Vic vaughn is vicious, p.5
VIC VAUGHN IS VICIOUS, page 5
“What do ya mean?” I unbuckle the princess and pick her up. She’s still sleeping so I carry her over to the porch. “Dropping the kid off.”
Spencer looks at me.
Spencer looks at the kid.
Spencer looks over his shoulder to an approaching Veronica. “Are we missing a kid?”
“What?” Ronnie wipes her hands on her apron. “What are you talking about?”
“Vic says he’s dropping off a kid. Is she ours?”
I am watching this conversation with fascination. These people. They have so many kids they can’t keep track of them.
“Vic.” Ronnie comes down the steps towards me. “That’s not one of our kids.”
I laugh. “Nice try, sister.”
She puts her hands on her hips. “No. I’m dead fucking serious. Not my kid, Vic. Where did you get this child?”
“What?”
“Where did this kid come from?”
“She… her… you’re wrong. She’s a princess! I mean, look at her!”
“Vic.” Is Spencer using his dad voice on me? “Where did you get this kid?”
“The fucking…” I suddenly can’t breathe. “The shop,” I finally manage. “She came into the shop this morning and sat down.”
“Vic.” Is Ronnie using her mom voice on me? “Please tell me you did not have this kid all day. Please tell me you are not that stupid.”
“Stupid! What are you talking about? She looks just like you! Just like them!” I point to her… one, two, three, four, five, six kids now standing on the porch. Princess Rory is holding the baby, Oliver is snickering like a little asshole, and the bossy one is shaking her head at me, passing judgment with her arms crossed.
And then an alert blares into the peaceful summer night.
I know what that alarm is. Everyone knows what that alarm is. It’s annoying and we all want to turn it off, but we don’t. Because it’s an Amber Alert. And if a kid goes missing, you need to know about that.
Spencer pulls his phone out to check, then holds it up so I can see.
And right there, in full color, is the sis.
Under her is me. The perp.
Under that is a pic from the swap meet.
Both of us all dressed up like bikers.
CHAPTER FIVE - DAISY
FIFTEEN HOURS EARLIER
“Vivi. Wake up, sweetie. Mama’s gotta go to work.”
She doesn’t even move. And I don’t blame her. It’s four-thirty AM on a Sunday morning. No one wants to get out of bed at four-thirty AM on Sunday morning.
“Viv,” I whisper. “I’ll make your favorite egg-white omelet for breakfast.”
She groans and pushes me away from her.
“Listen.” I put on my mom voice for this. “You need to get up right now. We have to go or I’ll be late for work. And I can’t be late for breakfast shift. I make more money—”
“On Sunday mornings”—she picks up my sentence in a mocking tone—“than I do all week.”
“It’s true. You know it’s true. This one crappy early-morning day is how we pay all the bills for the week.”
She pouts. “Last week you said I could get a goldfish.”
“You can! I didn’t lie.”
“When?”
“Well.” I sigh. She’s not a bad kid. At all. She’s just way too damn smart. And worldly. She’s wise to the ways of the world and that sucks. Because it means she’s been through too much and every day, I swear to God, I look at this kid and I can see her innocence spilling out of her with each new realization that our status in life is declining rapidly.
And I hate that. I hate that I’m back in school. I hate that I have to waitress. I hate that I live in student housing. I hate that my parents were killed in a car crash and they were three million dollars in debt so I had to sell the dairy farm I grew up on and move to this stupid town and get this stupid job just to be able to survive.
In fact, I hate everything these days. My kid is the only thing worth living for. And I’m letting her down.
“Well?” She’s using her snotty-kid voice on me.
“The pet store is closed today.”
“You say that every day!”
“No. You always ask me on Sundays. And it’s always closed on Sundays.”
“Then take me tomorrow.”
“I can’t. You know I can’t, Vivi. Tomorrow I have finals all day.”
