Mannie pushes past my knees and scoots around the coffee table to Faye. He does it in three swift steps, quick as a cat, before I can stop him. Even wearing a filthy apron and hairnet in Ray’s kitchen, there was something catlike about him—sleek black hair, dark-green eyes, arms so lean you could see every muscle.
“I got to look at what they have,” he says, then turns back to me. “You want juice? Juice would be good.”
Since he found out I’m pregnant, Mannie has turned into a fricking dietitian, which is a laugh and a half coming from a guy who lives on instant noodles and weed and still looks cut. When he bugs me about taking my prenatal vitamin, I want to take the pink bullet-shaped pill and shove it up his nostril.
“Don’t tell me what’s good for me,” I say.
Though he’s known her for all of one minute, Mannie turns to Faye for backup. “I’m just saying.”
Faye nods politely but looks ready to bolt.
“Whatever,” I say. “Juice is fine. Anything but apple.”
They go to the counter, and Fat Goth takes a very long time getting three bottles out of a fridge. Mannie says something to Faye, who keeps nodding politely.
For the fourth time today, the Little Alien has the hiccups. They’re steady as a heartbeat, and the first time I noticed them, maybe two weeks ago, that’s exactly what I thought I was hearing. When the little tapping stopped after a few minutes, I wondered if that was it, if the Little Alien was gone and now Mannie would shut up and Lara would start crying over something else and Ray would forgive his chubby little diva for not killing the Little Alien earlier and I would have some peace.
Mannie holds out a poppy-seed bagel on a paper plate.
“What’s that?” I ask.
He puts it on the table and settles in beside me. “What does it look like?”
Faye sits down in the overstuffed armchair across from us and opens a bottle of iced tea. She plays with the cap, like she doesn’t want to interfere.
“Thanks for coming,” I say to her. I can sense Mannie getting ready to pout, and I know I don’t have much time. “You remember your old baba made that poppy-seed cake and your dad walked around with little black bits in his teeth all afternoon?”
Faye smiles a little and keeps playing with her cap.
Mannie drains his energy drink as quickly and loudly as he can, then slams the can on the coffee table like he’s just done something great. “So you guys go way back?”
Most women find Mannie pretty easy on the eyes, but there is no way he is Faye’s type. She looks at him like she’s thinking about something else, like somebody just gave her a math problem she can’t figure out. And she can’t quite believe she can’t figure it out ’cause she’s really good at math.
I take a chance, because sometimes you have to go with your gut, you just have to rip that Band-Aid off. “She’s going to help me with the interview.”
“You getting another job?” Mannie asks. “I thought we’d been through this.”
This is moronic even for Mannie. Since he found out he was going to be a daddy, he’s become not just a nutrition expert, but Mr. Do-The-Right-Thing. He quit dealing to make two-for-one pizzas all night. He acted glad when I quit waitressing at the pancake place because it was “too hard on me.” Whenever I ask how the hell we’re going to pay for food, he says, “Don’t worry, babe. Sit down. Screw Ray. We’re good—we’re together. Don’t worry.”
I want to grab his tongue and twist. But Faye is pick, pick, picking, and I must remain casual and collected, Ms. Relaxed and Controlled. I remember that when actors are sitting around a table on TV, they often eat something to appear natural, so I take a bite of bagel. The poppy seeds stick to the roof of my mouth like sand.
“The adoption interview,” I say.
Mannie crosses his arms and slouches back in the couch like he might take a nap. “Just like that, eh? You decide. You decide everything. You know best, Bev. You know goddamn best.”
If he were more of a man, he would’ve got up and walked out. He would’ve at least had the dignity to know when he wasn’t wanted. But no, Mannie doesn’t quit a job, he just complains about the crap pay. He drives such a shit truck that it can’t make it through three nights of deliveries. He’d rather sulk about how I’m treating him than face the fact that I’d rather serve pancakes to seniors in matching windbreakers and their mouth-breathing grandchildren for the rest of my life than raise a kid with him. I’d rather have a girls’ night out with Denise the social worker. I’d rather pop the zits on Ray’s back, like my poor, victimized mother used to.
