A City Tossed and Broken Read Online Free

rooming house near the river. Her room was small and crammed with just a bed and a table. Mildew stained the walls. I could hear the person in the next room coughing.
    “Did you say good-bye to Sadie?” Mama asked me.
    I had been thinking I would stop by and say a last good-bye to my best friend. But in the end I couldn’t. I would write to her, I decided. I couldn’t stand to see pity in her eyes, her and her mother. Everybody feeling sorry for us — that was almost worse than anything that happened.
    I gave Mama the card from Andrew Jewell and she looked at it like she’d just discovered a rat on the table.
    “Where did you see him?” she asked, and I told her he came to call on the Sumps but Mrs. Sump wouldn’t let him in.
    “I’m not surprised at that,” she said.
    I asked her why, but she wouldn’t say. She looked so small and tired, sitting in that awful room.
    “How long?” I asked. “How long do I have to be in that house, working off the debt?” And I finally was able to say how I felt. “It’s awful, Ma. I hate it.”
    She didn’t want to hear that. I saw it in her face. She wanted me to be like a girl in a book, all brave and stalwart and cheerful. Instead of miserable and afraid and angry.
    Two years isn’t so very long, she said. I’ve done some figuring, and I’ll be able to put enough by in two years to get a proper place for us to live. It will be gone in a blink of an eye.
    I made an exaggerated blink. “Still here,” I said.
    And this was when the fight began.
    Mama said she still deserved my respect.
    Why, I said. Why wasn’t money set by for hard times? That’s what Grandad always did. How did they manage to lose every cent we had?
    All the money went back into the tavern, she said. It was fine because we had a place that was ours.
    So I said, if I’m old enough to be sent away to help out, I’m old enough to know.
    Here is something I learned, diary: Sometimes it is better not to know, I think.
    Here is what she said, the words spilling out so fast:
    “Your father is the reason we are here like this, left with nothing. He lost it, he lost everything. He was so proud to be invited into that back room, with the rich men gambling. Yes, Min, they were playing cards. And when this man” — and she shook the card at me — “this Andrew Jewell won all that money, he demanded it all right away. He made threats against your father. He said he knew people in the police department who would shut down the tavern. He wouldn’t wait for his money, and why should he, really, since he won it? So Mr. Sump took pity on your father and gave him a loan to cover the debt. He said not to worry about paying it back, he wouldn’t charge interest, but to use the tavern as collateral. And then suddenly he says because of this move to San Francisco his partners insisted on him collecting. So your father had to give up the tavern.”
    “But how could he have left?” I asked. “Without even saying good-bye to me?” Diary, I tried not to sound like a little girl when I asked that. Even though I felt like one. “Why did he leave for good? Why didn’t he stay and help?”
    That’s when she said he didn’t leave, she threw him out. She said to go away and never come back.
    “So there’s no forgiveness?” I asked her.
    “Not for this,” she said. “I was a sap. A silly fool with my head in the clouds. Your father is a gambler, Min. That’s why he goes away and comes back. He gambles and loses and can’t face me. So yes, all our money was tied up in the tavern. We could never get ahead.
    “It’s up to us now, Min,” she said. “We will start over from scratch. We can do it. I wish I could do it with you beside me, but I can’t.” She said she couldn’t bear to bring me here, that I would be living in a fine house, that Mrs. Sump had promised to look after me.
    “I could get a job,” I said. “I could work in a factory. I could say I was sixteen or seventeen, people would believe