“And I have a stupid babysitter! All day! I can’t wait to go to school so I don’t have to be with the stupid babysitters!”
Yeah. Me too, kid. Me too. Because that childcare bill is killing me.
“Tuesday, then,” she says.
“I have work.”
“Wednesday.”
“School.”
“Thursday.” She’s snarling her words at me now. I open my mouth, but she puts up a hand. “Don’t bother. I already know. Work.”
“This is what grownups do, Vivian. I’m not some weirdo, OK? Plenty of moms have to work and go to school. And I know that this life sucks for you right now, but it sucks for me too. Why can’t you just be on my side?”
This is the wrong thing to say. And even though I think these words inside my head like… all the time, I don’t say them out loud. Because it’s not fair.
It’s not anyone’s fault that my father had a heart attack while driving and he and my mom hit a tree and died instantly. It’s not anyone’s fault that he’d just upgraded all the dairy barns and processing equipment a few months before this happened, fully expecting to make his money back in productivity in the next two years, and then didn’t. It’s not anyone’s fault that I couldn’t make the payments because while I do know how to run the milking equipment and keep the cows fed, I never really understood how hard it was to keep a dairy farm profitable.
I sigh.
Because that last one is totally my fault. I was going to school for animal science and then got pregnant by the town tattoo artist. So it’s my fault I dropped out of school and never got my degree so I could learn to run the farm properly. It’s my fault that I have no other skills than being a shitty dairy farmer. And it’s my fault that the only way I can pay for my crappy family housing apartment on campus and still be able to afford Vivi’s daycare is to take out as many student loans as possible and waitress four days a week when I’m not in class.
I lie down on the bed with my crazy-beautiful daughter and hold her close. She’s sniffling. So she’s crying. Over a goldfish. And this is stupid. I can afford a goldfish. It’s what, five bucks for the fish? Maybe ten for the bowl. Five for the rocks, three for the net, and some food…
It adds up.
And it’s sad that I have to add these meager things up.
“OK. Listen. There’s another pet store down south. One that’s open all the time.”
She turns over and looks at me. “There is?”
“Yeah. PetSmart, right? They’re always open. It’s just… our car broke down, Viv. So the downtown one, though they do have crappy hours, it’s just much easier.”
“If it’s so easy, why don’t I have a goldfish?”
“You have a point. But listen. Summer finals are over on Friday. And I’ll have two whole weeks where I don’t have school. So we will go to get your fish next Monday. One week. Does that sound good? Can you live with that? Can you just give me one more week to get through finals? And I promise, things will calm down.”
She pouts again. “I want to go home. I want to go back to the farm.”
“We can’t. We sold it, remember?”
“Why did you sell it? It’s not fair.”
“Because I couldn’t pay the bills, Viv. You know this.”
“I miss my calf and my sheep. I didn’t even get to do the fair this year. And you said I could mutton-bust!”
“I know.” I feel like shit.
“You sold my sheep.”
My God. I am the worst mom ever. And now I want to cry too. But it’s a work day. And I have big tips coming. Sundays at the Pancake House… it’s crazy good. I will make at least two hundred dollars today and that will pay for a lot of next semester’s books, and her school supplies, and new clothes because almost everything she owns is too small.
“We have to go.” I get up.
And so does she.
Because Vivian Lee Lundin is the child of a single mom. And she already knows that life isn’t fair and complaining doesn’t fix anything. Only hard work does that.
Viv and I get off the bus on College Avenue and then cross the street. I do not look over my shoulder at the Sick Boyz tattoo shop. I do not. I do not, I do not, I… look.
It’s some high-level irony that her sperm donor and I work across the street from each other. I mean, I never told him I was pregnant and he barely remembered my name while we were screwing around, so there is no chance he would ever remember me now. But I never thought I would have to deal with him. I never thought I would see him again. And that would’ve worked out if my parents hadn’t died and I hadn’t been forced to move into town because the only way I could afford rent in this overpriced market was if I secured a family housing apartment on campus. And even though I could waitress anywhere—if I had a working car—I do not have a working car. It broke down six months ago, just after I sold all the other cars and farm trucks to pay off the credit cards I maxed out trying to feed the cows last winter.
