by Naomi West
“Poor baby,” I whisper, stroking his head. “Poor sweet baby.”
The apartment is a mess, a field of life-detritus: clothes and books and toys and all the rest of it. Between working at the café and taking care of Cormac and trying to find time to wash and sleep, life is running away from me. It’s like I’m walking a dog which is far too strong for me and the dog has scented something across the road. No matter how hard I pull, the dog pulls harder, wrenching me toward traffic. I’m going to have to call in sick for work. There’s no way I can take Cormac to daycare like this. But I need the money, badly. Cormac lets out another heart-shattering scream. The money problem will have to take care of itself.
“Just wait here, little man.” I put him down in the crib. I try to give him his pacifier but he’s not in the mood to be pacified. He bats it away.
I go into the bedroom and shut the door until it’s almost closed, leaving it open enough so that I can hear any changes in Cormac’s cries. Then I dial my boss.
He must be waiting for the call. The phone hardly rings before he picks up. “I love summer,” he says. “The place is really busy today, Kayla.” He pauses theatrically. Mr. Brown loves melodrama. “Are you on your way? Your shift starts in half an hour.”
“Mr. Brown, I’m really sorry but …”
“Sorry about what?” he barks. “It’s a lovely day, the sun is shining. I think we’re going to do some good business today. The best café in Colorado. That’s what people will say.”
“I’m not going to be able to come in today, Mr. Brown—”
“What?” he snaps, his voice going from musing to razor-sharp in one syllable. “It’s busy and it’s getting busier, Kayla. We need you here.”
“I’m very sick, Mr. Brown.” I hate lying, but Mr. Brown has shown zero understanding about Cormac. I think he sees me as something dirty for not being married and discussing Arsen’s death with him seems perverse. “I’m going to have to miss today.” My voice is trembling. I hate that. Once upon a time there was a girl in high school who spent her time reading Hemingway and Brontë and Woolf and would always have a witty retort to whatever the bullies said. Her voice never trembled. But that was another lifetime, when responsibility was just a boring-sounding word. “I’m very sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” he says. “Just be here. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to pretend that this call never happened and you’re going to get here before the situation becomes untenable. Untenable.” He seems proud of his choice of words. “I’ll even give you an extra half an hour to get here. You can make it up at the end of the day. Okay? See you soon! Oh, and Kayla, I can’t put up with this much longer. Consider today your last chance.”
He hangs up before I can say anything. I place the phone on the bed and then pick up my pillow from the floor and scream into it, scream into it so loudly that if I were to move the pillow my voice would overpower Cormac’s. I scream and scream until it feels like my vocal muscles are going to tear. Then, slowly, I remove the pillow and return to the living room, looking down at Cormac to remind myself that there must be some good in the world; just look at him. It’s not his fault.
But I really do need the money, badly. I’m flirting with eviction as it is, I don’t have any family I can turn to for help, and my savings are nonexistent. I don’t want to be a homeless mother. They’ll take him away from me. It’s a disaster. I don’t want to call Connor, my ex-boyfriend, but I act before I can properly think it through. Before I know it his voice is in my ear.
“Isn’t this a surprise,” he says.
“I need your help,” I tell him. “I need you to not be a jerk.”
“Wow.” His laugh sounds like a snake flickering its tongue. “Do you really think that’s the way to get me to do what you want?”
“Okay.” I take a deep breath. “Just listen to me, okay? Cormac is sick. It’s nothing serious. But I don’t want to take him to daycare in case he makes the other kids sick. So I’m asking you to—” It’s like I hear what I’m saying, like I stop being the one talking and become the listener. What is that madwoman asking, I wonder? Is she really asking Connor, her ex-boyfriend, to take care of her child?
“I’ll do whatever I can to help,” he says, his voice taking on a caring tone, or at least the closest he can get to a caring tone. “I’ll be right over. And Kayla, I don’t want to sound rude or anything but you know your life would be easier with your grandmother’s inheritance, right? Why don’t we just tie the knot so you can get at the pot, eh?”
