I’d drop a few flakes of fish food into the bowl for Blinky, grab the lunch Mom packed before bed, and catch the bus at the little pond out front of the apartment managers’ office. I didn’t feel special using an alarm clock or locking a door with the key that hung from a string around my neck or walking myself down the sidewalk to wait with other kids for a school bus, but I think it makes Mom proud to say I am—and always have been—perfect.
After I heard somewhere that goldfish grow as big as their container, I kept after Mom to let me put Blinky in the pond. She always told me the same thing, that 1) he’d freeze to death out there and 2) I was too tenderhearted. “You’ll be bawling for him as soon as you dump him, Reney,” she’d say and push her hair behind her ears. “And I’m not getting you another fish if you let this one go.”
We got him at the carnival when Kenny, who was high on life and the Wild Turkey he’d snuck in his boot, got to feeling happy and calling us a family. He said, “I love you like my own, Teeny Reney,” and forked over enough money for me to play all the games I wanted. Then he rubbed my hair so hard that one of my barrettes pulled out and my hair fell into my eyes.
Why Mom married him, I do not know. She was still half Holy Roller. Couldn’t help it, I guess. She only wore a bun to keep her hair back at work, but she still wouldn’t cut it. She parted it down the middle—like a hippie, she said—or pulled it back in two barrettes just like mine. She didn’t wear makeup and hadn’t even started drinking in those days.
I was used to Kenny and how he got, though. I even missed him sometimes when he took off with his buddies and didn’t show up for a while. I came home from the carnival with an armload of junk, a little bowl of Blinky, and a mad hornet for a mom because Kenny got mouthy and jealous after his happy bubbles popped.
I couldn’t get off the idea of setting Blinky free once I got on it. Maybe letting him out of his sad little bowl felt kind of like a good or right thing that God calls a person to do sometimes. Or maybe setting Blinky free to see if he got huge was just some kind of science experiment to me, because I don’t know if anybody can really love a fish.
He was a really good fish, though. He swam happy zigzags at the top of the bowl when I came into the room. He even let me feed him by hand when the apartment was quiet. I kept him for longer than I’d ever kept anything alive. The carnival came and left and came back again, and I still had little Blinky swimming circles in our living room, watching us live our lives like a TV show he couldn’t turn off.
My mom and Kenny argued. Sometimes they fought. I won’t say I ever got used to it, but I did get used to laying awake in the dark after the sounds faded, feeling nervous they were going to pick back up again. The night of their big knock-down-drag-out—their last fight—I lay in bed with my pillow over my head for what seemed like half the night when it started getting real rough. That’s when I busted through my bedroom door and saw Kenny holding my mom up against the wall by her jaw. He had her pushed up there so her neck looked long and skinny, like the rooster I saw my cousin slaughter with a knife he’d just sharpened. Mom was calm as the rooster that day. She looked as mean as him, too, her eyes staring at Kenny, daring him.
When she saw me, she started trying to tell me everything was going to be okay, trying to get me to go back to my room. Kenny kept his eyes on her and wouldn’t let her down, so I kicked him. Then, on accident, I called him a sorry-ass pissant motherfucker.
Mom and Kenny froze in place. It shouldn’t have been such a shock. What I hadn’t heard from Kenny I’d picked up from the apartment kids when we were hunting ghosts or making potions out of junk we pulled from the dumpsters.
I wondered for a second if we all might laugh, but Kenny kind of shook his head, then turned his red eyes back to Mom and started yelling. The way spit was flying off his lips, I could tell she wasn’t going to take it much longer. I took off to the kitchen, grabbed a butcher knife, and ran at him screaming.
His black mustache crinkled up like he couldn’t believe I’d do such a thing. He dropped my mom, who slid to the floor and wrapped her arms around me. I held on to my knife and kept it aimed at Kenny. He started backing up, blubbering about loving me like his own blood, patting behind him on the door until he found the handle. Once he got the door open, he stepped through it and didn’t come back to say goodbye.
I sat on the couch watching Mom cry while she packed up boxes and trash bags full of our stuff. Little Blinky swam on the table next to the TV, watching. We were going across town to Granny and Lula’s, the only place we should have ever been as far as I was concerned. I knew Lula didn’t like animals in the house, so I asked one more time to set Blinky free. Mom said, “Reney, do what you want with your fucking fish.” Then she threw a roll of duct tape across the room. I was out the door before she could gather herself to say sorry.
For a while, we stopped by the apartments to say hi to Miss Bee and Bones, the old couple who ran the place and lived in an apartment behind the office. Mom called Miss Bee more wisp than a woman. She had to pull around an oxygen tank, but her voice carried all the way across the parking lot to our apartment when she wanted it to. Bones towered above her, worrying over every little step she took. He had a dagger tattoo on his forearm that all us kids were sure meant he’d killed somebody in prison. Not that he gave us any reason to think that. They’d always kept an eye on us when we waited for the bus and sometimes even watched out for me after I got off the bus.
When we came back, I always went straight to the pond and plopped down on my belly to look for Blinky. Sometimes I got so close that the tip of my nose dipped in the water and a goldfish came up and took a nibble. Every now and then, Blinky would come up to the top of the water and take a piece of bread from my fingers.
Miss Bee would shuffle outside, dragging her tank. She’d stand there and smoke above me, talking about how I’d grown and complaining about the parties people were throwing. After catching up on the apartment gossip, Mom would disappear to have it out with Kenny. Miss Bee would hand over a big plastic jar of fish food she kept in her desk drawer and gripe about all the fish that got dumped when people up and moved. Sometimes while my mom was gone, I felt bad for what I’d done to Kenny or what I’d done to Kenny and her.
There were more goldfish in the little pond each time we stopped, until I wasn’t so sure that we’d set Blinky free at all. The fish stayed on the surface looking for handouts and took on a sick yellow color. Miss Bee got wheezier and wheezier, and Bones stopped coming out to pass me butterscotch and tell me jokes. Mom stopped staying gone so long and coming back with red, been-crying eyes. Blinky stopped coming to the top. He got bigger and bigger until I wasn’t even sure which fish he was. Then Miss Bee died, and my mom said Bones got so sad he started drinking again and lost the place.
A boy on the bus said the new apartment manager yelled at some kids for throwing candy in the pond and said he was going to fill that stinking mosquito trap in with concrete. The boy said he guessed it was true because the pond was marked off with construction tape by evening and had a bunch of sacks of Quikrete stacked around it. I had to keep wiping my eyes with the sleeve of my shirt the rest of the ride home. I couldn’t stop thinking about Blinky and all those little apartment fish flopping around on the sidewalk suffocating.