by Mike Wells
“Don’t pay me no mind,” the old man said, with another chuckle. “I get a little carried away sometimes. Just go on home and take care of that leg. Get some rest, and if you feel up to it, come on back to work in the morning.”
Neal nodded, but he had no intention of working another second for Snell. He was sure the only reason the old man had backed off was because he didn’t have a replacement delivery boy lined up. But that wouldn’t take long—there were plenty of people in Atlanta desperate enough to put up with Snell’s bullshit.
Neal walked out the door, managing to take the first few steps without limping.
And he didn’t look back.
* * *
Annie had everything packed up and loaded into her car by a quarter to five. It had taken her a lot longer than she had anticipated—she kept thinking of “one more thing” Natasha might need, and she ended up taking almost all the baby provisions that were in the apartment. The only item that was in short supply was disposable diapers. There was just one left, but she had just changed Natasha, so she could make it to Chattanooga and then buy some more there. She didn’t want to spend any more time in Atlanta than necessary.
When she was finally satisfied she had everything she needed, she went back inside the apartment to get Natasha and to leave Neal a note. The baby was already strapped into her car seat, ready and waiting on the couch, wearing the orange jumper that Annie’s mother had made for her. Annie had put it on Natasha that morning, knowing that she would be going home. It was too bad her mother wasn’t going to be there and see Natasha in it—it was awfully cute on her. Her mother had embroidered Natasha’s name across the front.
Annie searched around the kitchen for something to write on. She finally decided to use a napkin. Just after she scribbled Neal’s name across the top, she heard the sound of footsteps coming down the hallway.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, the pen poised above the paper. She watched the door as the footsteps came closer. “Please don’t be Neal. Please don’t be Neal.”
The footsteps stopped in front of the door. Annie waited breathlessly for the jingling sound of Neal’s keys.
Instead, there was a loud knock.
Annie opened her mouth. For a second, nothing came out. “Who is it?”
“Building maintenance. Here to take care of the rodent problem.”
“Oh,” Annie said, relieved. She almost laughed. Now that she was leaving, the manager had finally decided to do something about the mice.
“Can you come back later?” Annie paused, then added, “In an hour or so?” She took satisfaction in knowing that Neal would be home then—maybe the man would fill the apartment with noxious fumes and it would smell awful. Maybe an entire army of dying mice would come crawling out of the woodwork—that would serve Neal right.
“I’ll be back later,” the man said, sounding a little miffed. Annie sat still as she listened to him walk away.
She scribbled off the rest of her short and not-quite-truthful note to Neal, promising herself that she would call him when she got to Chattanooga and explain in more detail. As bad a husband and father as he was, he at least deserved that much.
* * *
Neal’s few moments of self-righteous supremacy at Snell’s Flowers were short-lived. When Mildred handed him his final paycheck—the first and only Snell paycheck he would ever receive—Neal at first thought she had made a clerical error. The amount was quite a bit less than he expected. When he questioned her about this, she went over the math with him and he realized, with quite a shock, that he was being paid less than minimum wage. A dollar an hour less, to be exact.
He stormed back into old man Snell’s office, or at least pushed his way in as forcefully as a man can do with a bad foot and an aching shoulder.
“What is this crap?” Neal said, tossing the check on the old man’s desk.
Snell merely glanced it. “What’s the problem now, son?”
“You’re trying to pay me less than minimum wage, that’s what.”
“So?”
Neal was almost beside himself with anger. “It’s illegal!”
“No,” Snell said smugly. “Not for part-time employees, it’s not.”
Neal was confused. “What the hell are you talking about? I’m not a part-time employee—I worked forty hours a week.”
“No, sir, you did not. Look at the paycheck. You worked thirty-five hours a week, like all the other delivery boys. Seven hours a day, five days a week. Eight to four, with one hour off for lunch.”
Neal picked up the check and stared at it.
“And, in this Great State of Georgia, you don’t have to pay a part-time employee minimum wage.” He gave another smug smile.
“You...why didn’t you tell me you paid less than minimum wage?”
“Don’t recall you askin’.”
Neal could not believe what the old man was trying to pull. He hadn’t asked how much the job paid, because he assumed it was minimum wage...but now that he thought about it, the ad he saw in the paper had said DRIVERS WANTED—PART & FULL TIME.
“Look,” Neal said, “I worked eight hours a day, or even more. You gave me more deliveries at four-thirty. Five o’clock, sometimes. I didn’t get back here until almost six on some days.”
“Well, we gave you a little extra work only because you were a tad slow with your deliveries. Which is only natural, you bein’ new and all.”
“What? That’s not true! I made my deliveries faster than any of the other...” Neal’s voice trailed off—there was no point in arguing with Snell. The sneaky son-of-a-bitch would just have another snappy comeback for whatever Neal said.
Neal turned to leave, but hesitated—he couldn’t resist telling Snell one more thing. He looked the old man straight in the eye and became acutely aware of their age difference, the wrinkles on Snell’s face, the balding head, the pot-belly. Neal lost his nerve for a few seconds, but then decided that he had tell Jimmy Snell what he really thought of him, no matter what.