I laugh, and then the laugh turns manic, a peal which fills the room. “No,” I say. “That won’t be—No, oh God, no.”
I hang up the phone and return to the living room, looking down at Cormac. He stops crying for a moment and smiles up at me almost nervously. I lean down and kiss him on the nose. “That’s right,” I whisper. “That’s a good boy. You’re my little prince. You’re my little hero. You’re Mommy’s best friend.” I pick him up and get him ready for daycare. It’s a horrible choice to have to make: daycare or homelessness. So I’ll pick daycare. Maybe Dominique will understand. Maybe I can talk with her about it.
Cormac is quiet all the way down the stairs and across the road to the car. I get him in his seat, buckled up and safe, and then go around to the driver’s seat. The Rockies loom over me, watching me as though judgmental. They make me feel small and insignificant as I pull out from the street and drive through the city, but soon I forget the Rockies. Cormac makes a few cooing noises, noises which threaten tears. They turn throaty toward the end and his eyes go wide; any moment, he could cry.
But as I pull into the daycare parking lot he’s still quiet, pawing at his clothes, smiling at me sideways and making more cooing noises. He’s so adorable when he’s like this I wish I could just stay with him all day. I wish I could sit with him for hours and not have to worry about where our rent money is coming from, not have to worry about the crazy whirring of life. I carry him into daycare and go straight for Dominique’s office.
“Come in!” she calls.
Dominique is a tall black lady with braided hair. Sometimes she puts seashells in the braids because the kids love it so much. Today she has colorful beads. Her smile is wide and rarely leaves her face. “Kayla,” she says. That one word, the sympathy in it, is enough to soften me.
I drop into the chair and let out a long breath. She waits patiently, sitting in her pink chair, surrounded by amateur art courtesy of the daycare’s guests, handprints and footprints and sometimes nose-prints. “I need help,” I tell her. I explain about Cormac’s minor sickness and my boss’s threat.
Dominique listens, but her smile wavers a little. “You know we can’t take sick children,” she chides. “What happens if every child in this place gets ill? That’s a headache for me. Maybe more than a headache. What if one of these children has a weak immune system or something? Doll, you know the rules.”
“I know.” I don’t mean to cry. That high school girl wouldn’t cry, the one with the sharp wit and the sharper intellect. But right now I don’t feel like her; I barely feel like a person. I was wrong. I’m not walking a powerful dog. I’m walking five, and each of them is pulling me in a different direction. “I just … we’re going to get evicted and … it’s so hard and … I just want to make sure he has a home!”
Dominique comes around the desk and touches my face. “I’ll make an exception for today,” she says. “But we can’t make a habit out of this. You know me, Kayla. I love the little guy. But I am running a business here. I’ll have to keep him in here, which will mean taking one of my carers off the floor. So just this once, okay?”
“I know. I know. Thank you, Dominique. I really mean that. You’re the best.”
I kiss her on the cheek and hug her, say goodbye to Cormac, and then I run out to my car. I get to the café two minutes before firing time, throw on my apron, and then force my face into a bright welcoming expression.
“Hello, sir, what can I get fo
r you today? Can I interest you in one of our special blueberry muffins? They were baked this morning!”
Chapter Three
Xander
“He was never really in the club, was he?” I say. I know I’m talking too much, but the idea of sitting in a circle and self-pitying and woe-is-meing doesn’t appeal to me too much. Maybe it’s nerves, which is funny ’cause I never get nervous. The whisky from lunchtime is wearing off. My head feels like how the ground must feel during an earthquake, a crack right through the center of my skull. “Arsen did his job, carried packages, but he wasn’t a scumbag like me. He never killed a man. Hell, old man, I don’t even know what he did on his own time. He was private that way. We’d go riding, and sometimes we’d go hunting or fishing if we had a weekend, but mostly he was a private man. You know all of this.”
