Troubled

2: Problems.

Megan Crawford.
Saturday, June 27th 2015.
18:11.

My family had never had much money.

I had been aware of that for so much time, but I never told my mother. I knew that she wanted to hide that from me, she did not want me to worry about our economy.

But I could not help but concern when I saw her on her bedroom desk with a letter on her hand and tears in her blue eyes.

I had gone in there to tell her that dinner was almost done, because on Mondays I was the one to cook. I had made tomato soup for all of us, my mother, my sister Catherine, and me.

But when I walked through the door, everything was forgotten.

I had only seen my mother cry a few times before. My father left when I was ten years old, he had found another woman that he loved more than me, my mother and my sisters. Catherine had been born a few months before that, and my older sister, Chloe, had been fourteen.

After my father left, I had listened to my mother sob almost every night when she thought everyone was asleep. The walls between our bedrooms were so thin. I had never gone to her to try to make her feel better, but I had always wanted to.

In that moment, when I saw my mother with her forehead against the wood of the desk and heard soft whimpers escaping her lips, I was reminded of those dark days when she would not smile at anything and would be so sad.

"Mom, what happened?" I asked, making her look up at me and brush a few strands of her blonde hair from her eyes. Her gaze was bloodshot and dull, and I was so dazed as to what had happened that had made her feel so miserable. My mother was a strong woman, not much could get to her.

"Megan, I'm so sorry you had to see that," she said, her eyes wide and her bottom lip between her teeth. She started to play with a loose thread of her shirt in a nervous manner and I walked over to her after I closed the door of her bedroom behind me.

"No, that's fine," I assured her as I knelt down in front of the desk chair and looked at my mother. I took her hand in mine as my eyebrows knitted together. "I'm just worried about you, what's wrong?"

"I do not have money to pay for the rent of this month," she admitted to me, her eyes not meeting mine for even a second. Her body was shaking as she told me and the tears were falling down her cheeks at a quick pace. "They want to take our house away."

I was taken aback, and stared at the paper on her hand. I only had to read a few words to realize that the letter was a warning to tell her that if she did not pay for the rent soon, we would not have a home anymore. I was so confused for a moment because I had never thought we would come to something so terrible. I had never known we had so little money.

"When do you have to pay?" I wondered, my voice silent and afraid of the answer.

"They are giving us a month before we get evicted," my mother replied as she finally glanced up at me with her pale blue eyes and saw the horrified look on my expression. "I know, honey. I swear I am going to work another shift in the hospital and perhaps that could help us."

My mother was a nurse in the hospital in town, but her salary was not much. I knew that she would not make enough money to pay for the rent, and I started to think. My mind was fast to come up with an answer to our problems, and I started to speak as I nodded my head.

"I have to find work," I said in a determined tone. I had never had a job before, but that did not matter to me in that moment, I just wanted to help. "I think they want to hire someone in the bookstore down the street, The Book Escape."