Inferno

Jacy carried her shoes to her bedroom, put them into the closet, then stripped out of all of her clothes and slipped on Daddy's baseball jersey.

She was grateful that Grandma had never thrown any of Daddy's things away after Daddy got married and moved out.

----

Jennifer stood outside of The Bargain Bin. So far, the five people she'd seen coming out and the two families she'd seen going in were beneath her, worthy of her contempt.

But Mom had made it pretty obvious; find a job or find a new place to live.

Even though Jadia now lived with her fiancé, and they had a pretty nice trailer, Jadia had hemmed and hawed, and then finally gathered up the gumption to tell her mother that there was no room for her.

"I put a roof over your head for..." Jennifer had snarled at her eldest child.

"No you didn't," Jadia had spat back. "Daddy did. You didn't have shit to do with it."

And Jacy, that smug little bitch, living all alone in that huge house all by herself had smiled sweetly and said in that God damned annoying little breathy whisper of hers "No," and closed the door in her mother's face. Her own mother's face.

Jacy hadn't even invited her in, just opened the door and stared at her for a long moment.

"Can I help you?" Jacy asked finally.

"Can I help...? What?" Jennifer had sputtered. "Is that how you greet your mother? Your own mother?"

"Well, I thought it was a little nicer than 'what the fuck do you want, you evil, narcissistic bitch,'" Jacy had said.

Jennifer stared at her youngest child, still a child at twenty one years old, then finally sputtered out that she needed a place to live.

"No," Jacy had said and closed the door.

Jennifer heard the deadbolt click shut. Finally she roused herself and got into Melissa's barely mobile car, and drove to The Bargain Bin.

The sign out front said that they were hiring.

She steeled herself, opened the door and entered the large building.

"Hi, welcome to The Bargain Bin," a young woman greeted her. "Anything in particular I can help you find?"

"A job," Jennifer admitted.

"Oh, you're in luck!" the young woman smiled widely. "We're slammed here! You can walk and chew gum at the same time, you're hired."

"Even if I got a felony on my record?" Jennifer asked.

"Uh huh; I got a felony on mine too," Mindy Laporte admitted. "Two, actually. Possession with intent to distribute Schedule two narcotics and attempted second degree murder, plus a couple of pops for solicitation. Grace don't give a flip about that as long as you show up, do your job, and don't try to rip us off."

She turned and waved to a large woman that was talking with a customer.

""Plus sizes right over there, buy three, take twenty percent off the fourth item of equal or lesser price, yes Mindy?" Grace said.

"She's looking for a job but says she's worried ''cause she's got a felony on her record," Mindy explained, and then beamed brightly as three high school boys wandered in.

"Yeah? Me too," Grace shrugged. "Even got the tats to prove it; St. Gabriel's. You?"

"Me too; St. Gabriel did five years for an arson I didn't do," Jennifer said.

"Like playing with matches?" Grace asked, hiding her smirk.

"No, I didn't do it," Jennifer retorted.

"Okay, come with me," Grace said and walked to the back of the store.

"Here, fill this out, find you an apron under that cabinet, walk around the store and figure out where stuff is, then get busy," Grace said, handing Jennifer a single page application. "And kind of hurry, huh? Mike didn't show up so we're kind of short handed.

"Get busy doing what?" Jennifer asked, worried.

"Just helping people, showing them where stuff is, then when we close at nine, help clean up. In the meantime, you see something on the floor, pick it up, put it where it belongs," Grace said, then left Jennifer to fill out the application.

"Great," Jennifer said, unhappily.

She filled out the application, found a 'Bargain Bin' apron and then looked around.

The layout was fairly simple. Baby and children's clothes were toward the front right hand side of the store. Larger children in the middle right hand side, then the men's section was in the rear right hand side.

Petites and juniors were in the front left hand side, followed by 'Clearance' racks in the middle left, and then the Plus sized section was in the rear left.

And in the middle were all the normal woman's clothes.

"Oh, this is cute," she commented as she picked up a top that had slid off a hanger.

"Employees get a forty percent discount on non-sale items, ten percent on sale items," Mindy cheerfully said as she bustled past, arms laden with several tops.

----

Jacy indulged in her favorite pastime, looking at the photograph albums Melvin and Bernice had compiled of her Daddy. Kenneth had been an only child, so there were several photographs of him taken over the years.

She smiled lovingly as she looked at the photographs of his childhood.

Sipping her single glass of wine, Jacy looked at his teenage years, looking again at the photograph of his Senior Prom. The smiling girl with her handsome Daddy was a mystery to her; it was the only photograph of the dark haired girl. Melvin and Bernice had admitted they couldn't remember the woman's name and she wasn't in any of Daddy's high school yearbooks.

The photographs of his baseball glory days made her sad; he could have been so much more than just an employee at a mattress factory. But he had done the right thing, what he thought was the right thing and married her mother.

She looked at the wedding album and smirked at Jennifer's white gown.

----

The noise in Angola never stops, even at night. It's just a different kind of noise.

Kenneth lay awake, not listening to the cacophony going on around him.

Jelissa had succumbed to AIDS; both Jacy and Jadia had sent him letters telling him of her passing.

Jacy had written that the nurse's aide told her that his letter was her favorite; Jelissa insisted that the aide read it to her every day.

"So I read it to her one more time," Jacy wrote. "It made me cry; your words were so beautiful. I love you, Daddy."

"I love you," Kenneth said out loud.

Amidst the echoes of yells, laughter, moans, clinking and clanging, no one heard his words.

The End.

**I write these stories for my enjoyment. I post them here for your enjoyment.

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