Forgetting Chuck Taylor

by Bailey Peters

  On Wednesdays, she only took a thirty-minute lunch so that she could leave work around the same time that schools let out. That allowed her to be downtown at the community center for her volunteer work. This session, there was no boxing. Instead, they devoted the full length of their meeting to talking about the benefits of mindfulness. At the end, Taylor led them through a guided meditation.

  Even as she told them to close their eyes and picture the weight and stress leaving each part of their body, she couldn’t get the buzzing and humming of anticipation to quiet inside her own. She did her best to keep her voice smooth, her attention focused. The kids had been skeptical about the benefits of meditation. If she wanted to create buy-in and make sure this was a tool they’d call on later in place of more destructive methods of dealing with stress, she knew it was important she did a good job.

  By the end, it seemed she had. The teens were no longer stealing glances at one another to make sure they weren’t the only ones participating. They were all practicing deep breathing, their chests rising and falling in unison. Taylor felt almost guilty when it was time to turn up the lights and tell the class to wipe down their yoga mats before returning them to the supply closet.

  When it was time to lock up for the night, she and Erica hopped in her car and headed to Eva’s office. They had plans to figure out the details for the surprise for Erica’s parents.

  * * *

  By the time the night was over, decorations had been selected from Eva’s seemingly never-ending arsenal of wedding supplies and others had been created from scratch. Eva and Erica’s hands were both coated in varying degrees of paint and glitter.

  Claiming no arts and crafts skills, Taylor had been exempted from the messier parts of planning and was tasked with making a playlist of songs that Erica’s parents might like.

  “Wouldn’t you know better than I would what they listen to?” Taylor had questioned.

  “I’m not saying you’re old, but you’re older than me, which means your taste might be a little closer to theirs,” Erica had said, a sheepish look on her face.

  “Is this this what you had in mind?” Taylor asked, turning up the music from Flashdance and doing her best Jennifer Beals impersonation, kicking, hair flipping, and pirouetting across the floor in dramatic fashion.

  “No, please, no!” Erica had laughed, doubling over in peals of laughter as Taylor attempted moves she lacked the rhythm for. She had long legs but she tripped over them better than she danced with them. “Maybe stick with Aerosmith?”

  That sounded doable. She texted Eva across the room. You know that Aerosmith song I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing from Armageddon? While I’m on a roll acting out movie scenes, we could re-enact that scene where Ben Affleck eats animal crackers off of Liv Tyler…

  When Eva saw the text, she rolled her eyes and smiled.

  Taylor sent a follow up text. So, does rolling your eyes mean no, or…?

  Eva texted an emoji back— a smiley face sticking out its tongue.

  Erica wasn’t quite as distracted as she’d seemed. She looked up from her crafting and turned her gaze from one woman to the other. “Are you weirdos texting each other while you’re in the same room?”

  “No,” they said in unison, smirking.

  “Uh huh. Sure, I buy that.”

  Taylor walked Erica the two blocks to the bus station when Erica turned down the car ride home. “I’ve got a bus pass. You’ve done enough for me already,” Erica said.

  When Taylor made her way back to the wedding planning shop, Eva was at the front door to let her in.

  “While you were gone, I stopped over at the food truck across the street and got some takeout for us. I didn’t know what you’d want, so I just got a spread of appetizers,” she said, motioning over to a table covered with chips and dip, fried Brussels sprouts, pot stickers, and wontons of some kind. The spread was about a thousand times more appetizing than the plain peanut butter sandwich and tap water Taylor knew would otherwise be waiting for her at home.

  “That’s perfectly fine, as long as I can have my dessert first,” Taylor said, daring to steal a kiss. The restrained and clumsy way Eva’s lips responded to her own made her end the kiss more quickly than she’d planned.

  “Let’s dig in,” Eva said, sitting down and unfolding a napkin across her lap.

