Worst of all, the hospital knew where to find him because their ambulance had picked him up at his place of employment… which just happened to be about two blocks from our apartment.
“Aaron,” I said loudly without getting up from the floor.
My brother opened one eye and focused it on me.
“Does anyone at the restaurant know where we live? Did you put our address down on any forms when you started working there?” I asked.
I really didn’t know what I would do with myself if police came knocking on our door to take my brother away.
“No,” he said.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Positive,” he said.
And then, after a long pause during which he may have fallen asleep, he added, “You know what sucks the most? I fell before any of my customers finished their meals. I didn’t make a single tip yesterday.”
I sat in stunned silence for what felt like an hour before I finally gathered the energy to go outside. I had to work that morning, but knowing that Aaron had effectively lost his job, which brought in the majority of our income, at a time when we also were out of food and money, was stressful to say the least. The only cash I had in the whole world was the crinkly five I had clung to since the day before.
I walked to the deli two blocks away and trudged up and down the aisles twice, trying to figure out how to make the five bucks stretch the furthest. I had to eat something before work; I’d never make it through the day with a rumbling belly. Whether or not I had anything left over for lunch was another story.
So, if I spent sixty cents on a bagel for my breakfast, that left me with $4.40. I thought about buying a bottle of Diet Coke or a coffee, but the realization, as I was pulling the sliding door of the fridge open to reach for a soda, that Aaron had a broken leg hit me like a punch in the face. And he’d left the hospital without any pain killers.
The thought was enough to make me want to lie down on the filthy floor of the deli and cry. We didn’t have a big bottle of aspirin or ibuprofen in our bathroom, like we did back at the big house in Phoenix. Pain killers were really expensive, as I would find when I went to the drug store a few blocks away. There wasn’t a bottle small enough that I could afford it with my $4.40. I did some quick math and Aaron was probably going to need pain relief every four to six hours, which meant I needed to buy either six or four doses of medicine. Even the tiny little aspirin packets, kept behind the counter at delis for quick relief, cost a dollar each.
At best, I only had enough money to buy pain relief for Aaron for one day, and that meant not eating anything but my bagel all day long.
As much as I felt like I was going to die if I didn’t ingest something carbonated and sweet, I couldn’t doom my brother to an entire day of anguishing in pain. The next day was going to be another challenge, as was each day after that.
It was Friday, November 28. There were two more days to go before I would get my pay check from Prekin, and I knew that would only amount to about six hundred and eighty-five dollars. The amount seemed like a lot, but it made me queasy to think that a year earlier, I could have easily spent that amount of money on three pairs of jeans and a sweater at the mall without blinking an eye. Even with us operating in our most extreme mode of frugality, it was going to be really difficult for us both to survive on that amount of money for two weeks until I was paid again on December 15.
I made no mention of this crisis as I briefly stopped back at the apartment to check on Aaron before work. I left the four tiny foil packets of aspirin I had purchased with him, near the couch. I was sure the second he’d heard his leg break, he had thought the same thing I was thinking: this would be our ruin.
But I couldn’t let this be our ruin. My brother needed me to be strong for him, so as I locked up the apartment and headed off to work, I resolved to do my best to fix the situation. We were going to need money, a lot more than I was making at my job. And Aaron’s unpaid bill at the hospital wasn’t resting well with me; we actually did have insurance, just on our parents’ policy. There was no good reason for that bill to go unpaid when at the end of the day it meant that the nurses and X-ray technicians who had helped my brother would be ripped off.
It was exhausting, thinking like a grown-up and trying to be conscious of how my actions impacted everyone. Even more exhausting to think that with one phone call to my parents’ house in Phoenix, probably anything I wanted could be mine… ice cream, a winter coat, new sneakers so that I could start running again, and a good night’s sleep on a soft mattress.
But calling my parents was not an option. I kept thinking about that camel trying to walk through the eye of a needle. Our parents had failed us, and I still felt like I needed to show God that I could be better than them.
Almost as if I had conjured it up just by thinking about my parents, I passed a magazine store on Broadway that had a display of The Spirit Monthly in its window alongside Time. I sauntered in and picked up a copy of my parents’ magazine out of curiosity. With everything going on, they had still managed to publish an edition for November. I flipped through, seeing the same user-submitted pictures and stories that the magazine contained every month, and I paused to read the Note from Mama letter written to me on the last page. I was more than a little surprised that it was there.
Dear Grace,
It’s so hard for a mother to let go. Someday, you’ll be a mama and understand the pain a mother endures when her baby is far away and out of sight. I pray to the generous Lord that he will hold you in the palm of His hand, safe and sound, until we are together again, and that you will be mindful of all of the values we have bestowed upon you since the day you were born. Each morning I wake up, my first thoughts are of you, and I ask the Lord to keep you out of harm’s way until you are back in my arms. You’re at an age when my love is overwhelming for you, I know, and you’re eager to begin a life of your own. It’s all, as a mother, I can ask of you, to be included in your new life. I hope you know that whatever challenges you face each day, I am always here for you, patiently waiting, at the home of your true heart.
