One
Lucia Rodriguez was having a terrible day.
She sighed as she locked up the Paws and Purrs Pet Clinic and trudged to her car. Automatically, she reached for her keys and then remembered the reason she’d gone back into the clinic in the first place—the car was dead. After trying to get it to start for almost ten minutes, she’d gone back inside to call her mom—since her ancient cell phone was also dead—and let her know she would be late getting home because of it.
Of course, most people would have called Triple A or whatever auto club they were a member of to get the car towed to a garage. But Lucia wasn’t a member of any auto clubs—she couldn’t afford it. In fact, as a single mom of three trying to live on a Vet Tech’s salary, she couldn’t afford much of anything—not even a cab or an Uber to get her home.
Sighing again, Luci started walking towards the bus stop. The dead car just capped off her awful day.
Well, at least the tire didn’t have anything to do with cats, she thought and shivered.
Working at a veterinary clinic, Luci saw her fair share of bad things happen to good animals. The Paws and Purrs practice treated all kinds of pets from regular ones like dogs and cats to exotic creatures like sugar gliders and hedgehogs. This being Florida, they also saw their share of snakes and lizards—though Dr. Canody had drawn the line at treating someone’s pet alligator.
But for some reason, today had just been a terrible day for cats.
First thing that morning, a lady had brought in a cat she’d hit with her car. The cat had obviously been a stray with ragged ears and fleas to show for it and the woman had been wearing an expensive business suit—not unusual since the Paws and Purrs Clinic was located in Downtown Tampa where a lot of corporations had their offices.
The cat had been mewing weakly and the woman was crying, her mascara running down her cheeks in black smears. Her suit was stained with blood but she didn’t even seem to notice.
“He ran right out in front of me!” she’d sobbed, holding the injured cat out to Luci, who took him carefully. “I couldn’t miss him! I tried to swerve—Oh God, I’m so sorry!”
From there, the day had only gotten worse. Right after the tragic accident, Luci had had to tell a man his cat had advanced Feline Aids and didn’t have long to live. Right after that, someone brought in a kitten with flea anemia, so weak it had died while Luci was trying to get an IV into its tiny vein. And finally, as though to cap off the terrible day, she’s had to sit with Mrs. Wachowski—a kind, little old lady who had been bringing her cats to the Paws and Purrs practice for years—as the vet euthanized Bootsie, her favorite cat.
Poor Mrs. Wachowski had cried like a baby and Luci had put an arm around her and tried to comfort her as best she could. She knew the pain of losing a pet all too well herself, and she also knew the older woman had recently lost her husband. Mrs. Wachowski had two more cats at home but losing Bootsie was a blow and she had looked twenty years older when she finally left the clinic.
There had been some bright spots in her otherwise dark day, Luci tried to remind herself. Mr. Yoder had come in with Goofus—a Boxer with a heart of gold and a brain of brick—as Dr. Canody liked to say. The big, dumb dog loved everyone and it was always fun to see him wagging and panting in all his goofy glory.
But all in all, it had been a pretty lousy day for her feline patients. And having car trouble to end everything didn’t help her mood any.
How am I going to pay to get it fixed? Luci wondered, as she rode the crowded, smelly bus in the deepening gloom. She lived in a rundown apartment building at the edge of the downtown area, all she could afford since her ex-husband, Tony, never paid child support.
He almost never came to see his kids, either, which was actually just as well. Tony had a hot temper and the antics of the three-year-old twins, Antony and Julio, always got on his nerves. He did better with their older sister, Francesca. But only because Frannie was extremely serious for a five-year-old and she usually got very quiet around her father.
Unfortunately, that was probably because Tony shouted a lot when he was angry—which was most of the time. Frannie had developed the habit of keeping silent and shushing her little brothers whenever he was around to try and keep peace in the house.
Luci had stayed with him for much longer than she should have. She had told herself that everything would be okay—that when the kids got a little bit older, Tony would go back to being the sweet, kind guy he’d been when they were dating. And besides, he only shouted at the kids—he never hit them. And he hardly ever hit Luci herself, just a black eye here and there and the occasional bruised wrist from where he grabbed her as he yelled in her face…
Thinking of her rationalization now made Luci angry with herself. It wasn’t until she’d walked into her kid’s playroom one day and had seen the twins huddled, crying, behind their big sister while Frannie tried desperately to hush them that she realized she wasn’t the only one being affected by Tony’s rages.
“Oh, Mommy!” Frannie’s face had relaxed from its fearful grimace as she saw her mother. “We thought it was Daddy coming,” she explained, as she soothed her little brothers. “And we were afraid he would be angry if we made any noise—so we were trying to be quiet little mices.”
It was a wake up call for Luci—at that moment, she made up her mind to leave. Even though Tony had a good job and they lived in a pretty house in Carrollwood—a nice, upper-class area of North Tampa—and even though she knew she’d have a hard time making it on her own with three kids, it wasn’t worth it. She didn’t want her daughter to grow up frightened and her sons to think it was okay for a husband to hit and shout.
That day she had packed up everything she could and moved to her mother’s place down in Ybor City—the historic part of Tampa. They lived there for a while, while Luci got a job and worked through the divorce.
In order to keep Tony from fighting for custody of the kids—which he threatened to do, even though she knew he didn’t really want them—she’d had to give up almost everything. The house was still in his name and she didn’t get a dime from their shared bank account. About all she got to keep were her children, their clothes and toys, and the family dog, Lady. Well that and the crappy late model Ford Fiesta, which was currently dead in the Paws and Purrs parking lot, she reminded herself.
As soon as she got on her feet, Luci had moved her little family out of her mom’s tiny one-bedroom, one-bathroom bungalow and into a small, cheap, two-bedroom in her current apartment building. She’d been able to do that because Dr. Canody had been kind enough to give her a raise and the extra hours she’d asked for.
Though her mom had protested that Luci and the kids could stay with her as long as they wanted, there just wasn’t enough room and besides, she needed to be closer to her work. Also, her kids still got to see their abuelita almost every day, since it was her mom who picked them up after school and pre-school and kept them until Luci got off work at Paws and Purrs.
Tonight had been her late night and now it was later still, she thought with a sigh, looking out the dirty window of the bus as it lumbered along the cracked pavement towards her end of town. Sometimes she felt like she was living life on a tightrope—just barely keeping her balance above the sea of debt and poverty which was constantly lapping at her heels.