You Should Pity Us Instead

by Amy Gustine

  Lawan wanted to say he wasn’t his dad. They should wait for the real kids. He didn’t, and by the time Kevin, Dennis, and Karen made it home, Frank was at the undertakers’ and Lawan felt like he’d killed him, though he couldn’t even remember what he said to Gloria that day.

  A new stab of guilt shoots through him. She’d clothed and tutored him and come to baseball games and student conferences. All the things a real mother would do.

  “I want to die quickly,” Gloria says. “I want to go with dignity. You know, not hold on for nature to do it.”

  Lawan takes a long moment to register her meaning, then pretends not to. He drops the leaking bag into the garbage. “Life’s a crapshoot. What are you gonna do?”

  Lawan always avoided calling Gloria and Frank “Mom” and “Dad” at home, where the terms took on an ingratiating phoniness. In public, though, he used to look for reasons to say it, and watch people’s expressions, trying to guess their thoughts. He remembers this when he takes Gloria to IHOP and the hostess mistakes him for her driver. Would she have made that mistake if he were white? It might have been the van, parked outside the big picture window, but he didn’t think so. And so what? Why blame the woman for a commonsense assumption?

  Gloria corrects her in the vehement, offended tone she’s always used at such moments. A tone that makes Lawan feel like a scruffy dog being reclaimed at the pound.

  After breakfast he tries to keep himself busy around the house so he won’t have to watch Gloria flog away at that Chinese farmer book or discuss her death anymore. She’d brought up the subject again at the restaurant, him trapped in the booth waiting for pancakes. He’d agreed, vaguely, to help her, knowing that if all went according to plan, by the time she’s lying in the hospital hooked up to the machines they hooked Frank up to—the one that beeped every thirty seconds, and the one that sounded like an obscene phone caller’s breathing—he’d be on some ship anchored in the Arabian Sea and someone else would have to do the dirty work.

  Saturday night Karen invites everyone to dinner. Lawan carries Gloria up the four steps to the front porch, then down the three steps to the sunken dining room, feeling again what he felt that first day she came home from rehab, both proud and awkward with everybody watching. Alone it doesn’t feel like this. Alone he is just Lawan, carrying Gloria.

  Between dinner and dessert, Gloria wants to go outside for a smoke. Lawan lowers her into the wheelchair beside the back stoop. It’s drizzling and cold and she waves him back in, popping open an extra-large umbrella Karen has provided.

  “Give me ten minutes.”

  Kevin and Dennis have moved to the family room to watch a recorded SNL while Karen and Veronica, Dennis’s wife, clean up. Karen’s husband, who owns some kind of industrial parts business, is in China again. As far as Lawan can tell, he half-lives over there. Karen doesn’t seem to mind. Lawan wonders if she’ll mind after the baby is born.

  Veronica pokes her head in the living room and scolds Dennis for not breaking up a fight between their boys, three and five, who can be heard in the foyer spitting at each other. Kevin gives Dennis a big grin to indicate how happy he is to be divorced, nobody to reprimand him, until Karen shouts, “And we could use some help cleaning up, Kevin!”

  Lawan is exempted. He wonders if it’s because he is supposed to be watching Gloria. He watches SNL instead, and then, having lost track of time, looks out the window, where Gloria sits, contentedly it seems, cigarette half-smoked. Or maybe it’s her second.

  Cleanup done and pie dished out, everyone resumes their places, Kevin in the recliner, Dennis on the couch, Veronica perched on the arm next to him, frowning at the show. Karen looks out the window, then taps on the glass. Gloria must indicate she’s not ready to come in because Karen sits down next to Lawan.

  “So how’s it been going over there?”

  This is the moment Lawan should tell them about the lunchmeat in the cupboard, the book that never ends. Instead he tells them he’s been thinking of joining the Marines.

  “What?” Karen says, aghast. “Why would you do that?”

  Kevin thinks he’s kidding. They all launch into a lecture about what an idiot he is.

  “You want to go to the desert and get your legs blown off for some rich guy’s oil contract?”

  Lawan points out that the Marines are connected to the Navy. He doesn’t think they go to the desert.

