She felt the vibration in her pockets mere seconds before she heard the familiar ring tone of her silver, dented cell phone. It had seen better days.

“Hello?”

“Hey there stranger,” said a female voice that had the sound of a thirty year smoker.

“Mom! Hi! I’m almost there. Just getting outta the subway.”

“Well, hurry up! Supper’s “bout done.” Her daughter laughed. Her mother wasn”t one to wait patiently behind a ridiculously long traffic jam and she sure wasn’t patient when it came to spending time with her daughter.

“Alright, alright. Don’t get your shorts in a twist,” she said with a giggle. The women cut their conversation short as they hung up their phones.

The daughter quickened her pace as fast as her short legs could carry her without breaking in a full blown run. Her bright ginger curls bounced slightly on her broad shoulders. Her friends always joked they could spot her a mile away in a crowd; she looked like a leprechaun in a hurry to protect her pot of gold, while suspiciously eyeing everyone just in case they were following her.

She was the spitting image of her mother. Her ex-step father loved that about her. She had been dreaming about him often lately and it bothered her for some reason. She hadn’t spoken to him, or heard her mother mention anything about him since the divorce when she was thirteen. A week after the papers were signed her mother moved them from the only place she could ever truly call home. It wasn’t a wealthy neighborhood by any means, nor was her house a beautiful sight. She loved it because it held so many cherished memories of her and her deceased father. She was nine when that idiot drunk semi-truck driver plowed through her father’s red truck like tin foil. After the wreck, her mother wouldn’t have been able to identify him if it wasn’t for the St. Christopher pendent strung on a thick metal chain that her father always wore. It was a closed casket.

She never liked the man her mother married two years later. The newlyweds blamed it on her fear of her father being replaced. But that wasn’t the case. There was something about him she didn’t trust and she could never put her finger on it at the time. All she knew was that his eyes were hallow and his gleaming smile wasn’t genuine. She never felt inclined to converse with this poor excuse of a man.