Pieces of Eight

by Whitney Barbetti

  “Grab your shoes,” Brooke instructed, and Norah bounded down the hall toward the door. “You ready?” she asked me.

  I picked up Griffin’s leash and tethered her to it. She was lying in front of the fridge, as if lazily begging for someone to give her a hot dog so she could lapse into a food coma. “No you don’t,” I told her. “Get your ass up. You need exercise.”

  “I poured coffee for you. In the blue mug there.”

  The mug had purple flowers across it and a lid, clearly meant for me to take it on our walk.

  “Sweet like a candy bar, right?”

  “What?” I asked her.

  “That’s how you take your coffee. Or how you used to.”

  “Yeah.” Surprised she remembered, I asked, “Did you put a quarter cup of sugar in this?”

  “Just about.” She smiled at me and tipped her head toward the door. “Coming?”

  I looped the leash around my wrist three times and with the coffee in my hand, I followed her out the door.

  The morning fog was low enough to block out much of the sky, grazing the tops of the row houses we passed as we walked across the sidewalk. Brooke lived in a pretty nice neighborhood, so she must have been doing pretty well for herself. Norah dodged ahead of us, catching up with who I presumed to be one of her classmates, but Brooke still followed behind—far enough to give her daughter a bit of privacy but not so far that Norah was ever out of her sight.

  “I don’t get to do this often enough. Usually, Marco—my boss—his wife takes her to school. And then while she’s at school, I come home and sleep.”

  A light breeze passed over us, whipping her hair into my face. I could smell the vanilla and something else—something creamy. “What were you baking this morning?”

  “Eclairs, for a baby shower.” She inspected her nails. “I have cocoa powder in my knuckles still, I guess.”

  Griffin saw a lone tree and bounded toward it, nearly toppling the coffee out of my hand. Luckily, Brooke caught it and steadied it as Griffin violently sniffed the tree. Norah was still close, stopped at the corner for the crosswalk, so Brooke stayed by me while Griffin pressed her nose against bark that had probably been pissed on by dozens of dogs.

  “Does she do this a lot?”

  “Every time she sees a tree by its lonesome, it’s like she feels it’s her duty to give it some company.”

  “Norah wants a dog.” She gave me a smile that I was sure was meant to convey some unsaid mutual understanding, but I just stared blankly at her. “Well, I’m not getting her a dog, not right now. She’s too young to take care of it, and I don’t want to deal with the mess.”

  I wasn’t sure if she was trying to remind me that she was doing me a very big favor, so I started to speak but she interrupted me.

  “It’s fine, that you’re at my house. Griffin is sweet. And besides, you’re there. It’d be a much different story if I was the only adult in a house with a dog and child. My dog.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, Griffin isn’t the brightest tool in the shed, but for what she lacks in intelligence, she makes up for in not being an asshole.”

  The crosswalk changed, and I tugged Griffin away from the tree. “What grade is Norah in?”

  “First. Crazy that she’s already in school all day.”

  I remembered holding her for the first time in the hospital, and the strange emotional tether I’d formed to her then. If I was being honest—and I’d never tell Brooke—the main reason I still saw Brooke was because of Norah, because of that connection I still didn’t understand. Maybe, in an alternate dimension, I could’ve had a happy childhood like the one Norah had. Maybe I could’ve had a mom who actually gave a shit like Brooke did.

  We walked with Norah all the way to school and when we got there, she turned around and waved goodbye, her smile wide and natural. I tried to copy the smile, but it felt like I was wearing someone else’s skin. Not that I wasn’t happy, but smiling didn’t come to me as easily as it came to Norah.

  “She’s a good kid,” I told Brooke, when her daughter had disappeared into the school. Griffin was sniffing out the next tree and pawing at the dirt at the base.

  “Thanks. I think so. She’s…” Brooke nodded, a small smile stretching her lips. “Special. I worry sometimes, you know, about her not having a dad. How that affects her.”