  Taylor tried not to read too heavily into Eva’s behavior, but it was perplexing nonetheless. Clearly, Eva wanted to spend more time with her, or she wouldn’t have bothered to have gotten them dinner. But why had Eva tensed at her touch? They’d laughed together all night with Erica there, and thinking back, Taylor couldn’t remember saying or doing anything that might have come across wrong.

  The hunger pangs brought on by the scent of the fried foods distracted her from her worries. Taylor filled her plate and tried not to eat greedily. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been out to eat or had takeout. With the exception of the occasional item off the dollar menu at a fast food joint, it had been years.

  “This is divine,” she said after taking the first bite of a pot sticker. She used her fork to pull some of the ingredients out of the wrapper onto her plate to eyeball them, see if she might be able to figure out how to recreate the recipe at home. “It looks like pork, green onions, and cabbage, but I can’t figure out what else is in it to create that flavor.”

  “Ginger,” Eva smiled. “I spied them cooking.”

  Taylor took another nibble, savoring it. “That’s exactly what it is.”

  Eva cleared her throat and straightened in her chair. “I don’t want to ruin a good night, but I want to ask you about something. I don’t know how to broach the subject gently, so I’m just going to throw it out there.” She stopped and bit her lip, taking a long look at Taylor before proceeding. “When I looked you up online, I found a mugshot.”

  Taylor reached for a water bottle on the table and tried to wash the lump out of her throat. She had known this moment was inevitable, but she didn’t think it would come so soon. Taylor just hoped Eva had not let her mind run wild with speculation about what Taylor did or didn’t do.

  It was a story Taylor had told as infrequently and as honestly as she could. She tried to do it without making excuses and without allowing herself shame.

  She collected her breath and began to speak. Eva could respond however she saw fit.

  * * *

  Taylor’s parents died in a car accident when she was an infant. She was raised by her grandmother in a cozy home full of simple comforts: endless loaves of homemade Sourdough bread, a fireplace always stacked with wood, floral sachets in all of the bureau drawers so their clothing would smell of lavender. Their belongings were often salvaged from thrift stores but were well cared for and spotlessly clean. Her grandmother worked as a one-woman cleaning service and made sure that her own home was every bit as well attended to as those she scrubbed to make ends meet.

  While the Scott women were sometimes short on pennies or resources, Taylor never lacked in guidance or love.

  Taylor was finishing her senior year of high school when she realized it was time for her grandmother to stop working. In her early sixties, Grandmother Scott was much more nimble than many of her peers, still able to handle the physical tax exacted by her work. The problem wasn’t the arthritis they anticipated. It was Early Onset Alzheimer’s instead.

  At first, the signs were small. She’d show up to clean the Jones’ house when it was her day to clean the Smiths’. She’d bring chemical cleaner to the people that preferred their disinfectants natural and homemade. Then, the signs became much larger—like the day her grandmother got confused about how to put her car in reverse and drove into a client’s closed garage door instead of backing down the driveway as she’d meant to do.

  Her grandmother needed to stop working, so Taylor took over her clients. When the last school bell of the day rang to signal dismissal at 2:15, she’d make her way to at least one or two gigs before it was time to head home for suppe
r. On weekends, she took over her grandmother’s position cleaning a local office park owned by one of the men at their church.

  That worked for the majority of the fall semester. While clients had been skeptical that a seventeen-year-old might cut corners or fail to perform up to standard, she made sure she met or exceeded their expectations. Given that many of them had employed her grandmother for years and understood Taylor’s home situation, many would give her generous tips. It was enough to keep up with the bills and put food on the table.

  The weekend before Christmas that year, Taylor realized everything was not quite as well managed as she’d thought. Her grandmother had spent the good portion of that Saturday afternoon baking treats for friends at church. Hours later, when Taylor went to put on a kettle to make nighttime tea, she realized two of the burners were still on low and the oven had never been turned off. The next day, when she came home from a cleaning gig, her grandmother was nowhere to be found and the front door was hanging wide open so that anyone that chose to do so could have waltzed in and robbed them blind. Her grandmother had gone on a walk in the neighborhood and gotten lost. It took hours for Taylor to find her.