“I don’t mind hearing it,” Christopher says, glancing in the rear-view mirror.
I knead the dashboard with my knuckles. “I think he wanted to build a life outside the club. He would’ve been something else in a different life. Something clever. He was a smart kid. Our old man just never gave him the chance to use it.”
“I’m sure he could have done anything he wanted,” Christopher says.
It’s like time bends. One second we’re cruising along the road; the next we’re pulling into the parking lot of a church. I haven’t been to church since I was ten years old and my old man decided that he didn’t like the effort being pious required anymore. I was glad, truth be told, when he told us we didn’t have to spend our Sunday morning at church anymore. It gave me more time to ride and fight, or meant that I could stay out later on Saturday nights.
I feel a real strong urge to run away as we walk toward the church entrance, with a nice-looking lady standing out front with pamphlets, smiling like a cult leader or something. The whole place seems shifty to me. These people are too welcoming. The way I look, tall and covered in tattoos, with a general air of violence—or so I’ve been told—people don’t usually smile at me like that. There’s normally a healthy level of fear there, but these ladies just smile and hand me a pamphlet that says “Alcoholics Anonymous” on it. I head straight for the coffee table, make myself a mug of black and neck it back so fast it scorches my throat. I need something to get me through this shit.
The metal-framed chairs are set out in a circle, the lights dim, moonlight slanting through the window. The folks here are more varied than I would’ve guessed: some lowlife-looking men and some drawn-out women, but also some men in suits and women in spring dresses. Then a big man in a cheap brown suit with a combover that isn’t fooling anyone claps his hands together. They make a squelching sound which reminds me of the sound my father’s hands would make when he shoveled peanuts into his mouth during the game.
“Hello, ladies and gentleman,” he says. “My name is Jeffrey and I’m an alcoholic.”
Everyone around me, including Christopher, sings back to him: “Hello, Jeffrey.”
It’s like being in kindergarten.
Jeffrey then talks a little about how he used to get so drunk he’d beat on his wife, but this was twenty-five years ago so he’s forgiven himself and blah-blah-blah. I don’t give a damn about what Jeffrey used to do, only I’d like to get his old lady down here and see if she loves him just as much as he’s come to love himself. Next a woman called Josephine stands up in a gray business suit and tells us how she has been clean now for one month. She works for a big accounting firm but used to get blasted on the weekends and throw herself at rough types, sometimes fucking three men in one night—or one car. I guess that’s pretty bad and it definitely ain’t a good idea, but again, I don’t see how it’s my problem. Everyone tells her that she is strong, that she’s a good person.
“I see a new face,” Jeffrey says. I want to headbutt that smile into a bloody frown. “Hello. Why don’t you stand up and tell everyone your name?”
“You’ve gotta stop talking to me like I’m five fucking years old, pal. Or this is gonna get ugly.”
“Xander!” Christopher snaps. “Don’t fuck around now, kid.”
“It’s okay,” Jeffrey says, holding his hands up. “Anger is a natural part of the healing process.”
I’m not about to stand up like this is some dog show, but at the same time I told Christopher I’d try and make this work, so I just sit there silently, not sure what to do.
“You don’t have to stand,” Jeffrey says, like he’s reading my mind. “Maybe we should just start with your name.”
“What sort of bullshit is this? The old man just said my name. It’s Xander.”
And then, predictably, I guess: “Hello, Xander.”
“And you, Xander, are you an alcoholic?” I don’t like the way he says it, like he’s getting something from me, like it gets him off to see stronger men made weak in front of him. He licks his lower lip. His eyes are wide, too eager. “Admitting that you have a problem is the first step to fixing it.”
Christopher stares at me, squinting, all wrinkles. Jeffrey stares at me, his scalp shining through the thin strands of his combover. The nice lady in the business suit who used to enjoy a weekly gangbang stares at me. All of them stare at me, waiting for me to become like them, to love myself. But the problem with loving yourself is that it’s a big fucking practical joke.
