My Mother Sold Me to Pay Her Dealer, and the Man Who Took Me From Him Has a Use for Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Foot of the Stairs
On her ninth week upstairs at the Dry Dock, Bronwen says her name and her price to forty men, and walks out of the bar in her own coat ahead of Valentine Corvino.
On my ninth week upstairs at the Dry Dock, Marek Hudak brought the whole bar to the foot of the stairs.
"Gigi," he called up, in the voice he used for company. "Come pour for our guest."
I was sitting on the edge of the bed in the room with the lock on the outside.
I had heard the music drop and forty men go quiet.
I had heard a name run along the bar, over and over, passed hand to hand.
Marek had been selling it all night.
My partner, he kept saying. My friend from the old neighborhood. The family's right behind me.
I had said almost nothing in nine weeks and listened to everything, so I knew a lie when I heard one.
Nobody with that name drank in a bar like this.
The bolt slid back, and one of Marek's men stood in the door and looked me over.
"Dress," he said.
It was the red one Marek had bought me, thin, with a zipper that stuck.
I put it on, because the alternative was being put in it.
I walked down the back stairs with his hand on my elbow.
We passed the kitchen smell of fryer oil and bleach and came out into the noise of the bar.
Then I stopped on the last step, because forty men had turned to look.
A table sat in the middle of the floor with one man at it.
He was about thirty, with short black hair and a scar through his left eyebrow.
He wore a charcoal overcoat he had not taken off, and a glass of water stood untouched in front of him.
He did not look at me.
He looked at Marek.
Marek came to the bottom of the stairs and took my wrist, proud of me, the way he was proud of his good whiskey.
"Gigi's our house girl," he told the room. "Best pour in the valley. Go on, sweetheart."
He pushed the bottle into my hand.
I looked at the label.
I looked at the men along the bar, and at the bartender polishing a glass he had already polished twice.
I thought of my mother's kitchen on Rutger Street and a Wednesday in October.
"Just go with him, Bronwen," she had said. "He only wants to talk."
I thought of the two hundred dying people I had sat with on the hospice ward.
None of them had been afraid of the end once somebody stayed in the room.
Nobody had stayed in mine.
I took the bottle by the neck, out of Marek's grip.
"My name is Gwendolyn Treadwell," I said.
I said it loud enough to reach the door.
The jukebox was off by then, and I could hear the ice machine.
"My mother sold me to this man for four thousand two hundred dollars on the ninth of October.
"I've been kept upstairs ever since, behind a door that locks from the outside.
"His men have used me whenever they liked, and he knew, and he let them."
Marek laughed once, a short bark, and reached for me.
I stepped back out of his reach.
"If any of you wants to say I'm lying," I said, "that gentleman can ask your bartender what the number was."
The bartender stopped polishing.
I walked across the floor through forty men who would not meet my eyes.
I set the bottle down in front of the man in the overcoat, and I did not look away from him.
Up close, his eyes were nearly black.
He read my face once, from my mouth to my eyes.
Then he stood, and his chair scraped.
"Mr. Corvino," Marek said, in a different voice.
"She comes with me," the man said.
He had a low flat voice that did not carry, so the whole bar leaned in to hear it.
"Tonight. Name what she cost you and I won't argue."
Marek spread his hands and smiled at the room.
"Valentine. My friend. Your name isn't on that debt."
Then he muttered to the man beside him, "I only deal with your uncle's side anyway."
Nobody in the bar corrected him.
A few of his men laughed along with him, thinly.
Valentine Corvino looked at him the way you look at a bill you have decided not to pay.
I did not wait to see how it ended.
My coat hung on the hook by the back stairs, the blue one with the torn lining that I had worn in on the ninth of October.
I took it down and put it on, one arm and then the other, while every man in the room watched.
Then I walked out of the Dry Dock ahead of both of them.
The door was heavy, and the cold hit my bare legs and my open mouth.
The sign over the tire shop across the road said six degrees.
Snow was coming down sideways through the lot lights.
I had no shoes but the thin black pair Marek had bought, no money, and no idea which way the road went.
I did not care.
I would rather be taken out of that building by a man who frightened me than be carried back up those stairs.
A black car idled at the curb with its back door already open.
Valentine Corvino came out behind me with his hands at his sides and stopped two steps away.
He did not touch my coat, or my arm, or the door.
He stood in the snow with the light on his scar and said nothing.
The bar door banged behind him, and I heard Marek shouting his name.
I got into the car.
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