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We lived in what felt like the IE. But in the San Gabriel Valley just south of the 210. There was a Smith’s grocery store and a Guitar Center across the street. She liked Smith’s, it was a wide white grocery store with the tall grocery carts she could ride under. And on the street that led to her apartment complex, there was a pizza shop.

No one really knows how this relationship came to be but a few days spent on the pinball machine of the dining space became a regular. And if she were to really think about it, maybe Ronnie left her there under the watchful eye of Ajima.

Ajima wore a light blue floral house dress white a white apron. It was never dirty but just mussed up to know that she was a disciplined and hard working woman. Sometimes Snuggles would have a slice of pizza, one of Ajima’s son’s ran deliveries, the other worked the counter, and Vince tinkered somewhere in the back. Vince was so elusive, waist length jet black hair draped like a rocker.

But one day Ajima’s boys came by the house, which never happened. Lonnie told her to say he wasn’t there. Door propped open, she saw a look in Sam’s eyes that she’d never seen before.

He must owed them money, like everyone else. Was she a pawn? A way to get by? A singing handsome father, raising a daughter whose mother had abandoned and abused her once again. Yes he was Superman, coming to save the day. This time she found him, after she made so many calls to disconnect numbers and her paternal grandmother. It could have been worse, to believe a man with an “S”, isn’t just a man of many shirts.