But that’s the difference between Mannie and me. He’s had a shitty life, so it’s like he doesn’t know any better, whereas I know I was not meant to fetch packets of rockhard butter that people will try to spread only to end up mutilating their toast. I was meant to run the restaurant. Ray may be a prick, but he taught me this: sometimes you’re going to be short of cash, but you’ve always got to have a plan.
“You’re giving the baby up?” Faye asks.
I swish some juice around in my mouth and nod. The Little Alien is hiccupping again, as if it knows we’re talking about it.
“Why her?” Mannie asks. “What does she have to do with this?”
Because I want to show Ray how it’s done. Because I don’t know anyone else who’s adopted. Because even after I moved back to this third-rate burb, I barely thought of Faye at all, not until after I got into this shit, when I knew I needed a plan, and then I couldn’t get her out of my head.
“Because,” I say, “we go way back.”
I wait for Mannie to bring up Betty, his sainted pseudomother, wait for the sad-sack story about how he knows a thing or two about this stuff and maybe he should have a say because it’s his kid. But he shuts up and keeps pouting.
Faye is looking at my bump, and I think of the time Lara told Faye that she had wise eyes. It was right after Lara’s hysterectomy, when she lay milking it on the couch for days, hopped up on OxyContin. “You look like you got judgment,” she told Faye, and we beelined it out of there, away from the stench of Calming Cucumber body lotion and greasy hair and flat ginger ale.
The Little Alien goes quiet, like it can feel Faye’s eyes on my stomach. For the last five minutes, it hasn’t jabbed or moved, has left me in peace for once, as if it knows its fricking future is at stake here.
No one has to say a word, and I can sense it’s a done deal. You have to be prepared for a few curveballs. You have to trust your instincts and get a little lucky.
“When’s the interview?” Faye asks.
“Three days,” I say. “Tuesday. Four fifteen. I’ll be exactly thirty-one weeks.”
Denise and I pick Faye up outside her school on Tuesday as requested. I can tell by the way she’s standing, hands shoved in pockets and skinny legs stiff as Popsicle sticks, that she’s been waiting for a while. It’s sunny, and she has to walk through a little pile of slush to get to the curb. Denise lets her in the back of the minivan and slides the door closed so hard, you’d think she was a jail guard.
I look back and give Faye a little wave. She smiles like she doesn’t really mean it, and her dainty Chinese nose crinkles a little. I know, I want to say. It stinks like rancid chocolate milk and the smokes Denise must sneak when her kids aren’t around.
“It’s close,” Denise says. “Maybe ten minutes away.”
Now and then, the craziness of things hits you right between the eyes and you have to suck it up. You can’t let yourself think about the fact that you’re suddenly in a social worker’s nasty beater with someone you never thought you’d see again, going to meet some barren couple named Olef and Helga who happen to live in the old neighborhood.
You have to suck it up, let the current take you over the waves, into the spray, onto the rocks. The ocean was the only thing I liked about living out west. I hated the drizzle. I hated the do-gooder two-faced bitches who talked about saving the trees while they stole your boyfriend. But the ocean
was all right. Everything going with the flow—don’t even try to paddle, just wait and see where things will wash up.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Ray had asked. “That kid is too stupid to bus tables, never mind raise a kid. And you—you think you’re ready? Lara was always go easy on her, Ray, always don’t be such a hardass. But look what it gets you. What’s your plan?”
“Don’t lecture me,” I said. “I’m not going to make having kids and getting divorced my new hobby. I’m not keeping it.”
“You’re not keeping it,” he said. “Right, I can see that. You’ve obviously looked after things and have just been eating too many Long Johns.”
