I Told You, Eli Oxley

Chapter Seven

I don't know about butterflies, but I definitely felt something in my stomach. She left after a couple minutes of silence. I think it was good that she left. The anxiety had flooded the room and we were drowning. Or at least I was.

Later that day at work (I worked at an Ace Hardware down the street, making just enough money for car insurance and my cell phone bill), I couldn't think of much else. Even the smell of mulch, usually a smell that I loved (ah, fresh mulch), couldn't break up the nausea - love sickness, I suppose.

I couldn't focus, not even after a guy cussed me out when I hit him with a bale of hay I was supposed to be tossing into his truck. He wasn't looking and fell over when the thirty-pound bale hit him. I didn't even notice - I just reached back around for the next bale when he tore into me. I apologized profusely, and he begrudgingly, yet mercifully said that next time I did something like that, he would make sure I got fired. The rest of the work day I still felt that sickness, but I was able to at least half-way focus on my job.

That love sickness feeling became a lot more muddled the next day, however, when Kara approached me after Communications and asked if I could help her study because she failed her first quiz. Now, a couple of thoughts could have, nay, should have occurred to me at that moment, such as, "But what about Al?" or, "She's probably not interested in you but just using you," or, at the very least, "I barely squeezed out a 'C', so I don't think I would be much help," but all I could manage to say was "Sure."

And if my love life didn't screw with me enough, I could now count on a good ol' fashion mystery in my family to tighten that screw. I wasn't sure how the address of an ATM would help me figure out what my dad was up to, if he was up to anything at all, but I was curious enough to see it through. I mean, who argues about extra money? Shouldn't everyone be happy that we had extra money, especially since my dad's pay slash had left us cutting back for the previous couple of months? But I guess eighteen hundred bucks just appearing from cash deposits without any explanation could raise some concerns. For instance, if you find a suitcase full of money on a bus, if you're smart, you don't take it because you know that, not only is it someone else's, but also because that someone else is probably a very dangerous person who will undoubtedly be looking for that money. I knew this wasn't the case, but other possible scenarios occurred to me. Scenario 1: My dad had a secret bank account with tons of extra money that he wasn't telling us about, from which he deposited the sets of $600 into our family's main account when we were getting low on money. Scenario 2: My dad had some sort of side job that he took up after his pay cut without telling anybody about, and he would deposit that money into our account. Scenario 3: My dad really didn't know where the money was coming from, and some secret Samaritan who happened to have access to our account was depositing the money.

Scenario #3 was the least likely. Also very unlikely was #1, but I didn't rule it out yet. So I decided to go with #2, though I couldn't imagine what kind of work my dad could do on the side - surely he wasn't selling drugs or prostituting himself out (I tend to think in extremes). To find out, though, I would have to stake out the ATM to catch my dad in action, or at least in the action of depositing money so I could have hard evidence to approach him with.

* * *

If Chattanooga had a Red Light District, this was it. It was foggy when I parked right outside an Adult-themed novelty store called Allure and across the street from a strip joint simply titled Rusty's. I remembered in 6th grade when Austin bragged about his dad promising to take him to Rusty's for his 18th birthday. At the time, I was a little jealous because my dad never offered me any glorious promises like that. I thought about Rusty's a lot in those days. But there I was. Finally eighteen. I had some (a little) extra cash. I could go right in and see my first real life naked woman. But being there, in the middle of all of, well, it's hard to describe. It just didn't feel right. I probably wouldn't have known what to do anyway.

Right next to Rusty's was the American International ATM I was looking for. Between Rusty's, Allure and the various pay-by-the-hour motels, both the drug dealing and prostituting theories held more weight now. Although, there was a Chevy dealership just up the street, so maybe it wasn't all that bad?

Before I had left home, I rigged up a portable remote pairing system that would alert me when my dad's bank account was accessed and then duplicate the information onto my laptop I brought. It was a super-advanced system that I had only recently learned how to build after I was inspired by the remote pairing of phones they did on Person of Interest - the coolest show there ever was.

I sat there and read my Philosophy textbook while waiting for the alert, just trying to keep my head down. After a couple hours and a few solicits from homeless guys and prostitutes, I gave up. The only alert didn't come from my pairing system, but rather when it began to get dark outside. I was afraid to get out of the car to feed the meter again, so I just left.