There was a long pause. I would’ve thought she’d hung up if not for that loud, labored breathing.
When she spoke again, her voice was softer. I thought of birds with broken wings, glass vases so beautiful and fragile I was afraid to look at them for too long. “It just feels like I’ve been failing a lot lately,” she said. “I can’t even get dinner right.”
I thought of a night two years ago. Dad was still alive and living with us. The Bears game had just started. He wasn’t drunk yet, but by halftime he’d have finished at least a six-pack. Some nights, I was the best thing that ever happened to him, his pride, his joy; he talked often of buying us plane tickets to New York City and taking me to the top of the Empire State Building. On other nights, I was a dumb bitch, a waste of space; sometimes he’d throw his empties at me. I didn’t want to find out what type of night it was. My window opened out onto the roof. I climbed out of it to sit and smoke, try to find stars in the sky. I was about to light up when I looked down and saw Mom’s car pull into the driveway.
I watched as she took the key from the ignition, killed the lights. I waited for her to come inside. She didn’t. She sat in the driver’s seat, just sat. Five minutes went by and she was still sitting, staring out the windshield. I wondered what she was staring at, if she actually was staring at anything, or if she was just thinking, or maybe trying not to think, just having a moment when nothing moved or mattered—I wished that she was at least listening to music. She sat and stared another ten minutes before going inside.
There was a supermarket not far from Eddie’s. Pickles were cheap. “What’s your address?” I asked.
* * *
—
THE COOKS EYED ME FUNNY when I came into the kitchen with a brown paper bag. They looked only slightly less nervous when I pulled a pickle jar out of it.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m just helping this lady out.”
They stared blankly at me.
“Her kid isn’t eating.”
Silence.
“Can you guys get me a large pepperoni?”
They looked at each other, shrugged, and started pulling the dough. I chopped a couple pickles into uneven slices and wedged myself between the cooks, sprinkled the pickles over the sauce, cheese, and meat. I told myself that it only looked off because it was raw, but the cooks didn’t seem to know what to make of it either. One sniffed it, another laughed, the third just stared and scratched his head. They eventually shrugged again and put the pizza in the oven.
While I waited, I walked out of the kitchen and to the front of the shop. Darryl was off the phone and back inside, pouring rum into a soda cup. We stared at each other for a moment. His eyes were red and puffy; his face looked strange without a smile.
I coughed, just for something to do. “Any calls?”
“Just one,” he said. “Midway through, the guy decided he wanted Chinese and hung up.”
“Cool. I picked up one while you were—when you—” I coughed again. “Cool.”
I thought about asking him if he was okay, decided to mop the floor instead. Peter would be waking up soon and didn’t need much to start yelling at us. Darryl sipped his drink and wiped down the counter.
I mopped half the shop before my mind began to wander. There was a slip of paper in the back left pocket of my jeans with an address and the name Jenny Hauser scribbled above it.
“I’m Jenny, by the way. Jenny Hauser,” she’d said after she thanked me for the third time. “My grandma also had the same name. I don’t remember much about her except that she made real good rhubarb pie and hated black people.”
I’d thought she sounded too old to be a Jenny. She should be a Jen or a firm Jennifer—Jenny had a ponytail and scrapes on her knees, liked the crusts cut off of her PB and J’s, fought with her mom but always apologized, had never really been in love but had plenty of crushes on boys in her class, teachers who showed her kindness, Jenny believed in God and Kenny Chesney—I couldn’t stop imagining what she looked like.
“Yo,” Darryl hollered. “Order up.”
* * *
—
MY DAD DIDN’T HAVE ANY MONEY to leave us. He did have a ’99 Ford Festiva.
The paint job was faded, the driver’s door dented; there was a questionable yellow stain on the back seat; the A/C was broken, stuck on high, freezing air pumped through the car, even in the winter. Simply put, the car was a piece of shit.
I’d told Mom we should sell it for parts, take whatever we could get. She shook her head and said she couldn’t, she remembered him bringing it home for the first time. “He looked so handsome stepping out of it. He bought me flowers too,” she said. “Sunflowers.” I didn’t remember that. I did remember him teaching me to drive in it. He’d smoke and sip from his red thermos, flick ashes on me whenever I drove too slow or forgot to signal. Once, I sideswiped a car in a Popeyes parking lot and he made me iron his shirts and shine his shoes every Sunday night for a month.
When Mom got a new car last year—a used ’07 Toyota Camry that didn’t have dents or stains or broken radios, was a sleek shiny silver—she dropped the keys to the Festiva on my bedside table. I let the car sit in front of the house a week before I lost all willpower.
I spent that whole day driving, every song sounded good on full blast. It was a Los Angeles winter day, seventy and cloudless. Everything looked crisp and clean through the windshield. The full gas tank and the open road made my fingers and toes tingle. A man was selling oranges on the shoulder of a highway. I bought four bags and shouted along with a song that was about a girl and a goat and Missoula, Montana.
* * *
—
THE RADIO WAS OFF when I was driving to Jenny’s house for the first time. My palms were sweaty against the steering wheel and I had that tight-chest feeling I sometimes got when I drank too much coffee. I hadn’t had any coffee for over a week. Billy said it was bad for the baby, he didn’t want to have a little girl or boy with twelve toes and poor reading skills.
The address took me to a nice part of town where all the homes were big and uniform with perfectly mowed front lawns. I saw three different golden retrievers being walked by three different women in tracksuits before I pulled up to her home. I was relieved to see that, though her home was big, it didn’t annoy me. It was one of the smaller ones on the block, and her lawn was slightly overgrown and yellowing in some places.
The coffee chest–feeling increased as I stepped out of my car and started walking to the front door. I appreciated then how good I felt on a daily basis, calm and centered, how little fazed me, my ability to walk tall and look straight ahead. Three weeks ago I peed on a stick, and when the little pink plus winked up at me, I walked downstairs, opened the freezer, and ate a Popsicle, thought about what I wanted to watch that night, a rom-com or an action movie—both would have broad-chested dudes, did I want to cry or see shit get blown up?