  The next several months, she and her grandmother worked to create systems to make sure nothing would go wrong. They mostly relied on large notes tacked over the oven, on all of the doors, on anything that might lead to trouble while her grandmother was at home unsupervised.

  By the time Taylor graduated in early May, the signs might as well have been invisible for all of the good they did.

  To ensure that Grandmother Scott was safe while Taylor was working, she hired their neighbor Emory to come spend the day with her. Her work was easy—provide simple companionship and make sure nothing went wrong. To afford Emory’s services, even at minimum wage, Taylor had to pick up more clients. It was still doable.

  Until it wasn’t. Even when she was working more than forty hour weeks, it was hard to cover the costs of her grandmother’s rising medical costs.

  So she stole. At first, it was just spare change—quarters slipped into her pockets that were left in piles on bureaus or in money jars. With enough pocket change, she could afford all the ingredients necessary for a full meal at the dollar store. After a time, it was larger things like a twenty she found forgotten in a client’s pants pocket when she was folding their laundry or something she needed that might go unnoticed like a handful of Advil.

  When Emory had to go back to school in August and Taylor couldn’t find anyone to replace her at minimum wage, Taylor was desperate.

  One of her clients—Shelly Jones—had a husband that didn’t trust the bank. They had cash hidden all over their house in so many places Taylor had accidentally found while dusting and cleaning that she’d lost count. Her plan was to borrow a few hundred dollars to cover the cost of medical bills that had come due and replace it as soon as she was able, before they could notice. She’d found an extra job working from home for a call center late at night. She just needed her first paycheck to clear from them and she could replace the Jones’ money.

  Instead of stealing just a couple hundred, she nabbed a little over $1,000.00. It had been impulsive, rash.

  That night, when she returned home from work with the first real grocery haul she’d managed in weeks, the police were waiting for her. The Jones family had a hidden nanny cam in their house that had caught her red handed.

  In some ways, she was lucky. She ended up with a public defender that negotiated probation and no jail time. His wife, a social worker, helped her process the paperwork for her grandmother to receive the financial assistance necessary to be placed in a nursing home. Taylor and her grandmother sold their house to cover the remaining costs for her care. Some of the money, Grandmother Scott gave Taylor to help her get on her feet. It took care of the deposit for a small studio apartment that took her on as a month-to-month tenant and the fees to turn on the water and electricity.

  When she came clean to her clients about her conviction, most of them let her go, with the exception of a few of them that attended her church. One of them had hugged her and said, “Oh honey, if we had known things had been that bad, we’d have found a way to help. Taken up money for you in our Bible study group. I’m not going to fire you, but you’d better not do it again.” The woman’s kindness had brought tears to Taylor’s eyes.

  She was also able to keep her work from home gig with the call center.

  Between her two jobs, her time spent getting her grandmother back and forth from the nursing home to church activities, and her court-mandated volunteering, she was too tired to feel sorry for herself as she adjusted to her new normal. There was some relief in knowing her grandmother was being attended to by professionals but there was also guilt in knowing that there were plenty of mornings her grandmother would wake up confused in her new home and not remember how she’d ended up there.

  When Taylor’s mandated volunteer hours were over at the library, they had offered her a full-time job—no application or interview needed. Her volunteer coordinator had pulled her aside and in a low voice said—we know why you’ve been here. We know how hard it’s going to make it for you to get a stable job. You’ve paid your dues and we trust you. We have an opening and we want to help.

  It was a godsend. The job provided enough money that she could quit the other two jobs and have regular hours from eight to five without the physical labor involved in cleaning. The free time she’d gained in the evenings meant she finally had time to go to school.

  * * *

  “So that’s it. I never lied to you,” Taylor said. “At the brewery, when you were going on about how commendable my volunteering was, I told you not to make assumptions—even if they were good.”

  “And then I kissed you.”