  “Does it affect her at all?” I asked and tugged Griffin along when Brooke turned to go back home. “She seems so well-adjusted.”

  “Well, I mean, she’s a kid. They are curious. She asks questions about her dad, but I tell her when she’s older I’ll tell her about him.” It wasn’t cold out, but Brooke pulled her black cardigan tighter around her middle as she looked both ways before leading us across the street. “Sometimes I wonder if I made the right decision, excluding him from her life. I know it was the right decision for me, but I still wonder if it was right for me to do it.”

  “I guess you’ll never know.” I sounded dismissive, but it was a game I had played over and over in my own head over the last twenty-four hours. It was hard to believe that it had only been that long because it felt like ten times that many hours.

  When Brooke hit the pedestrian walk sign, her sleeve slipped up her arm enough to show a tiny tattoo inked on the inside of her wrist.

  “What’s that?” I asked her, resisting the urge to invade her private space by grabbing her arm and checking it out.

  “Oh.” She rolled up her sleeve and put her arm in front of me. “A heart, for Norah.”

  The lines weren’t perfectly straight, but the N inside of them looked neat enough. “Why is it upside down?”

  “Because,” she said, turning so she was standing with her back to my chest and holding her arm up for view, “the heart is for me, really. Norah drew it, and I got it this way so when I looked at it, it was the right way for me.” The crosswalk lit for us to walk and I tried to think of anything I loved enough to ink on my body. “My mom, she fought me on it. Tooth and nail. Thought inking my skin would make me look like a scumbag or something. But, it’s for me.”

  I nodded, thinking about her word, fought. Thinking about Six, and how he’d always, always told me to fight.

  I thought about how it’d been days since I’d stopped fighting. How I’d pushed him away, how I hadn’t done the one thing he’d asked me to do a million years before. Fight.

  “So, now that little ears aren’t here, why don’t you tell me why you showed up to my doorstep last night?”

  I’d been foolish to think Brooke was granting me some kind of reprieve during the walk to the school. We’d talked about Norah and Griffin and the weather—safe shit. And now she was shining a flashlight into the cavern I’d carved inside myself and seeing what she could find.

  I started with the hardest thing, that was the easiest thing to say. “I left Six.” It sounded so simple to my ears, but I met her eyes and hoped that I didn’t want to talk about it, at least for now.

  “You were together a long time.”

  “Nearly a decade.” When I said it like that, in the terms of a singular thing, it made it feel much less significant than if I’d said ten years. Even though they were equal, the single made it falsely sound unimportant. And if I was going to move past this, I needed to make it less than it was, at least to other people. I could lie to others about how much it hurt, but I couldn’t lie to myself. “But it’s over now.”

  “That’s too bad.” She made a sound in her throat.

  Confused, I turned to her and Griffin made a bee-line for the tree she’d sighted from a block away.

  “‘Too bad?’ You didn’t seem to like him.”

  “To be fair,” she said evenly, “I didn’t like any men at that moment. Why do you think it took me so long to go back to the Dry Run?”

  “Because you were depressed?” I asked. “I don’t know.”

  “Because I didn’t know him. He’s tall, built. Pretty imposing.” At my blank look, she continued. “Come on, you more than anyone h
ave to know that about him. He can be scary.”

  “He was always just Six to me.” I mean, just Six was a gross understatement, but I’d never looked at him as being anything other than the man I’d fallen in love with. The man I’d known was different from the first moment I’d laid sober eyes on him. He may have been a savior, but he wasn’t a God.

  “Well, to me, he was a strange, large man. And coupled with you…” she shrugged and then motioned for me to take a slight detour instead of heading right back to her place. “Store’s this way,” she explained, and then continued, “He freaked me out a little. We were in his place, making a mess of his stuff.”

  “He was used to mess.” I thought of the many times he’d cleaned up after me. The way I’d cleaned up after my mother. It was a wonder he didn’t hate me the way I hated her. “He wouldn’t hurt someone unless they deserved it.” Why did I feel this need to defend him? We weren’t together anymore; it didn’t matter what Brooke thought of him. But despite me telling myself these things, I didn’t listen. “It doesn’t matter. It’s over.”