The Long Johns remark was a low fricking blow. Sometimes, when we still lived in Winnipeg and Lara stayed in bed late on the weekends, Ray would take me to the bakery up the street, and Long Johns were my favorite treat. He teased me about my “Long John gut,” but we still kept going, and in between cell-phone calls, he’d talk about his problems with beverage deliveries and leaky roofs and short-order chefs who stole, like I wasn’t just a kid. And so the blow was all the lower because he was right. I hadn’t looked after things, had let week after week go by without booking an appointment at the clinic. But I hadn’t wanted to think about any of it, not the nauseating tightness in my gut, not the little hand vac they’d stick between my legs, because sometimes thinking too much gets you nowhere.
Look at Lara. She’s gone from thinking she’s fat because her mommy died when she was five to thinking she’s fat because she’s an emotional eater or because Ray is a sociopath. She has a bad back because her fillings are made of mercury, or because her chair at work is toxic, or because Ray is a sociopath. She hashes things over and over, endlessly gazing at her stretch-marked navel and tying her panties up in knots.
Maybe that’s why I always end up back with Mannie, why I find it so hard to stay mad at him. He never seems to worry about what happened five minutes ago, never mind five years. Except when it comes to his foster mom, the sainted Betty, but he only really talks about her in the morning, if we stay in bed for a bit and he lights a joint. I can tell when he’s going to start, because he rolls over to me and brushes my hair out of my face like they do in the movies and smiles, his face still puffy and soft like a little kid’s. Once I knew the signs, though, I could get up to pee before the Bettyfest even began.
Mannie has no postsecondary, no real smarts, but he is a man of action. When I met him, he’d already been charged with strike number two and his probation officer was on speed dial. Mannie had sworn to him that he was done with joyriding, was seeing a new girl, “the fricking heiress of a restaurant chain,” but there were times when he’d show up at Ray’s condo door and hold out a set of keys like a bouquet.
Pretty much everybody in my family has their addiction. With Lara, it’s food and navel-gazing. With Ray, it’s money and wives. With Jill, it was some married record producer with buckteeth. All of my half sibs have their own “thing,” except for the oldest, the twins Karla and Kim, who don’t stay in touch, so I don’t know. For years, I kept waiting to see what my poison would be. I’d seen enough boozers and junkies at my “alternative” West Coast schools to know what a fricking bore they were. There was no way I was going there. Then I met Mannie and, lo and behold, found out I couldn’t get enough of speeding through suburbs in stolen SUVs. It’s dangerous, it’s pointless, but when you’re there, unbuckled, nothing applies to you. Nothing. You run the red, you fling a kid’s car seat out the window, it doesn’t matter if you live or die. Afterward, the high sticks around for a while, the thoughtless, breathless rush, and when Mannie touches you, he is a hungry cat, not a two-bit dealer who says nothing instead of anything, and you let yourself be devoured.
Still, I hated Ray that day he dared to get so pissed at me, because he was right. I’d screwed up. I didn’t need some hypocrite to tell me that, and I knew even before he said it how it was going to end, because even when we’re royally pissed, Ray and I understand each other.
“I can’t support this,” he’d said. “It wouldn’t be right. The gravy train ends today. Let Big Daddy Carjacker support you.”
Giving it up for adoption never would’ve occurred to him. You don’t give away something that’s rightfully yours. Better kill the thing than give it to a stranger, much less a stranger who lives south of the tracks, where the odd tract of public housing brings everything else down.
In the old neighborhood, the farther you get from the river, the less posh it becomes. Within a few minutes, the big old trees and big old houses with dormers and trellises turn into rows of stucco-covered boxes with tacky trimmed hedges. Ray and Lara don’t agree on much, but whenever they ventured a mile or two south of our old place on Montrose, they said the houses “lost all pedigree.” Pedigree is a word they started to use a lot when they got the bright idea to get a basset hound to breed when money was a little tight one winter.
“Oh, the stench,” Lara always says when she tells the story. “Who could have anticipated the profound stench? My eyes water just thinking about that animal.”
“Watch for Taylor,” Denise says. “It’s a right on Taylor.”
Suddenly, I hate Denise almost as much as I hate Ray. The afternoon sun is so bright in Denise’s beater that it hurts, and I wonder how old she must be. Forty? Her makeup has sunk into the little lines around her eyes, and in this light, there are signs of a faint mustache above her lip. She’s probably at that age when most people start needing glasses, although she tries to dress younger. If you got some glasses, I want to say, maybe you’d notice the ’stache and stop squinting in that really unattractive way whenever we’re going through forms.
