Going Solo (New Song) by Brenda Barrett

she was better now.
    Alice stepped into the house. It was just a short distance from the dusty track to the zinc fence of her house. Blue was sitting outside on a dusty pan smoking a cigarette. He ignored her and she did likewise. They had been at odds since Carson had warned him to leave her alone. He barely mumbled anything to her these days and she liked it that way. If they never spoke again, she would be fine.
    Her eyes adjusted to the dark interior when she entered the cramped little hall space where she and her siblings slept in sleeping bags in the nights. It was now serving as a living room; the sleeping bags were neatly stacked in a corner. Her mother had taken out the four white plastic chairs that she always stacked on each other in the corner and had arranged them in a circle. She had even shined the red stained floor to a glossy looking sheen. She must have known that the pastor was coming over because the circular white table was covered with a tablecloth that had grape patterns, and a plastic jug with lemonade was sitting on top of it.
    The pastor was holding one of their better-looking plastic cups in his hands and Alice looked from him to her mother. "Good evening," she said sullenly. These days she could not look Pastor Keen in the face. Didn't anybody else see the sexual interest that he was showing her? She had told Carson about it but even he did not believe her. In her humble opinion, Pastor Keen was a hypocrite - a creepy, slimy hypocrite that her mother and the other church people held in high regard. On one hand, he was so good with people, and on the other, he had a serious problem.
    She looked at his fair skin and his curly black hair that had a little gray sprinkled in it. He had the bearing of someone who was well learned. Some people would assume he was a doctor because he was always wearing one of those bush jackets that the late Michael Manley, a former prime minister of Jamaica, had made popular in the 70s. Come to think of it, he had a Michael Manley Look about him.
    He adjusted his glasses and once more, she wondered when she had actually come to loathe him as much as she did now. It was way back from she was fourteen or so. Little by little, he had slowly changed toward her, giving her long leering looks and finding excuses to talk to her whenever he could.
    "Have a seat Alice," Emilia said, pointing at the chair nearest to Pastor Keen. She put down her knapsack in the corner and sat in the chair nearest to her mother, pulling it even closer to her and further from Pastor Keen. Her mother looked at her mulish expression and realized that she was blatantly distancing herself from the pastor and sighed.
    "Pastor Keen has gotten a job for you already, knowing that you are going to graduate this year." There was a warning in her mother's tone: be grateful or else.
    "A job?" Alice said, heeding the warning tone and trying to look interested.
    "Yes," Pastor Keen said, in his gentle, refined, overly controlled, pastoral voice. "I have finally gotten the go ahead from the board to hire a full-time church secretary. I know you did business courses in high school and that you are a great organizer. Remember that time when you arranged the fundraiser because you wanted to go to the Pantomime? I have since then admired your skills. You are a young person who has potential. The job is available at the start of the summer, June 1."
    Alice stopped herself from snorting. She just nodded instead. The dutiful, dirt-poor girl should be grateful after all. The respected church pastor had magnanimously thought of her and was offering her a job because she had potential.
    "Say something," Emilia hissed, almost pushing Alice's stiff unyielding body from the chair with a poke.
    "I don't…" She inhaled and rubbed where her mother had poked her, "know what to say." She smiled at him insincerely, hoping that the cold distrust that she felt for him could be seen shining from her eyes.
    "A thank you is all I need,"