  “Is it?”

  This reminded me of sitting across from one of the shrinks, and I was not up for that. There was so much more to the story, but I wasn’t in the mood for Brooke to throw me a pity party, so I shook my head. “It’s over. Believe me, I made sure of it.” He’d told me once that he couldn’t stay with me if I hurt myself over him. I still had, and he’d stayed, but I’d never threatened it. I’d never put him in the position of choosing me hurting myself or him leaving me be. I’d used the weakness he’d once admitted to me and exploited it. I wondered how much he hated me. On a love scale of one to ten, he had to be deep in the negatives.

  “I guess you don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Oh, that obvious, huh?” I snapped and then quickly squeezed my lips tight, pulling them in so my teeth bit down on the insides. I didn’t press hard enough to make me bleed, but enough that the pain centered me. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay, you’re sensitive right now.”

  When people labeled me the way Brooke did, my gut reaction was to prove them wrong. To show them that no, I wasn’t sensitive. Why did I feel the need to invalidate what others thought of me? Even when they weren’t wrong?

  Instead, I took a deep, cleansing breath and followed Brooke up the walk to the door.

  Griffin increased her pace to keep up with her as Brooke opened the glass door. “Oh, shit, I need to tie her up.”

  Brooke waved me off and took the leash from me. “I know the owner. She’ll be fine.”

  I followed Brooke inside and wished I had tied Griffin up. This place was fucking tiny. So small that two people couldn’t walk down an aisle side by side. I wasn’t a claustrophobic person, but as I stood in the aisle where the dog food sat beside a stack of baby wipes, I was convinced the walls were inching closer and closer to one another. Brooke poked her head around the corner, Griffin in one hand and a jug of milk in the other. “Do they have what you need?”

  Six had done most of the shopping for Griffin, so I didn’t know the brand she usually ate. Not that there was a shit ton of selection at this corner store. Three brands of dry and one brand of wet food.

  “If you’re not sure, grab one of them and then mix it with some wet food for a while until she gets used to it.”

  I couldn’t argue against Brooke’s logic, so I did as she suggested and carried them to the front counter where Brooke was already chatting about the cashier’s wife’s broken leg. Her face lit up in a way I wasn’t used to seeing when she talked to me, and I saw her leaning comfortably on the counter, chin propped up on her palm as she listened to the man’s woes. The store was practically empty; only Brooke and I were in line, and I got the feeling that Brooke shopped here more to socialize with the staff—who she was on a first-name basis with—than to actually get groceries.

  When she noticed me standing beside her, she held out her arm and motioned me forward. “This is my friend Mira. Griffin’s hers.”

  “Pretty dog you got there,” the cashier said. He didn’t wear a name tag, and from the homey feeling of the store, I figured he was probably the owner too. “Is she a show dog?”

  I barely contained the bubble of laughter that burst up my throat. “No. She’s a lazy dog.”

  The man barked a laugh and took the dog food from my arms. “Well, she’s pretty enough to be a show. This it for you?”

  I nodded and pulled out the measly bit of cash I still had on me. I’d have to figure out income ASAP, because I didn’t know how long Brooke would let me crash at her place.

  “I got it,” Brooke said, and handed over a twenty.

  I almost protested. But pride had to take a backseat to practicality. I’d helped Brooke once, so maybe this was her helping me back. Granted, I’d helped her with Six’s money and Six’s apartment, but I’d been the facilitator at least.

  Brooke said a long goodbye to the owner and I followed her out of the store, bag of food on one shoulder and bag of cans hanging from my other hand. When I was about to ask her to hand me the leash, I noticed that Griffin was actually behaving so well that she walked past a tree without stopping. And when I realized that she hadn’t knocked over shelf after shelf of goods in the store with her baseball bat of a tail, I was even more surprised. The bitch was a traitor, obeying Brooke more than her own owner.

