Playing to Win

wasn’t typically attributed to him.
    She was learning so many things about him.
    “So? Are you going to talk?”
    She shifted her focus back to him. He stared at her intently, held her hand, his thumb brushing lightly over hers. “This isn’t part of my job.”
    “Consider yourself off duty, Miss Brooks. Now unload on me. Tell me about the music.”
    She took a deep breath, then let it out, realizing maybe it was time to talk about it. “I mentioned it was a song my mother liked.”
    “You did. You miss your mom?”
    She let out a quiet laugh. “No. Yes and no. I don’t know. Not really.” She paused. “Sometimes. It’s hard to miss what you never really had.”
    “Okay, that was a mouthful. Talk to me about your mom. You told me a while back it was just the two of you. Were you close?”
    “No.”
    That one word said a lot. Cole heard the pain and bitterness in that word. And loneliness.
    “Did she have to work a lot to support the two of you?”
    “Support? No, she didn’t work to support us. Mostly she was on welfare, food stamps, whatever she could do to get by. She’d work occasionally, but only when she absolutely had to, when the system made her. When I was old enough to stay alone, she’d go out at night and work—sometimes.”
    He didn’t like the direction this was going. “Work where? Like as a waitress?”
    She took a hard swallow of wine. “No. Not as a waitress. She’d get jobs at nightclubs as a stripper. When she got too worn down and haggard-looking from the drugs to do that, she’d just whore herself out on the streets.”
    His stomach dropped. “Jesus, Savannah.”
    She wouldn’t meet his gaze, instead stared at her hands. “Yeah.”
    “How did you survive?”
    “I stayed out of her way. She was mostly stoned all the time, soshe didn’t bother with me. She’d get high and play classical music. She loved classical. And she’d play Beethoven, especially that music—the one in the music box—over and over again. She’d dance around the house—sometimes she was even fun. She’d grab me and we’d dance together. When I was little, I never knew she was high. I just thought she was fun. Until I got older and realized there was something terribly wrong about her.”
    That’s why the song triggered the memories tonight. That’s why it was both a sweet and awful memory for her.
    “The welfare and food stamps brought in enough food—when she remembered to go buy it. When I was old enough, I’d go get it, but I had to steal enough money from her purse to get groceries. She didn’t like to part with the cash because that was her drug money.”
    “The state—”
    “Did nothing. She made sure the state couldn’t take me away. I was a meal ticket for her.”
    He frowned. “In what way?”
    “Not the way you think. I mean I was a dependent, so the state paid her for me. She might have been a lot of things, but she never used me other than to get money from the state. She never brought guys to the apartment. She always did her…‘work’ on the streets. She kept men away from me. Always told me to never be like her. She told me to make sure to go to school every day and stay away from boys. She wanted better for me than she had.”
    She paused, caught her breath. “I guess, in her own way, she tried her best.”
    Cole couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for Savannah as a child, to grow up with a drug-addicted whore of a mother who was likely too addled to care for her daughter. He wasn’t big on emotion, but Christ, his heart hurt for her.
    “So what happened to her?”
    “She left when I was thirteen.”
    “What do you mean…left?”
    “I mean she left. Decided she didn’t want to be a mother anymore. Or maybe she was so high she simply forgot she was a mother. I have no idea. When she didn’t come home for a week I finally ran out of food and there was no money to buy more. I got hungry, so I had to tell the school. Social services took me in after that.”
    Cole was stunned. A child of that age left all alone. He couldn’t fathom the loneliness and fear, what that must have been like for her, wondering when or if her mother would be back. “Did they look for her?”
    “So they told me. I’m sure they didn’t look hard. Where were they going to look? They knew her history. I figure she hooked up with someone and left town. Or maybe she figured I was better off without her. That’s what I’d like to think, anyway. They never told me