A Five-Minute Life by Emma Scott EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author:Emma Scott
- Language: English
- Genre: Medical Romance
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- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Jim
The red-and-white For Rent sign caught my eye through my helmet’s face
shield. I slowed my Harley FX, parked it at the curb and lifted the visor.
Behind a rickety fence was a tiny house, probably no more than nine
hundred square feet, squatting on a patch of dried grass. The cement path
leading up to the door was cracked. A crooked step on the stoop. Peeling
white paint on the siding.
Small, plain, and cheap.
Perfect.
I took off my helmet fished my cell phone out of my black leather jacket
and called the faded number on the sign.
It’s just a damn phone call, I thought, inhaling deep. Keep your shit
together.
A man answered. “Yeah.”
Inhale. Exhale.
“I’m calling about the house for rent in Boones Mill?”
No stutter. Not even on the m in Mill. A minor victory.
“Okay,” the guy said. “Six-fifty per month. Utilities included but not
water. No pets. Wanna see it? I can be down there in five.”
“I have a job interview at the Blue Ridge Sanitarium,” I said. “If I get
the job, I’ll be back in a few hours. I could see it then.”
The guy sighed. “So why call me now?”
“I don’t want anyone to take it.”
He chuckled over the distinct sound of an exhale of a cigarette—half
cough, half laugh.
“Son, you’re the first to call in a month. I think you’re safe.” A drag off
his smoke. “You going to work up at Blue Ridge? With all the head cases
and whackos?”
I gripped the phone tighter. Asshole. “Just don’t rent the house, okay?”
“Sure, sure. I’ll put a courtesy hold on it, just for you.”
“Thanks,” I muttered. I hung up and my hand dropped to my jeans-clad
thigh.
The guy was right—no one wanted his crappy little house but me. The
phone call was a dry run for my job interview at the sanitarium. I’d been
driving since six this morning from Richmond and didn’t want my
interviewer to be the first person I talked to.
My ex-foster mother’s sneering tone filled my head.
Like it matters, you big dummy. You’re going to stutter your way
through that job interview and you know it.
“Shut up, Doris,” I muttered.
Of all the foster homes I’d been bounced around since birth, I’d been in
her care, if you could call it that, from the time I was ten until I turned
eighteen. At twenty-four, her taunting voice still wouldn’t leave me the fuck
alone. I didn’t stutter through every sentence anymore, but it still lurked
under my tongue and came out to play when I was pissed off. Or nervous.
Like job-interview-nervous.
When I was twelve, doctors labeled my stutter a psychological
disfluency: a reaction to a traumatic event, rather than physiological issues
in my brain.
“A reaction?” Doris had said with a sneer in the doctor’s office. “You
saying he can’t talk right, but it’s all in his head? Pfft. He’s a big dummy, is
all. This just proves it.”
The doctor stiffened. “Has there been a traumatic incident recently?”
“Of course not,” Doris snapped, while I wanted to scream across my
tied-up tongue that yes, something had happened. Just the week before
Grandpa Jack died.
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