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Quitting Another Job

“You quit again? What the fuck, Sally-Anne! That’s the second job this month. How are you gonna contribute to bills if you can’t hold down a job?”

Pa was really mad. He was hollering at me from just an arm’s length away, spittle flying from his lips. He was fit to be tied when I came home early from my job at the gas station. I tried sneaking in the door, but he was always around and watching for intruders, when he wasn’t watching my younger sister, Lulu. She didn’t need watching, but he kept his greasy eyes on her anyways, and sometimes his hands, too.

Pa tried that with me a few years ago, starting when I was Lulu’s age, or maybe younger. When I filled out at 19, he started staring at my boobs. I took to wearing loose sweatshirts, and never wore a tight top again. The last time he’d stared, I told him I’d pour sugar in his gas tank if he looked at me like that again, and he laid off. He loved that car more than me, it seemed. Lulu started getting her figure around the same age, too, and Pa noticed. The women in our family were late bloomers, said Ma, but when we did, we bloomed big. Big boobs, big hips, big ass. Not a model figure, we were too full everywhere for that, but we weren’t huge, either. It sure got us a lot of attention, but neither me nor Lulu wanted any part of it. We’d talked about that a few times, and we both felt that if boys didn’t notice us before, when we had no figures, they obviously didn’t care about us as people. They just wanted to bury their faces in our tits. We were happier keeping out of all that, so neither of us had ever dated.

I just wanted to get a job that would let me move out. Pa said it wasn’t right for a girl to live on her own. He said either I lived with family, or a husband.

He couldn’t stop me, though. If I hid enough money, I’d move across town and he couldn’t do nothing about it. I’d take Lulu with me too, if I could.

I never understood why Ma didn’t step in. She saw Pa trying to feel up Lulu and said nothing. I tried asking her once, and she muttered something about needing a break from it herself. She was a cold-hearted mother, I realized. My family, aside from Lulu, were nothing but a disappointment; selfish and disgusting. Lulu’s twin, Luke, wasn’t any better. He stayed out a lot, either with the guys on his football team or sleeping his way through all the cheerleaders. When Lulu would cry out to him for help the odd time he was home, he just laughed. Lulu tolerated a lot more than I did, though, and confessed that she didn’t see how she could get out from under Pa’s thumb, so she may as well let him do what he wanted. He didn’t try that with her when I was around, though. He knew I’d step in and tell him off.

I applied everywhere I could in our town, but there weren’t a lot of jobs for someone with just their high-school diploma. I had the grades to get into college, just barely, but Ma and Pa wouldn’t let me go. I didn’t get any scholarships, so even if I stayed home, I’d be struggling to pay for tuition. Ma and Pa had no money to help out, even if they wanted to. What little they had went towards Luke’s tuition. I think they wanted me trapped at home. My only hope was to find a decent job that didn’t need a degree or certificate, and get a place for me and Lulu, if I could convince her to leave.

That was proving harder than I thought. I’d had a dozen jobs over the last two years, plus a couple I’d held while in school, and I’d quit each one. Sometimes I lasted a few days, sometimes a couple of months, but they all ended the same way. My boss would try to grope me. Some of them held out for a while, just trying to talk me ...