“You’re making that face again.”
“What face?”
“That face when you look at that place.”
“What place?”
“That place!” She stops and points behind us. Right at Sick Boyz.
“I’m not making a face at that place.”
“Mom. You so are. I’m gonna go in there and see what’s so interesting.”
“You will not. Ever. Go in there. Do you hear me, Vivian Lee? Ev-er.”
She tsks her tongue at me. “Why not? I like the sign. It’s pretty.”
“It’s a tattoo shop, Viv. Those people in there, they’re bad.”
“No. I see kids go in there.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. Little kids. My age. I saw them before school got out. They wear those uniforms.”
“Yeah, because those kids go to private school.” Holy shit, I can’t believe I just said that out loud. And it came out… bitter.
Vivian looks harder at the shop. “Hmm.”
“Never mind that shop. We don’t associate with those people.” I pull her towards the door to the restaurant and we slip inside. Judy, the manager, shoots me a look, just like she does every weekend when I bring my kid with me to work. She hates it, but she puts up with it because Vivian is not a troublemaker. She’s quiet. She sits in the breakroom and colors and draws, and doesn’t ask anyone for anything. She is a little mouse.
She is the daughter of a single mom.
She makes herself disappear so I don’t lose my job.
I suddenly feel very weary.
Vivian sits down at the break table and starts pulling her stuff out of her backpack. She’s been using an old sketchbook of mine. I was taking an art class when I dropped out of school seven years ago. Just a dumb drawing class for general ed credit. And that was my notebook.
She loves that thing. Most of the pages are still blank. I didn’t get far into that semester before I figured out I needed to go back home and forget about school. At least until Vivi was born.
And then I turned into a statistic. Because I never went back.
Daisy Lundin. Stop it. You are back. You are changing your life for the better. And yes, things suck mightily right now, but it won’t be like this forever. You only have five more semesters and you will graduate with your animal science degree.
I should change majors. This animal science degree is not going to do anything for me now. I don’t want to work for some other dairy farmer. But if I change my major that will add two more semesters. And every time I think about how long it will take to change my life, I get depressed.
So dairy farming, here I come.
“Do I at least get a donut?”
“No,” I tell my daughter. “No junk. I’ll bring you an egg-white omelet and some juice, OK? You just sit here and be good, and I’ll come back with your breakfast in a few minutes once I get my tables all set up.”
She huffs, but doesn’t complain.
I take my purse into the bathroom and check my hair. It’s a mess. It’s always a mess. I haven’t had it cut in months and I can’t even remember the last time I didn’t have it up in a ponytail. I don’t usually wear make-up either, which is fine here in the Pancake House, but it really makes me stand out at school.
Things were different seven years ago.
Or were they? Maybe I was just one of the in-girls, so I didn’t notice the outsiders like the woman I am now.
I sigh a little. Then, on a whim, I pull the scrunchie out of my hair and fluff it up. I have nice hair. It’s long, and blonde, and thick. It’s a little wild today. And I can’t wear it down, not while I’m waitressing. But I can do better than a stinking ponytail, right?
I braid it. Two braids. Like Heidi. I used to wear it like this all the time. It’s really cute in the winter when you have a hat on too.
Then, because just this simple act of paying attention to myself has lifted my spirits, I go digging in my purse for some makeup. I don’t have a lot and none of it is what I would call good. It’s drugstore stuff. And not high-end drugstore stuff, either.
I was blessed with a nice complexion. It’s not overly fair like some blonde people who always look pale. And my eyes are a beautiful green color that stand out in the sun.
Why don’t I play up my assets? I have giant tits too. My milk jugs. This makes me giggle. That’s what I used to call them during my first round of college.
