Market Street Moll

Folks call me Moll. I don't know anyone actually knows my real name anymore, no one but the woman who birthed me and named me and died on me when I was eleven. I've got brothers somewhere in the world, but they don't know me any more than anyone else. They ain't family, not since the state pulled us up and broke us apart.

I got a real name, the one on the papers. But Moll is who I am.

I've been Moll ever since is was 15. I didn't know what it meant, not at the time, but I learned the first time I got picked up for hooking. Some of the girls are really smart, you know with books and stuff. I read but I ain't never been called smart.

So now you know. I'm Moll, and I live two blocks from Market Street in San Francisco. Never been far from it my whole life and I always end up back on it eventually. When I was little, we lived in this apartment behind a liquor store where my mother worked right there on Market. Later we moved into a smaller place above a book store a few blocks down.

It was me and Michael and Patrick then. Michael's got a different Daddy than me and Patrick, one that left Mom when he found out about Michael. Seven years later, she was pregnant with me and Patrick. She almost gave us up, cause she was alone and already had Michael and she was poor, really poor. She used to tell me that it was me, the reason she kept us. Always wanted a baby girl.

I don't think it was me she wanted. I think it was the idea of a girl. There wasn't money to dress me up all pretty and stuff, not like she wanted, but that suited me fine. Never was much for the lace and shit. Never been one for pretty.

Michael made a good Daddy, for all that he wasn't even old enough to drive. He cooked us dinner while Mom worked, made us do our homework and got us to bed. He worked when he could, odd jobs, sweeping floors and hauling trash. That left me to the cleaning, and making sure Patrick was okay. I was, after all his big sister, even if only by about 10 minutes. He was a responsibility I took very seriously.

It wasn't an easy life, but then whose is easy, really?

When Patrick and I were eleven, I found my mother throwing up three mornings in a row and I was sure she was dying. One of the kids at school told me her mother threw up and ended up having the cancer. I wasn't sure what that was, but it sounded bad.

When I told Michael, he said me she was probably just pregnant, but I didn't understand how when

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