“Up there,” Faye says. “Taylor.”
We stop in front of a bungalow much like the kind Lara rented when we first moved to Vancouver—beige stucco, concrete steps, two square windows staring at you on either side of the front door.
“Here we are,” says Denise, like we’re her kids and we’ve just arrived at an amusement park. I hate the way Denise is always too much of something—too down-to-business, too touchy-feely, too I’ve-been-in-your-shoes, too cheery, like she’s trying to live down the fact that she’s got a homemade tattoo that says Billy above her left wrist. When I asked her about it, she said it was from a long time ago, in another life, and it reminds her every day how far she’s come. Which seemed like a load of shit to me, and I wasn’t in the mood to let her get away with it. “Right,” I said, “and I bet it would hurt like a bugger and cost a lot to have it removed.”
The front sidewalk has been completely cleared of all signs of slush. The concrete isn’t even wet, as if someone has not only shoveled but also blow-dried the thing. Before we’re even halfway up the walk Helga opens the door and ushers us in.
The living room looks smaller than the one in our house in Vancouver, but it’s hard to tell because there’s a lot more furniture. After Ray dumped her, Lara went all minimalist, but these people have obviously gone to town at some big-box store—matching couch and love seat, matching end tables, matching recliners. The sofasize painting of lily pads must’ve been part of the deal.
Helga takes our coats one by one and piles them in the crook of her arm. “Sit, sit,” she says, pointing from one seat to another. “Make yourself at home. Olef ’s just making coffee, but we have tea, soda. What would you like?”
She heads to the hall closet before we can answer. She is somewhere between sturdy and chubby, maybe thirty pounds overweight, which is about what I expected. In her file, she listed baking and Aquasize as two of her main hobbies.
Denise takes a seat primly on the love seat. The purple of her sweater isn’t a bad color for her, but it’s starting to ball and makes her breasts look saggy. The sleeves are just long enough to cover her wrists and the tattoo.
I sit in one of the hideous recliners, and Helga comes up behind Faye and leads her to the other one. “Now, what can I get you guys?”
I glance ove
r at Faye, who has said all of four words since we picked her up. “Do you have any diet grapefruit?” I say.
“Oh,” Helga says. “No. But we have diet everything else. You name it.”
There’s something about her that reminds me of Heather, Ray’s daughter with his second wife, Val. They both look like they could be the milkmaid on a package of butter—rosy cheeks, big teeth and bigger thighs.
“Surprise me,” I say.
Helga blinks nervously, like I’ve just told her that if she guesses my weight correctly, the baby is hers. “Righto. A surprise it is.”
“Coffee would be lovely,” Denise says.
Faye gives a little wave with her tiny hand. “I’m good.”
Olef appears with a plate of banana bread. The file said he owns a sports memorabilia store, and he looks exactly like the kind of guy who watches—but doesn’t play—a lot of sports. His face is shiny and pale, and if it weren’t for the just-baked banana bread, you could probably smell his sweaty golf shirt.
Denise repeats the introductions with Olef as he passes out cake with no napkins. He looks eager and nervous, that nice guy who only checks you out when he thinks you’re not looking. Except the vibe I’m getting is anything but horniness. He wouldn’t notice if I had a unibrow and one leg; all I am to him is a walking womb—a non-junkie, healthy, blond womb.
He wrote in the file that he’s wanted to be a dad for as long as he can remember. His own father had been a Wolf Cub leader and a hockey coach and played Santa at the community club children’s party. Olef also wrote that Helga is the “light of his life” and that he married her even though she’d had a hysterectomy at twenty-four.
Helga comes back with the coffee and a no-name diet cola. Denise takes her coffee black, and somehow I know that both Helga and Olef will take the works: half-and-half and two sugar cubes each. They settle down on the couch together like two peas in a faux-suede pod.
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