  “If you like the idea of traveling, join the Foreign Service,” Veronica says.

  Lawan shrugs, unwilling to admit he has only the vaguest notion of what that is. Embassies or something. It sounds like paperwork.

  “You need college for those positions,” Karen says.

  Gloria offered to pay for college and Lawan’s not going has been a regular topic of discussion. Kevin used to argue college wasn’t necessary if Lawan wanted to own a business. Karen and Dennis said what business? And where would the capital come from? Lawan didn’t want to ask what capital was and when he found out later he thought, why don’t they just call it money?

  After Lawan turned down Kevin’s offer to “apprentice” at the bike shop and took the job driving the kids, Kevin stopped defending him. But Lawan can’t work at the bike shop. He hates people who take bikes seriously. Does not want to discuss why frame weight matters or how comfortable a seat is on their bony asses.

  “You’ve never even mentioned the military.” Karen’s tone is exasperated. He wishes she’d just come out with it: what will they do with Gloria?

  “I have a friend who joined.” He details all the benefits, attributing to this fictitious friend what the recruiter told him.

  “The few, the proud, the Marines,” Kevin says.

  Unsure if he’s being mocked, Lawan replies, “That’s me,” hoping to sound ironic, worldly, while thinking yes, that’s exactly what he’ll be.

  He slips on his windbreaker and puts the hood up. Through the window in the back door he can see Gloria staring at the yard the same way she had years ago, when as a kid he’d be flailing away with a jump rope or teetering across the patio on an old skateboard, shouting, “Look! Look!” and she’d nod, saying, “Yes, I see you, yes.”

  As he’s closing the door, Dennis yells, “You do know the Marines are going to shave your head, right?”

  The next weekend Lawan gets dressed to go to a Jay Z concert with Lawsandra, though he told Gloria and Dennis, who’s coming by to stay with her, that he’s going with a friend from work.

  The tickets are his birthday gift. Beforehand they are going to one of those famous steak houses where they bring you a slab of meat two inches thick and you have to order everything else separately. For dessert he hopes they have carrot cake, and his piece will have a burning candle in it. After the concert they will go out for drinks, and she’ll tell him what he wants to know that he hasn’t had the nerve to ask yet, like who his father is, and if Lawsandra knows what happened to his sisters. He tried to find them, Googling their given names first, then trying versions the Millers might have substituted, like Kayla or Kay, Nita or Anita. He found several Millers with these white names and considered messaging them, but Lawkaya and Lawnita are only sixteen years old. If these other girls turn out not to be his sisters, trying to connect online could get him arrested.

  At four o’clock, half an hour before Dennis is due to come over and stay with Gloria, he calls to cancel. Something about time zones and filing deadlines. He goes on, offering details as if Lawan knows what they mean. It feels like a way of putting him down, reminding Lawan he should have gone to college.

  Lawan calls Kevin, who doesn’t answer, then Karen, who says she woke up with a sore throat and doesn’t want to risk getting Gloria sick.

  While he waits for Kevin to call back, Lawsandra texts wanting to know where he is, and he tells her they might have to go late, skip dinner.

  Finally, at six o’clock, Kevin arrives and Lawan borrows his CR-V. It’s newer and more reliable than his own car, and it doesn’t smell of cigarettes like
Gloria’s, which he knows Lawsandra hates. Dope is fine, but regular cigarettes nauseate her. The facts about her are piling up, and he is storing each one like the little slips of fortune from a Chinese restaurant.

  At her house Lawan takes the musty stairs to the second floor. Booker answers, looking half-asleep.

  “No, she gone to the concert.”

  “I was supposed to pick her up.”

  “She gone with her friend Cheryl. Left a while ago.”

  A few texts verify this. Lawsandra didn’t want to risk being late, so she sold his ticket to Cheryl and they’re already at the restaurant. No mention of his birthday.

  Lawan hangs around, sharing a pizza with Booker, mostly to kill time. When he leaves it’s still too early to go home, so he stops at the bar, where, without Booker and Lawsandra, the other customers make him nervous, hot girls in peek-a-boo skirts draped over guys who look like they’d take his eyes out for noticing. At ten he leaves and drives around, careful to snake through the city without backtracking. Doesn’t want the same cop to see him twice. He’d get pulled over, a young black man driving in circles.

