floor with my back to the door, smoking. I finish the bottle of rum next. Harrison is nice to me. He bring me things. Nothing big or expensive. Anthony would beat me if he knew—or take it. He got a wife, kids. A daughter in college who want to be a doctor like him.

I watch him. Wait for him to move. But he still dead to the world, snoring when I stand up and tiptoe past him. The whole time I’m looking over my shoulder. Sometime, I swear Anthony can see through walls, hear what you think. So, I try to be good. I try to be quiet. I wouldn’t call nobody I know, ever—till now. Because of Christmas and New Year’s, I been thinking about my sister a lot. So, I had to take a chance.

Shaking, I lift his cell out his pocket with two fingers. Then walk on my toes to the other side of the room.

“JuJu,” I whisper.

“Char—”

“I’m fine. He treats me good.” My neck stretches when Harrison turns onto his belly. “I don’t want to leave; I like it here.”

I don’t tell her all he said about me being his property, that nowhere on earth is safe from him, how he will cut Cricket up like sausage if I left, feed her to the bears at the zoo. He talked about doing worse to my sister, my friends.

She crying. “Char, who’s doing this to you?”

“Nobody.” I wipe under my eye with the back of my hand. “You know … I always liked money. I’m making my own now, plenty, so I’m good.”

She gonna have the call traced, she say, get the FBI involved.

“I have to hang up.” I look at the time. Then at him—naked—no covers to hide him. He pays for an hour. Only last half that time. Falls asleep every week like an old man.

“I’m taking good care of her.”

His arm reaches for me on the other side on the bed. My heart jumps—beats fast as eggs boiling in hot water. “Can I talk to her?” I thought by now JuJu woulda put her in foster care.

Solomon done what I asked and called her, she say. She took a plane. Got Cricket from his grandmother’s place. “We home waiting for you.”

He yawns. Smiles in his sleep.

“Ma … ma … ma.”

“Cricket. It’s me. Momma.” Too many tears roll in my mouth for me to say anything else.

My sister gets back on the phone. “I knew you would want me to take care of her.”

I tiptoe past him. “I just called to say Merry Christmas and thanks. You did a good job raising me. It’s all my fault. I shoulda listened.”

“Mr. Bobbie asked about you. He told me everything.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m glad. He kept you off the street, and you wasn’t with some boy. He was out of town when you left them messages,” she say. “But he’s back now. Him, Miss Saunders, Maleeka, other kids at your old school—they put up posters back home. I put signs up in your neighborhood before I left the motel.”

Anthony won’t like that.

“Char—I was wrong. You smart … going places in this world.” She cries some more.

I tell her I ain’t the same Char she knew. I done so many things, seen so much—I don’t know myself no more.

“We know you, Char. Me, the people at your old school—Mom and Dad.”

I tell her they’re dead. She say they up in heaven talking to God about me.

I snort when I laugh. “God—Where he at?”

He’s inside of me, she says, all around me, everywhere.

I cover myself. “I don’t want him in here, JuJu … seeing me.”

“He’s seen worse, Char.” She asks to pray for me. Does it before I say yes or no.

“Merry Christmas. Happy New Year,” I whisper.

This the best present she had in her whole life, she say.

I end the call, put his phone back in his pants pocket, then sit on the edge of the bed and drink my rum. It’s gone in no time. Harrison too. He don’t even notice that I’m drunk. But Anthony do.

“Bitch!” His fist is a rock slamming into the back of my head. “Throwing up on customers.” He kick my legs out from under me. “You cost me money, Charlie, three weeks in a row.”

He dragging me up the hall by my hair. Smacking me until I almost pass out. I try to tell him, but he won’t hear it, I was nervous ’cause he got rid of Earle, and I was scared I’d be next. It’s a lie. All we do in this business is lie, so what’s it matter? He think I’m blaming him for all this and everything else. That give him more reason to hit me again.

The men lined up ignore me. The manager downstairs pick his teeth with the end of a straw, watches me get drug out the door. Out on the sidewalk, people pay for the movies and get a free show too.

I quit begging in the car. I’m up front next to him, ’cause the driver is on vacation in Aruba. I don’t know where that is.

Daddy puts the car in reverse, backs into the street, speeds us away from there in no time ’cause he got no time to waste no more on me, he say.

Mostly rats and mangy cats they say live in Daddy’s other house next door to us. The last girl who ended up here got sold, they say, sent overseas. She was part Japanese, five three, my age. She ran away from Daddy five times, Earle told me. Came back every time on her own ’cause we love him and hate him, need him and don’t, all at the same time. When I step in between the trees, I wonder if my shoes sitting on the dirt, her shoes kicked up, walked over. And which of them I’ll see soon—her or April?

He’s beside me, holding on to my arms like he the police. If Daddy bring you to this house, shut your mouth and take what you got coming, Carolina told me that first day. So, I let him walk me up the crooked steps without opening my mouth. Watch him unlock the back door, turn on the lights, push spiderwebs out his face.

“You made me do this.”

Should I talk or be quiet?

“The problem is you’re hardheaded, Charlie. You don’t learn.”

Maybe I should beg.

“Damn girls with babies. Y’all the worse kind.”

This a old house. Cold as ice cubes. You breathe and see your breath. We in the basement when I think about the dungeons I colored. In movies, ain’t nothing good happens in a place like this.

“Get in.”

I do what I’m told.

“Daddy.”

“You are not her. I have to keep telling myself that.”

I look in his dark, tired eyes.

“She had that baby. Got leukemia. Died at your age. And she’s not coming back.”

I look away so I don’t get hit for seeing what I’m seeing—him crying—tears dripping on his seven-hundred-dollar jacket. On my way in, I tell him he can beat me, cut me, do what he want to me. “Just don’t leave me.”

The door is almost closed when he say I better be alive when he come back.