  Taylor nodded. “I knew I would need to tell you at some point if we kept spending time together. I just didn’t know how yet. Especially after the kiss.”

  Taylor twirled her favorite ring around on her finger, fidgeting as she waited for a response. Eva could be hard to read, her thoughts masked by a perfectly placid face that looked as though it were airbrushed.

  “What are you thinking over there?” she finally asked.

  Eva took a deep breath and stood. “I was thinking that considering that story you just told me, you might be in need of another kiss.”

  Instead of laying one on her then and there, Eva locked the front door to her office and turned off the light. Then she took Taylor’s hand and led her upstairs to the apartment.

  They laid down together on top of Eva’s bed, fully clothed, letting their eyes adjust in the dark until they could see each other. After what seemed like a lifetime of listening to one another’s breath and searching one another’s eyes, Eva moved closer and touched Taylor’s face.

  The kiss was a conversation. A welcome. A promise. A beginning.

  They didn’t shed any clothing. There would be plenty of nights for that ahead. First, they’d shed the hesitancy and distance between them. Let things grow organically.

  It was perfect and sweet and simple. It was exactly what Taylor needed.

  10

  Taylor

  While Taylor had never doubted that Eva’s work planning weddings and events would be nothing less than exemplary, she was amazed at how far above and beyond Eva had gone to make the dinner for Erica’s parents special.

  When Mr. and Mrs. Casey arrived at the community center, Erica greeted them at the front door the same way the hostess at a restaurant would. She was dressed from head to toe in black, her makeup done tastefully and her hair pulled back.

  “I might have lured you here under false pretenses. I know how hard you’ve been working because of what I did, and I wanted to do something nice for you. Come with me,” she said, turning to walk in the direction of the gym before they could protest or ask questions. The couple shot one another a quizzical expression before following her.

  Once they made their way through the double doors to the gym ar
ea that held the boxing ring, Mrs. Casey’s eyes filled with tears and her hand flew to her mouth. She leaned into her husband, taking it all in. He slid his arm around her back and squeezed her close to him.

  Draped in front of the boxing ring was the banner that Erica had made with some assistance from Eva. In a careful script that looked almost like calligraphy, it said For Mom and Dad, the champions that fight for me.

  To the right of the ring was a table covered in a black linen tablecloth. In the middle was a centerpiece that Erica had picked out from Eva’s wedding supply stash—a vintage lantern with a white pillar candle flickering inside. Around its base was a dusting of fragrant rose petals, both red and white. Streamers of the same colors were draped across the boxing ring and hung from the ceiling, creating extra pops of color that made the room look as though decked out for Homecoming or Prom. The playlist Taylor made played softly.

  Scattered throughout the room on spare surfaces were pictures of their family taken during happier times. Eva had printed them off at her office and slipped them into picture frames she had on hand. They were a last minute touch after she’d found Erica’s mother’s Instagram. Sometimes, maybe social media wasn’t quite so bad. Each of those was surrounded by flower petals as well.

  Erica walked her parents to the table and pulled out their chairs for them. With perfect timing, Eva emerged from behind the door that connected the community center’s kitchen and gym. In her hands, she carried two glass flutes and a bottle of champagne. Erica would serve her parents everything else that night, but given that she was underage, Eva and Taylor had agreed it best Erica not serve her parents the bubbly.

  “For our guests of honor,” Eva said, smiling as she popped the cork off the bottle. She filled both of the flutes.

  Taylor joined the group forming around the couple. “I’ve been one of Erica’s coaches here at the gym, and through our time together, I’ve learned that you have a phenomenal daughter. The progress she’s made definitely makes her a standout among her peers in our program. When I learned that she wanted to do something nice for the two of you given all of the sacrifices you’ve made, I knew the center would want to be involved. Support systems in the community like the one our program offers are great, but nothing is better than the support of a loving family. Tonight is for you. Cheers,” she said, and the couple raised their glasses, toasting one another.