Betty's House

A biting, funny, and unsettling portrait of need and survival. When a down-on-his-luck drifter meets Betty in a fried-chicken joint, he sees only a mark with a soft spot for broken men. But Betty's tenderness hides a wrath older than either of them. Their affair-part hustle, part haunting-exposes what happens when lust, hunger, and class resentment blur into love. Betty's House is a darkly comic meditation on sex, poverty, and pride in the modern South-where the smallest kindness can turn curse, and every desire carries a price. Excerpt: I have been living with Betty, in Betty's house, for six months now. Her purse dangling at the end of its long chain bumped me when she rose from the table that day in the Chicken N Biskits.
Betty rubbed my arm slowly and softly. When she left, there was a crumpled wad of paper on the table--a ten-dollar bill with her name and phone number scrawled over Hamilton's smug face. I was insulted that such a troll would think that the likes of me would give her one second of my time. I kept the ten spot, and a little voice told me to put the number in my jacked-up flip phone with the missing zero.
I tell you, a brother is having a hard time when he don't even have a zero on his phone. When Friday came and the eagle hadn't flown, the Manager tossed my things out into the rain, with a nest of bugs to keep me company.***Love is complicated. Check out these books and stories by this author:Maura and Her Two HusbandsInto the Murky WaterMinister QOdd Voices in Love