  Monday, Lawan’s actual birthday, he has just dropped off Danny, a sixteen-year-old whose problems started with a car accident, and is closing the back doors when he notices Tyler drooling. Lawan wipes his mouth with a tissue. “You okay, kid?”

  Tyler can talk, but it takes a while for the words to make their way to his lips, so at first Lawan isn’t worried. Then his hands begin to shake and Lawan realizes it’s a seizure. He jumps in the driver’s seat and shoots straight down Cherry to the big hospital, where his van and his uniform get the guard’s attention and he hits the ER in five minutes flat, by which time Tyler is shivering and his eyes are just white marbles and the hospital staff don’t need any paperwork or cards before they take him and Lawan stands, stunned, beginning to question if he did the right thing, or if he should have held the kid’s tongue down. Wasn’t that the risk? They could choke on it, or bite it or something.

  When he calls Tricia he downplays the incident so she won’t kill herself driving over. Once she’s safely in the waiting room, he fleshes out the reality and they sit holding hands, until the doctor comes out and says Tyler seems okay, but Lawan can tell something’s changed. There is a lot of medical talk which Tricia seems to understand. She begins to follow the doctor, then stops. “You coming?”

  “No, you go ahead. Your time.”

  An understanding passes between them that he won’t be there for her the way she’d hoped, and she accepts it gracefully, but he knows how she feels, and that drives him out to the van, which the guard has moved to a nearby lot.

  The guy hands him his keys. “Kid okay?”

  “Hope so.” Lawan shrugs, safe inside the assumption that he is just the driver.

  He’d planned to spend the evening at Tricia’s. Birthday dinner, birthday sex. Lawan assumes that’s off, but Gloria isn’t expecting him home for hours, so he goes to Lawsandra’s.

  She answers the door without her wig, and it takes a few seconds for him to understand the rooster tail was fake. Her real hair looks like tufts of dryer lint.

  “How was the concert?”

  Lawsandra shrugs. “You didn’t really miss anything. The seats were shitty.”

  She brought home KFC and gestures for him to make himself a plate. While they eat, she doesn’t mention his birthday even though Lawan brings up Memorial Day and the change to his schedule in a couple of weeks after school ends for the summer. He can’t think of any other way to get her to consider the date, so he asks if she knows what happened to his sisters.

  “Huh?” She’s looking for something in the fridge.

  “The twins, Lawnita and Lawkaya. They went to a family named Miller.”

  Lawsandra looks at him as if he wasn’t supposed to know this.

  “I looked for ’em on Facebook, but that’s a common name.”

  “Lawkaya and Lawnita?”

  “Miller.”

  His phone rings and Karen leaves a message wanting to know if everything is okay. She’s called Gloria several times at home and didn’t get an answer.

  Lawan’s not worried. When he left for work, she was at the table with her Chinese farmer book, the newspaper, and a cup of tea. He’d prepped her dinner and she was going to microwave it whenever she got hungry. Still, he puts on his jacket. As he’s moving toward the door Lawsandra says, “They’re your half-sisters.”

  “What?”

  “Half. Different father. Yours was named Ron and he died in a house fire. Police tried to say it was a crack thing, but it was electrical. The lights and stuff in that place were always weird, and some of the fixtures there, at the ceiling, they had these black marks, like scorches, around them.”

  Lawsandra points to the ceiling, at the hundreds of tiny holes their blinding game has left.

  “You know where they are?”

  “No. They was so little.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “They don’t remember. It’s all up here.” She stabs at her temple. “You make your connections and then they stuck, right? Like you, you come back looking for me because you remember. They don’t, and why confuse ’em now?”

  On the way home Karen calls again, says Gloria is still not answering. After that, time gets thick. Lawan pushes through. At Gloria’s he finds the bedroom door shut. She must have gotten herself up here on her bottom. There’s no way she could do the stairs on her feet.