With love always,
Mama
I was baffled. The letter wasn’t all that much different than the one she had written in the September issue the year before, when I had first left home for Treadwell. It was vague enough to be a decoy for our readers, just a simple letter from a mother to her daughter far away at boarding school. But to me, it seemed like a direct acknowledgment of our separation. My mother had reached out to try to find me in the only way she could, presumably without even the assistance of a copy editor, because the language in the letter was much more straightforward than the usual flowery, poetic nature of the back page.
The letter to my brother was much more cryptic, about forgiveness and God sheltering his most precious creations. Without mentioning Heather or any specifics, she seemed to be telling him (and our entire readership) that forgiveness and redemption were always available… all you had to do was ask God.
What, exactly, Mama was trying to convey was a mystery. But seeing that letter with my own eyes was proof that she knew we were missing. And proof for me, too, that she wasn’t actively trying to find us, either. I couldn’t shake the feeling after reading that letter that my mother was telling me to stay put for the time being.
Mama’s letter shook me up emotionally for the whole day. I was sullen at work and even cried for a few minutes in the bathroom. As angry and confused as I was about my parents’ activities, I still missed them. A lot. I really wanted to call my mother and hear her call me honey bun on the phone.
But she seemed to want me and Aaron to stay put. So, stay put, we would. But staying put was going to require money.
I had a plan. A feeble one, but it was at least a step in the right direction.
Chapter 11
Dear Mr. Michaels,
You don’t know me, but I read your article in last month’s issue of Time about Reverend Chuck Mathison. I am Chuck’s
daughter, Grace, and you may not believe me about that, but that’s you’re going to have to take my word for it. You had some of your facts wrong in your article and I wanted to set you straight on them. First of all, my brother would never encourage any girl to get an abortion. His girlfriend made that decision on her own without his involvement, and blamed the choice on him after her parents found out about it. Our parents raised us to be conscientious Christians and my brother is too kind of a man to defend himself in this situation and tell the world the truth. But I’m not too kind to point out the truth now that my entire family is suffering because of someone else’s stubborn pride.
If you would like to know my perspective on this entire situation, you can get in touch with me by placing an ad on the back of the Village Voice. I don’t feel like writing letters to any other journalists, so a conversation with me could be your exclusive scoop. I would also appreciate it if you could let the staff at Lenox Hill hospital know that they treated my brother’s broken leg last week and they can contact my father’s staff in Arizona to obtain information about his medical insurance. I would hate for those nice people to not get paid for their work.
Kind Regards,
Grace
I waited in line at the post office for what felt like fifty years on my lunch break to buy a stamp. A week had passed since Aaron had broken his leg. I had spent the weekend walking from store to store, filling out job applications to try to get a gig as holiday retail help, that is, when I wasn’t working the register or restocking shelves at Prekin. I was willing to work two shifts per day, seven days a week, if that was what it was going to take to pay our rent on my own while my brother recovered.
Dianne asked me to fill in for her on Saturday so that she could appear in one of her department’s performances at NYU, and Jim seemed surprised to see me when I arrived for work on the sixth day in a row.
“Aren’t you sick of this place yet?” Jim asked me.
“No, sir,” I replied earnestly.
The city was preparing itself for Christmas. Lights had been wrapped around every standing tree in the city, and holiday music blared from the doorway of every store I passed. If I hadn’t been so worried about my brother, I probably would have enjoyed the holiday sentiment in the city more; people seemed like they were genuinely making an effort to be nicer. But instead of filling me with cheer, the city’s holiday spirit was making me nostalgic and gloomy. I couldn’t help but wonder if my parents were back from South Africa yet, if they’d raised the tree in our living room, if they’d strung garland up and down the banisters leading to the second and third floors of the house.
And then there was the curious matter of our family portrait. Normally, every year when Aaron and I were home for Thanksgiving, Mama and Daddy would have the family photographer drive down from Scottsdale with his staff. We would have our hair done and pose for the photo that would appear on the cover of the holiday issue of the magazine, as well as our family Christmas card. In the previous year’s photo, we had all posed around an enormous tree that Daddy had arranged and professionally decorated along the front drive to our house. I genuinely wondered what they would do this year without us. Recycle a picture from when we were little kids?
The second week of December, I actually got a call back from a fancy soap store about working nights and weekends during the holidays. However, they had wanted me to come in for an interview while I was already booked to work at Prekin, and I couldn’t pass up the afternoon in wages. Despite really wanting a second job, I was daunted by the foot of snow on the ground; it made walking around on my lunch breaks and after my shifts very unenjoyable. My brother was a little lucky that his leg was broken and he couldn’t go outside. Venturing outdoors in snow without snow boots really sucked, and I was having to layer up three pairs of socks each morning for the walk to work. My suede boots had been completely and totally destroyed by that point, and yet I still put them on every morning, stained and smelly, and wore them to wherever the day took me because I couldn’t buy another pair of shoes.
