The Diaper Queen of Maple Court
A Novel

About this book:

Rita Vance stepped off the bus from state prison with twenty-two dollars, a toddler she barely knows, and an eviction notice waiting on her mother's kitchen table. She has fourteen days to show her parole officer a pay stub—or go back inside. The only work hiring won't touch her record, and the bodega charges a poverty tax on every pack of diapers: forty dollars a week for the cheap ones that leak, twenty-five for the good ones she can't afford upfront.

So Rita does the math. Two hundred babies in Maple Court. Twelve hundred diapers a day. Nine thousand dollars a month flowing out of the courtyard in quarters and fives. She finds a warehouse manager sitting on water-damaged freight he can't move, talks him down to sixty bucks for twenty cases, and hauls them home in a rusted shopping cart. By sunset, she's not just a mother trying to survive—she's the only distributor on the block who sells at a price that doesn't require a choice between dry pants and the light bill.

But every hustle has a supply chain, and every supply chain has a choke point. The block captain wants his cut. The coupon syndicate watches her margins. Her parole officer runs background checks on her customers. And when the distributor cuts her off, Rita has to decide how far she'll go to keep the mothers of Maple Court dry—and whether the crown she's building is worth the weight on her head.