Free The First Day of the Rest of My Life by Cathy Lamb

building houses and doing landscape stuff, like fountains and walls, but I had to bail my mom out of jail because she’d been locked up for driving drunk, again. So I didn’t have money for rent and my brother needed all this stuff for football and we didn’t have any food, and I got desperate. And I was pissed off and frustrated. No matter how hard I worked at my job, nothing was ever right. Then the construction market started to slow so I took a newspaper delivery job, too. My mom was always passed out or screaming at me and my brother, telling me I was nothing, telling him he was shit. Years of that. Years of her screaming shit.”
    I closed my eyes on a wave of pain for this guy. Wave of pain. Some people should not parent.
    Ramon rolled his shoulders. “I needed five hundred dollars. That was it. Five hundred dollars. So I robbed a bank, got caught, did four years, and now . . . my brother’s in foster care because the state took him from my mom when she crashed in a car with him and had meth in there, plus she assaulted someone with a pickax and she’s in jail now, but if I can get a job and prove I’m responsible, I can get custody of him instead of visitation only.”
    He slumped into his chair again. “I have to get my brother back, Miss O’Shea, I have to. He’s only twelve.”
    “Ramon, you can mow and edge a lawn, pick weeds, plant flowers?”
    “Sure. Yes. Absolutely.”
    “These paintings that you make. Can you transfer the painting into reality?”
    “You mean, can I look at one of my paintings and take a bunch of dirt and turn it into something cool in someone’s front yard?”
    “Yes.”
    Hope peeked through his eyes. “I know I can. I spent hours and hours in prison studying, drawing . . . I even went online and talked to landscapers and gardeners, asked them all sorts of questions. Plus, I know how to work with cement, build brick walls, that sort of thing because of the construction work I was doing before jail. I like being outdoors, Miss O’Shea. I like working in gardens. In fact, I worked in the prison garden.”
    He was proud of that, I could tell. “Tell me about it.”
    “We had all kinds of fruits and vegetables, all the time. I built a whole bunch of raised beds, used organic everything, planted seeds and starts. I built a huge grape arbor, a shed with shelves, brick pathways all over the garden, a huge wood deck, a rock wall, a cement patio with a trellis over it. I planted nasturtiums and edible flowers that the cook put on the guys’ plates sometimes—that’s why all the guys in jail called me Flower. Because of the flowers. Even the warden thanked me. He wrote me a recommendation, so did two guards from jail, but no one will hire me.”
    I thought of the house that I didn’t like. Boring grass, dying. Plain. Dirt. “I’ll hire you.”
    He looked shocked. “You will? To do what?” He snapped his fingers. “I could be your janitor. I could be a janitor for this whole building. Can you tell somebody here that I can clean? I did that in jail, too. Cleaned all the time. Cleaned good—corners, too. The guy in charge of the kitchen, Mr. Morriston, he didn’t like when I worked in the garden, because he wanted me in the kitchen helping him, every corner, every wall, I cleaned. . . .”
    “Nope, nope, and nope. Ramon, you need to shoot for where you want to be, so to speak. Do the Shoot High O’Shea program.”
    “The Shoot High O’Shea program? What’s that?”
    “It means, don’t shoot low, shoot high. Shoot for what you want, who you want to be. Ramon, my yard is boring. Only grass, and the grass is dying. Draw out a plan for my yard and we’ll work out a price. I’m up in the hills, so if the yard turns out great, I betcha you’ll get more business.”
    He was stunned. “You’re hiring me to work on your yard?” “Yep. Here’s my address. Get on up there. Think about it, give me a drawing, and I’ll give you a check. How’s that?”
    “You’re