  Lawan knocks. “I’m home. You okay?”

  Nothing. He raps on the door with all four knuckles. “You all right?”

  Silence.

  He tries the knob and finds it locked.

  “Mom?” The word sounds strange. He repeats it, louder. “Mom?”

  Razor blades. Pills. Alcohol. The results flash across his mind in vivid pictures. He pounds on the door, “Mom! It’s Lawan. You answer now!”

  Then he hears the toilet flush, the faucet, her walker rattling. She opens the door, registers his expression and laughs. “What’s the matter? Did you think I was dead?” Gloria is almost as tall as he is. She gives him a smacking kiss on the cheek.

  “Why didn’t you answer the phone? Karen and I were calling.”

  “I was trying to nap. My God, why is everyone so worked up? I can be alone for a few hours.”

  As Gloria starts to shuffle past him, Lawan blurts, “Why did you ask me?”

  “What?”

  “Ask me. Why did you ask me to help you, if you got worse?”

  She takes a moment to register his meaning and it passes between them, the recognition that asking him to help her die is possible, but asking Karen, Dennis, or Kevin is not.

  “That was stupid. I’m sorry.” They are jammed face to face in the narrow hall. Gloria grips his wrist. “I love you, Lawan.”

  “It’s okay,” he says. “I get it. I know how it is.”

  She squeezes his arm. “I have your birthday present. It’s downstairs.”

  “Come on,” he says. “I’ll carry you.”

  THE RIVER WARTA

  Now that Caroline lived alone for the first time in her life, she began to be irritated by the cleanliness of her house. When she left something somewhere, it stayed there. If she didn’t enter a room for days, it collected nothing but a thin, almost imperceptible layer of dust. Her daughters’ bedrooms grew stiff and gray with disuse. In her own bed, Frederick’s pillow remained plump and smooth, the case free of his coarse, white hair, and Caroline—though she knew it was ridiculous—took this as an affront. It unnerved her that nothing changed in the house unless she changed it.

  So when the cat meowed, a ridiculous predatory supplicant outside her window in a golden twilight during Indian summer, Caroline did not broom it away as she would have a year ago. With the Depression on, she’d become used to homeless, hungry visitors. She stood at the window looking down at its twisting, black body, its chartreuse eyes, and whispered, “What’s the matter? Ar
e you lost? This isn’t your house. Go on now, go,” aware that her tone was more inviting than dismissing.

  The next day, her youngest girl, Eva—who’d inherited too much of her mother even in her mother’s opinion—came by. “There’s a stray cat around the house. Where’s the broom?”

  “Leave it be,” Caroline said. “It’s doing no harm.”

  The night before, she’d watched the cat lap at the milk she’d slipped out on a tea saucer, marveling at the strange distance between herself and this woman who stood in front of the window. She who would not tolerate a cat’s filthy tongue on her good tea service, especially now that she could no longer replace what might be broken. But this woman, who was using her dishes, her hands, her eyes, had carried the saucer out and watched with amusement and even pride as the animal satisfied itself.

  “Where did it come from?” Eva asked.

  “Nowhere,” Caroline said. “I don’t think she has a home.”

  Eva was Caroline’s plainest daughter. She lacked Sophie’s spunk—however annoying—and Addie’s supple beauty. Sometimes, studying Eva, at once both diffident and haughty, Caroline felt embarrassed, as if she were looking too long in a mirror, and it made her love her youngest daughter with a humiliating ache.

  “Everything comes from somewhere,” Eva said. “What you mean is nobody wants it.”

  Caroline, then called Karolina, was born in 1880 in Poznań, Poland, a city on the Warta River. As a girl she liked to stand by the river when a thunderstorm was coming in, watching blue sky skitter to gray in the water’s reflection, the mirrored clouds cut in half by waves. In summer the rain felt good on the insides of her wrists, where she rolled up the sleeves of her dress.

  The river seemed a majestic, mysterious transport, always on the way to something else, and as she entered adolescence Caroline began to imagine what she might do if she were a boy. She’d escape for sure, maybe as far as America. At the very least she would have used her time down at the river for something useful, like fishing.