With his voice quavering a bit, Neal finally got it out.
“You’re a selfish prick.”
This was the worst insult Neal could conjure up, but Snell did not seem to be in the least phased by it. “No, son, I’m just a bidnessman, tryin’ to do the best I can for mysef and my fambly. If you don’t like workin’ for us, why, there’s somebody else who will.”
Neal snickered. “I can see how much you want to ‘hep out’ your fellow Georgia Tech students.”
This touched a nerve in the old man. “Now you listen to me for a minute, you smart-mouthed college boy. You don’t have a damn clue ‘bout how hard it is to make a profit these days. I try to hep out students like you much as I can, but you got to realize there’s...well, other economic forces at work here.” Snell lowered his voice, cocking his head towards the loading door. “Those nigra-boys are just happy as clams workin’ for less than minimum wage.”
This had been the last straw—Neal turned around and walked out, fighting an almost overpowering urge to tear up the check and throw it in the old man’s face. But he couldn’t do that—he and Annie needed the money too much.
Now, Neal sat in his car, parked in front of his apartment building, staring down at the miserable pittance of a paycheck in his hand, wondering how he was going to explain it all to Annie. She was probably furious about everything that had happened already.
Neal gobbled down another couple of pain killers and swallowed them dry. He wanted to dope himself into a stupor.
After staring into space another ten minutes, he finally mustered up the courage to drag himself out of the car and into the building. When he entered the apartment, he was relieved to discover that Annie and Natasha weren’t home. He then realized that he hadn’t noticed Annie’s car out in the parking lot. Annie was almost always home when he came back from work.
When he went into the kitchen, he saw a napkin taped to the refrigerator. There was writing on it, but he couldn’t read it—his vision s
eemed blurry. It must have been because of the pain killers. Everything seemed to be going in and out of focus.
He tore the napkin free and held it close to his face, squinting at Annie’s uneven handwriting.
Neal, gone to the grocery. Hope your foot is better—Annie.
Neal stared dully at the note, leaning against the refrigerator. After a moment, he hobbled his way into the bedroom and lay down.
He soon fell into a deep, drug-induced sleep.
CHAPTER 7
Just as Annie was approaching the entry ramp to I-75, she decided to buy some more diapers before she left Atlanta. Her nose told her that Natasha already needed another change, and she didn’t want to take any chances.
She considered trying to find a drugstore so she could buy one of the brands she liked, but decided against it—they were all too crowded this time of day. Plus, she would have to unstrap Natasha and take her inside the store with her. Unlike some mothers, Annie refused to leave her baby alone in the car, unless she could see Natasha every second.
Annie decided to go to a mini-market instead. They usually only had Pampers, she knew, but that would just have to do for the moment. She could stock up tomorrow when she and Natasha were safely in Chattanooga. The best thing about mini-markets was that Annie could leave Natasha strapped in her car seat and just run inside and be back in less than a minute, keeping an eye on the baby the whole time. Whoever came up with the idea of a mini-market was a genius, Annie mused.
Annie followed the creeping flow of traffic along Windy Hill Road and across I-75. She spotted a mini-market on the right-hand side, just past the exit ramp. Good. There was a traffic light there, too. It would be easy to get back out of the parking lot and onto the Interstate.
She searched for a parking place near the door. Unfortunately, the lot was packed full of rush-hour customers. In fact, there weren’t any parking spaces available at all, near the door or otherwise.
Annie had no choice but to wait until someone moved. She put the car in park and looked at Natasha. “Can ooo help Mommy find a parking space?”
Natasha smiled back and wiggled her arms.
“Sure you taaaan,” Annie said, patting the baby’s fuzzy blonde head.
Annie saw an aging red-haired woman emerge from the storefront. She walked over to a shiny blue sedan that was parked only two spaces away from the front door.
“Perfect,” Annie said, waiting impatiently as the woman unlocked her car door. Annie put her own car in reverse and backed up a little bit, giving the woman plenty of room to pull out. The parking lot was at a steep incline away from the front door, and it made things a little awkward.
Annie smiled at Natasha again, waiting.
But after about thirty seconds, the blue sedan still had not moved. Annie leaned forward and squinted through the windshield. In the dim dusk light, she could barely see the woman’s head through the sedan’s tinted windows. The head didn’t appear to be moving.
“Come on, lady,” Annie moaned.
“Daaaaaa,” Natasha added.
Annie laughed. “I don’t think she’s going anywhere, honey. Not before you start high school, anyway.”
Annie put her own car back in drive and inched forward, eyeing two handicapped spaces that were directly in front of the store’s entrance. She had already learned her lesson about parking in those. The year before, she had gotten a $150 fine for parking in one at Lenox Mall. But this wasn’t Lenox Mall, and she would only be in the store a second or two.
“Mommy shouldn’t do this,” she said as she pulled into the nearer handicapped space, “but Mommy is going to do it anyway.” She put the car in park and turned to Natasha. “Now you just sit right here and be good while I buy you some more diapers.”
Natasha smiled again. Annie touched her little nose playfully. “No loud music or smoking until Mommy comes back, o-taaay?”