And, oh, my God. I just remembered what I was wearing when I first met the sperm donor known as Vicious Vaughn.
My milkmaid costume.
I cover my mouth to stifle a giggle. I was so stupid.
Someone knocks on the door and I hurriedly paint on some lipstick, just for fun, then drop my purse in the breakroom and get out on the floor.
Everyone remarks on my hair and my lipstick. In fact, people are so in love with this version of me, my tips actually start increasing.
This is what he saw in me, I guess.
The cute girl with the blonde braids who came into her TA’s office just to drop off a sketchbook for grading and instead found the most infamous citizen of Fort Collins, Colorado and didn’t even know what she’d stumbled into.
SEVEN YEARS AGO
COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY DORMS
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” Angie is tapping her red, sequined stiletto toe at me in the doorway of the room we share. She’s dressed up like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and I’m a milkmaid. So ironic. If these kids only knew that I actually spent my childhood milking cows, they would die. But I do look damn cute in this outfit. I snicker to myself as I tie the ribbons onto the end of my braids.
“Oh, my God, Daisy! We’re going to be late!”
“Holy smokes, Angie. It’s six o’clock. We have the whole night ahead of us. Re. Lax.”
“We’re driving to Denver. And there’s traffic.”
“We’ll be fine,” I tell her, then take one last look in the mirror, adjust my milk jugs, and then cross the room and pick up my sketchbook.
“What are you doing with that?” She sneers down at my sticker-covered sketchbook.
“I told you, I have to drop it off at the TA’s office by tonight or I won’t get my grade.”
“No.” She plants a hand on her hip. “Absolutely not. We are not stopping by the art building.”
“It’s literally a hundred yards that way.” I point in some random direction.
“Nope.”
“I’ll meet you at the car then, OK?”
Angie is at the end of her rope with me. She’s an OK roommate, but if we were not sharing living quarters, she would never hang out with me. Don’t let the Dorothy costume fool you, Angie is one of those serious types. She even comes with nerd glasses. “You have ten minutes, then we’re leaving you behind. And by ten, I mean nine and a half.”
“Fine.” I grab my long, white winter coat, shoulder it on as Angie closes our door, then we bolt down the stairs as fast as we dare wearing these ridiculous shoes. When we get outside, she heads towards a crowd of girls who are also sexily dressed up for Halloween in Denver, while I go the other way, towards the art building.
It’s really not that far, but these shoes aren’t meant for walking. To make matters worse, when I get in there, I realize that I don’t actually know where the TA office is and have to ask directions from an older art professor who clearly thinks my costume is over the top. Finally, I find the right hallway, and the right door, and pull it open.
“Oh.” I stop in my tracks. Because standing before me is the most beautiful, rugged, hot, sexy, gorgeous man I’ve ever laid eyes on.
He looks me up and down but good as we just stand there appreciating each other. Finally, he says, “Are you lost, Little Bo Peep?”
I almost melt into a puddle of goo at his feet, that’s how deep and rich his voice is. Instead, I giggle. “I’m a milkmaid. Little Bo Peep was last year.” I twirl the end of one of my braids around my finger.
He draws in a deep breath and makes a noise. It’s like a hum that reverberates straight to my insides. I’m not sure if it’s a ‘hmmmmm,’ or a ‘mmmmmm,’ or a growl. But I like it.
“Well, Peep, can I help you with something?” He is tall, very tall, and muscular, but not like steroid muscular. And blond. But his blue eyes are like—whoa. They are something to behold. And his tattoos. Holy shit, his cannon-sized arms are covered with red and yellow dragons. With fire. Rings of it. Lakes of it. Whole oceans of it.
“Oh,” I say, tapping my head. “I get it. You’re a biker!”
“Got it in one, Betsy.”
“No, it’s Daisy.”
“Get out of here. Your name is not Daisy.”