“Does your leg feel like it’s getting any better?” I asked Aaron the night I had blown off the interview at the soap shop. We were in our tiny living room, my brother sprawled out on the couch and me sitting Indian-style on the floor, sharing a package of ramen noodles.
Mrs. Chan had taught us how to turn a 70-cent package of ramen into a more satisfying meal by adding a block of tofu from the deli and cracking an egg into the soup as it cooked. We were becoming experts in cooking on the cheap. Jacinda had also given us her mom’s old television when they upgraded to a flat screen, and although we didn’t have cable, we received two channels by using the set’s old-fashioned antenna. Usually, all we got was news in Spanish through thick static, but some nights we lucked out and got re-runs of The Jeffersons and Welcome Back, Kotter. Slowly, our apartment was turning into a shabby home.
Considering how many times my brother and I had cleaned out our closets and given old stuff to charity in our lifetime, it was humbling, to say the least, to be given things by people who themselves had so little to spare.
“I guess,” Aaron shrugged, looking down at his leg. “It still hurts, though.”
Aaron never left the apartment. Getting up and down the stairs was impossible for him, and even if he did make it downstairs, the snow outside on the ground would probably mess up his cast, so it was better for him to stay inside. I knew he was starting to go a little nuts being trapped in our tiny apartment all the time; I personally would have already gone bonkers. I did my best to bring him home little pieces of the city for entertainment every night. It was not uncommon for me to walk past brownstone buildings where the occupants had simply put stuff that they didn’t want any more out on their front steps, so we had a acquired a few books and magazines.
Despite my best efforts to cheer Aaron up, he rarely smiled. I was no expert, but I was pretty sure my brother was sinking into a serious depression. We were both losing weight because of our penny-pinching, but he looked sullen and shrunken. Sometimes he simply did not respond when I asked him questions, and appeared to be completely lost in thought. As much as it was easy for me to get kind of teary-eyed thinking about the future I had planned for myself that was no longer in the equation because we’d left our respective schools, for my brother, the impact was much more immediate. He was a senior. Two months earlier, he had been submitting college applications and was looking for volunteer opportunities for the summer. He had gone from anticipating the next four years of his life being all about Ivy League campus activities, to an immediate future of waiting tables for an indeterminate amount of time.
“We could call them,” I offered quietly. As much as I was steadfast about not wanting to resort to calling Mama and Daddy for help, I couldn’t stand to think that Aaron was lying on the couch for twenty-three hours a day, probably in dull, aching pain. I had to believe that even if they had disowned him, they wouldn’t want him to be suffering this way.
“No,” he said, firmly.
I worked with my brother to keep our budget very strict. We never bought more than the bare minimum for food. By December 15, we had twelve hundred dollars in our money drawer; it was a haphazard mix of twenties, fifties and hundreds. I had estimated that if I could work two extra days before the end of the month, we would still be exactly six hundred dollars short on rent by January 1st. Saving money became an obsession for me, and sometimes even in the middle of the night I got up from the floor and went into the kitchen to look in our money drawer to assure myself that everything was still where I expected it to be.
I was having a hard time sleeping at night. Where was I going to get that extra six hundred bucks? What if we couldn’t pay rent? What if I ended up being two weeks late if I had to wait for another paycheck, and that made us late for February, too? What if we got kicked out in the snow? Money was on my mind constantly. It made me incessantly angry that my entire pay check for two weeks of almost full-time work barely provided me wit
h the amount that Aaron used to bring home in three days.
“You could wait tables,” Jacinda suggested one night when we were on the phone. “You could get a job in the East Village at one of those funky vegetarian restaurants.”
But I was pretty sure I couldn’t. I wasn’t outgoing, like my brother or my dad. I got tongue-tied and flustered when I had to talk to strangers. Furthermore, I didn’t have any real experience and would never be able to bluff about it. And most importantly, I didn’t have legal ID and wasn’t technically old enough to have a job… anywhere. Even if I could get a job at a funky restaurant on the Lower East Side or in the East Village, I wouldn’t bring home the kind of money my brother had been making at his fancy bistro. I simply didn’t look sophisticated enough to get a job at a place like that, didn’t seem old enough, and was too ashamed of myself to even try.
So, Prekin it was. Day in, day out. I couldn’t even enjoy my days off anymore because all I could think about was how I wasn’t making any money by not being at work. I was cautious at all times to not let the little annoyances about my job fester in my mind. It would have been easy to start being negative about Eliot’s constant use of foul language, the lingering smell of sour milk in the break room, Nastasja’s fifteen-minute long bathroom breaks… but if I had even acknowledged those pithy annoyances, the monotony of every day would have been unbearable.
I was so entrenched in just putting on a happy face and getting through the day that I almost didn’t even notice the morning that Felix walked into the store.
I was finishing up with a customer who had just paid when I noticed the front door open and a young man with glasses and a heavy ski cap entered. He was brushing snow from his hat and dusting it off of his shoulders. My attention was on counting change to hand to my customer, who was a regular, a sculptor who lived in the ritzy neighborhood, so I didn’t realize until I looked up again from my register that the guy who had entered the store looked familiar.
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