Family Business

Family Business by Ranch Hand

My name is Jason and I had just passed my eighteenth birthday. I live in Nevada about a hundred miles north of Las Vegas. I'm a pretty normal kid, popular in school, varsity wrestling team, with a fairly normal family, or so I thought. My Dad split on us just after I was born, which left me with my Mom and my sister who is two years older. I remember things were pretty tight growing up, money-wise. Sometime after I was ten years old my mom got a job as a cocktail waitress at one of the casinos in Vegas. My sister watched out for me most of the time and our neighbor Mrs. Slater made sure we had hot food to eat and didn't get into too much mischief.

It was tough on mom, driving all those miles back and forth and she soon found a friend who had a place in town where she began crashing for several days at a stretch. My sister Jenny and I just got used to not seeing much of mom most of the time.