  I mean, if I thought about it, Griffin was actually making me look good. But why wasn’t she like this when I had control of the leash? I mumbled a swear word under my breath, because Griffin certainly was acting like she was a mother fucking show dog all of a sudden, making me sound like a liar.

  Back at Brooke’s house, she helped me figure out how much food to give Griffin and how much wet food to mix with it. “You seem like you know how to handle dogs,” I said, curiously.

  “I used to volunteer at a shelter. This was how we got the dogs introduced to our food, after not knowing the kind of food they were used to.” She put the dog bowl on the ground for Griffin and turned to me. “So, what’s next?”

  “I guess I need a job. And an apartment.” I had more confidence in the first prospect over the second. Unless a landlord would accept payment in paintings or self-defense lessons, I was about as poor as possible.

  “What kind of job?”

  I shrugged. “I’ll probably ask Jacob. He doesn’t spend his whole day at the Dry Run; he’s gotta have a place to go earn some cash for his terrible taste in oversized clothes.”

  She put her hands on her hips, looking very much the part of Mom. “I have an idea. I’m not sure if Marco will go for it, but it’s at least worth a shot.” She pursed her lips and looked me over, as if she was gauging what my answer would be already. “I’ve been trying to move out of the early morning shift so I can work the day, but Marco can’t find anyone that doesn’t cry or cower at his demands.” She shrugged. “I feel like you might be a good fit.”

  “Wait. Work at the bakery?”

  “Yep.” She slid into the seat her daughter had earlier occupied. “The morning shift. I could train you until you’re more comfortable. And then I wouldn’t have to have Marco’s wife watching Norah if this worked out.”

  “Well, I mean, I hate to break it to you but the only experience I’ve got with baking is what you showed me, so long ago.”

  “It’s following a recipe. The more elaborate stuff is for the bakers. You’d basically be an intern, which was how I started too. But it’d give you a job and—because you’d be doing me a favor—you could stay here until you land on your feet.”

  It was a regression, a role reversal from how we’d been before. Seven years earlier, I’d been the one sitting in the booth opposite Brooke, offering her a soft place to land. It’d been easier to offer it than to receive the same kind of help, I realized. Brooke had been vulnerable then; pregnant and alone, with no income to get by. I was no longer pregnant, but I was in the same income spot.

  “I mean, I can’t promise you the
job. But we could try it out, tomorrow morning. Introduce you to Marco, see if you can stand up to him being a dick sometimes. I get the feeling that people talking to you rudely doesn’t get under your skin like it gets under most people’s skin.”

  Only if he was someone I loved, I acknowledged silently. I weighed my options here. I could spend the next couple months, crashing on Brooke’s sofa with a job that would eventually allow me to move into my own place with Griffin.

  I looked around her living room. It was shabby, yes, but it was well taken care of. I could live here. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  But all of that was not addressing the potentially larger issue. Would Brooke be comfortable with my presence around her daughter.

  “I feel like I should tell you,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure it mattered. “I’m an addict.”

  “What, like heroin?”

  “That shit’s gross. No, I mean, pain killers. Cocaine. Alcohol.” I shrugged. “I don’t do any of that anymore. Used to smoke too, but that’s not as frowned upon as the illegal shit.”

  Her eyes narrowed as she searched my face. “You can’t do that in my house.”

  “Well, no shit.” I rubbed my lips together hard, regretting saying that. “That’s why,” I began, in a softer voice this time, “I said I don’t do it anymore.” The truth was that it would be so fucking easy to go back to those things, in an effort to forget Six and erase the memories of him. But it was always just temporary. And besides, I was really getting too old—at thirty-three—to be snorting shit up my nose.

  Of course, it was easy to say that without temptation in front of me. But I consoled myself with the realization that the moment Six had left the hospital room, I hadn’t wished for a drink or anything else to numb me. It had been the first time in my life that I’d allowed grief to settle in without the need to drown it out.