“I’m not an alcoholic,” I tell the bastard. “In the world I come from—hell, in the world I live in—I’m a light drinker. There are fellas at the club who drink a hell of a lot more’n me. The only reason the old man dragged me here is because I’m south of thirty, which apparently means that I’m a cause worth fighting for or some horseshit. My brother’s dead, folks, dead and burned so badly I ain’t never gonna see his smile again, and you want to me sit here and sing you a pretty song so that you can give me one of those fucking chips? No, not today. I’m not playing this game.”
I’m at the door when Christopher catches up with me, his mouth all twisted in anger. “Walk to the car with me,” he says, voice like bubbling lava, hot under the surface
“What the fuck was that?” he hisses. “Who the hell do you think you are? This is my meeting. I’ve been coming here for twenty-three years, and that’s how you talk to them? What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“I’ve got a headache, old man, and my body feels like it’s gonna jump out of my clothes. And that’s just for starters. I don’t wanna listen to a bunch of people patting themselves on the back. Who gives a shit?”
“I give a shit.” He grabs my jacket and brings his face to mine, angrier than I’ve ever seen him. “That’s who!”
“Old man,” I say, keeping my voice calm although if some other bastard grabbed me like this, it’d be game over, “I suggest that you take your hands off me right now. I didn’t know how angry you were about all this shit, all right? If I’d known maybe I would’ve been a little nicer about the whole thing, but you know I can’t let a man lay his hands on me like this. That isn’t how we live our lives.”
“No.” Christopher takes a step back. “You’re right. We fightin’, or you letting this slide?”
“I’ll let it slide, goddamn.” I pat him on the back. “I didn’t mean to insult you or nothing.”
He takes out a cigarette and lights it with his zippo. “I was an alcoholic once upon a time, lad. Real bad. Much worse’n you’re doing right now. I did some shit I’ve never mentioned to anyone at the club, made a real fool of myself. Don’t you get it?” He blows out so much smoke that his face is hidden for a moment. “I know the path you’re walking down because I’ve walked down it, and it ain’t good.” He reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out a pamphlet. “Just take this. Read it over. And think about coming back for a meeting. You’re my friend, Xander, but I reckon you’re more than that. We’re a club. We’re family. I can’t let you walk down this road without putting up a fight. I just can’t. I can’t let you throw your life away like this. It just ain’t right. Why’nt you find a girl or something?” he
asks, voice breaking. I didn’t know the old bastard cared about me so much. Or maybe I did but I just didn’t want to see it.
“A girl.” I shrug. “There ain’t no girls. Club girls, lose myself for a night, yeah, sure, and then what? Wake up feeling like shit when I hear her fuckin’ some other guy?”
“You care about that stuff?” He raises an eyebrow, stubbing his cigarette out at the same time.
“I never used to,” I say. “But ever since Arsen. A psychiatrist would have a goddamn field day with me. I don’t know what’s going on with me. All I know is that club girls don’t do shit for me no more.”
“Find another girl!” Christopher breaks out. “That’d help get your mind off this stuff.”
“Maybe, old man. Maybe.” I take the pamphlet. “I’ll look this over if that’ll stop you tearing up on me.”
He punches me in the arm. “I can still go some rounds, kid, be careful.”
“Yeah, yeah. Why’nt you drive me to my apartment?”
We’re silent for the car ride. I look out of the window and try to convince myself that I’m going to be better tonight, but when I get up to my apartment—Spartan and neat, a habit leftover from when my old man’d beat me silly for leaving shit lying around—I go straight to the whisky bottle on my bedside table. I take it to the couch and sit with the whisky bottle in one hand and the pamphlet in another. I sit in the dark, mostly, except for a shaft of moonlight and the standby light on the TV, a red-eyed cyclops watching me, waiting for me to stumble. And of course, I stumble, I can’t help but stumble; I open up that whisky bottle and take a small sip, just enough to stop my body from bailing on me.