Natasha stuck one finger in her mouth and looked out the window.
“O-tay,” Annie answered for her.
Before Annie got out of the car, she pressed the emergency brake as far down as it would go, to the floorboard. The lights were still on, but that was okay—it was safer.
Annie went inside and searched for the diapers, keeping a sharp eye on Natasha through the store’s large plate glass windows. When she found them (they only had Pampers, of course), she picked up two packages and quickly headed for the cash register, snatching up a few candy bars along the way. There were four people in line, two mud-caked men in yellow hard-hats; in front of them, a boy of no more than ten; and in front of him, a bald-headed man who was buying two six-packs of beer. The man had just set the two six-packs on the counter when he noticed Annie holding the Pampers.
Annie gave him a friendly I’m in a big hurry look, hoping that he would notice what she was buying. She had discovered that many people, particularly men, were sympathetic to young mothers.
This particular man took the cue. “Would you like to go ahead of me, young lady?”
“If you’re sure you don’t mind...”
“Not at all.” The man slid his six-pack over to one side of the counter to make room for her.
Annie glanced at the men in the hard-hats, who were giving the man dirty looks, and smiled apologetically. She set the Pampers and candy down on the counter and looked outside. From this angle, she could make out the silhouette of Natasha’s little head against the car’s rear window.
A gum-popping teenage clerk rung up Annie’s purchase. “That’s eight forty-two.”
Annie reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a twenty dollar bill. As she did this, she accidentally dragged out a big clump of change along with it. The coins scattered all over the floor. Before she had left the apartment, she had gathered up all the loose change she could find and filled her pockets with it.
Annie felt stupid and clumsy. She handed the girl the twenty and squatted down to the floor to pick up all the money. The little boy behind her in line dropped to his knees to help her.
When Annie finally stood up, the clerk was waiting with her change from the twenty, looking annoyed.
“Sorry about that,” Annie said, taking the change and stuffing it in her jeans. She glanced back out the front window.
Natasha was gone.
It took a moment for this information to register in Annie’s brain. Then, she realized that it wasn’t just Natasha that was missing—the whole car was gone.
For a half-second, Annie was completely frozen, unable to come to grips with the data that was being fed from her eyeballs to her visual cortex, thinking that maybe she was looking out the wrong window or that her eyes were playing tricks on her. But it was the same window she had just looked out a moment earlier, and her eyes were just fine.
Her child—her baby—had disappeared!
“Natasha!” Annie broke into a sprint, flying towards the front door.
After a few strides, she could see her car. It was backing out of the parking space. No, it wasn’t backing out, it was rolling out by itself—there was no one in the driver’s seat.
“Oh my God!” she gasped, as she burst through the front door. She could still see the silhouette of Natasha’s head against the car’s rear window. The front wheels weren’t straight, so the car was rolling at an angle, picking up speed, headed towards the street.
In a split second, Annie estimated the trajectory and knew there was a good chance the car would make it out of the entrance to the parking lot and into the heavy rush hour traffic. She shot like a bullet across the pavement, fueled by blind protective maternal energy, towards the right side of the runaway vehicle. She would throw the door open, jump inside, and jam her foot on the emergency brake (hadn’t she already put on the emergency brake?) before the car could roll out into the street.
During the next few seconds, the world seemed to slow down like a frame-by-frame sports replay. Each moment infinitely short and infinitely long at the same time. There seemed to be minutes, hours, even days
to reflect on her whole life—her childhood, her high school days, her first period, her first job, her pregnancy, the endless fights with Neal about having an abortion, even Neal’s paranoia about Natasha during the past few days. Yet, during those fleeting flashbacks, the car seemed to be inevitably hurtling towards the traffic.
As she streaked across the parking lot, she was unaware of any physical sensations. She had one and only one goal: to save the life of her child. Every cell in her body was relegated to accomplishing it, as if her body was on some kind of automatic pilot, with no conscious direction on her part.
But after sprinting full-speed for few more seconds, she began to slow down. At first it was only a slight hesitation, but after two or more of her long, frantic strides, she made a decision to change her course. The front end of her car was swinging around towards a pickup truck that was parked near the entrance to the street. The front of her car would make solid contact with the back of the pickup truck. And if Annie didn’t alter her course appreciably, she would be caught between the two vehicles on impact.
But her motherly instincts overtook her reason. She continued on her previous course, resuming maximum speed. After two more strides, she had caught up with the front bumper of her own car; after another stride, she was in between her car and the truck, with the front end of her car approaching fast.
Now there was only a couple of feet between the two vehicles.
Annie’s hand flew out towards the handle of the door on her car, even though she was too far away to actually reach it.
At that instant, she caught another glimpse of Natasha, smiling at her mother with childish glee, waving her hands in the air at whatever imaginary things babies wave their hands, perhaps thinking that this was all some kind of fun game that Mommy had made up to amuse her.
That was when Annie went down.
The front of her car slammed against her left hip. A split-second later, both she and her car smashed into the side of the truck. Although she felt like she was flying gracefully through space, Annie was in fact spinning wildly, like a rag doll discarded by an angry toddler. She was only dimly aware of her own bones cracking.