Other People's Children

by R. J. Hoffmann

  “Jon’s doing well at work, right?”

  Gail had been expecting this conversation, or some version of it anyway. The week before, when she told her dad that she was taking four months, he didn’t really reply. He looked like he wanted to argue, but he held his tongue. She had considered taking more time, maybe going part-time. But, although her dad ran the shop tight, he had no clue how to sell—Gail’s grandfather had always handled the selling. When he died, Gail was still a junior in college, and she had no idea how much her father struggled to fill the gap, how much the business suffered. It wasn’t until graduation approached that her dad told how deep the hole had become. She’d never forget those first three years that she’d spent scrambling to dig them out of it.

  “That’s beside the point.”

  “Martin and Stephanie are both doing well.”

  Easy for him to say. All he saw were the new accounts they brought in. Gail had hired Martin three years ago, Stephanie just last year. Both were still learning the business. “They do well when I stay on top of them,” she said.

  Gail’s dad glanced at the wall, at the black-and-white photo of Gail’s grandfather standing next to his own father. “You saved the company when he died,” he said. “There’s no denying that.” He shifted in his seat, and she could see him choose his words carefully. “I want you to come back after four months. That’s what I want. I love working with you, but I love you more. I want you to decide what’s best for you and your family.”

  Decide what’s best. Gail fell still, and her lack of a ready answer caught her off guard. Decide. She didn’t really decide to work at the shop after college. As much as she enjoyed those summers grinding knives, she had dreamed of a job at a marketing agency or a tech start-up. But back then she wasn’t given a choice. The shop chose her. Could it really do without her now? And was that even what she wanted? She didn’t expect to love selling so much, and she never expected to become so good at it. And wouldn’t she go crazy as a stay-at-home mom? But then she thought of that lime squirming inside of Carli, and she wondered if she could really come back after four months. Could she drop her baby off at day care every morning, leave that baby for eight or nine hours at a stretch? If she stayed at home with the baby, she would miss that shot of adrenaline when she closed a deal, and she would miss the scrape and clatter of the shop, but what if she missed her baby’s first steps or first words? She looked at the picture of the two dead men, stiff in their poorly fitted suits, staring at the camera expressionless. It was easier to have no choice.

  “Let’s just see how it goes,” Gail finally said.

  Then she stood, carefully avoided her father’s gaze, and walked through the door, back into that delicious noise.

  Carli

  Carli was late for class, but she walked slowly. Waddled really. Past the commons. Past the two students sitting at a card table, registering people to vote. She had slept poorly—contractions every few hours, like something was twisting her intestines. She should have stayed home, but she missed class last Wednesday because her car wouldn’t start, and she might miss more after the baby. She was barely hanging on to a B, and the class cost her almost four hundred dollars. Besides, the doctor told her to ignore the contractions until they were ten minutes apart—or until her water broke.

  Everybody stared when she entered the classroom. Partly because she barged in late, partly because she was so fat that she could no longer zip her jacket, but mostly because they were already bored to tears by whatever Professor Aronson was going on about. This was Carli’s first class at Waubonsee Community College, and she had met nobody. Nothing like a twenty-pound bubble of fat and fetus to get between you and your new friends. Aronson had given up trying to coax class participation after the first few weeks—now he just droned on and on. She shuffled to the closest open seat and wedged herself in. Professor Aronson never stopped talking.

  Carli took out her notebook and squinted at the whiteboard: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. She hadn’t done all the reading—she’d had four shifts behind the cash register at Giamonti’s that week—but she had scanned the chapter on Maslow. She worked to remember it her own way while Professor Aronson babbled.

  The first three levels were easy. (1) Physiological needs. Carli was always hungry. She ate a whole pizza at work the night before during her break. Food came first. (2) Safety needs. In the beginning, when Andy started delivering pizza at Giamonti’s, she had felt safe with him. The first time they hooked up, she didn’t yet know about his addiction. He made her laugh, and the way he smiled revealed a kindness that she wasn’t used to. When he was tweaking crank, though, he became unpredictable and manic, and some of his friends really scared the crap out of her. When Carli finally broke it off with Andy, the night after he punched her, and just a couple of weeks before she realized she was pregnant, her (3) love and belonging needs took a hit. Not that he ever really loved her, but when he wasn’t high, the gentle way he treated her made her feel warm and alive. Her friends drifted off about the time her baby bump arrived. Her mom hated her, and her sister didn’t seem to care one way or the other. Love and belonging were going to need some work. (4) Esteem needs. Probably why she wanted to become a nurse, why she sat in this classroom for three hours every week, listening to Aronson talk about all this crap that she’d never need to know. She had read the paragraph about (5) Self-actualization four times, but still had no idea what to make of that tiny triangle at the top.

  It was probably more guilt than her esteem needs that kept her coming back to class. She promised herself that she’d get her life together. She promised the baby. Once she decided to give up her baby, she couldn’t just go stock shelves at Walmart or pack boxes at the warehouse or find another meth-head like Andy to nuzzle. She’d be letting the baby down, but double. She wondered why Maslow didn’t devote a slice of his pyramid to guilt.

  Halfway through class, Carli felt another contraction building, and the pain raced right past anything that she’d felt the night before. It started at her hips and moved inward as if it were hungry. Stupid to come to class. She bit her lip hard and leaned over the desk, pretending to take notes, but then it really hit, and she let out a little yelp. Even with her eyes closed, she knew everyone in the classroom was looking at her.

  “Carli?” Aronson said. “You OK?”

  Carli couldn’t answer, so she kept her head down on her desk, her hands clutching her stomach. And then the water flooded her pants.

  When the contraction finally, begrudgingly eased its grip, Carli tried to figure out what to do next. She considered waiting until the end of class so that she could let everyone leave before her. But then she heard water drip from the seat of her chair and splatter on the floor, and she felt the nearest students stir. She grabbed her backpack, stood, and plodded toward the door, trying to ignore the wet. Professor Aronson stopped talking.

  “Jesus Christ,” the kid behind her said with disgust. Carli didn’t look at anyone, didn’t even breathe, until she made it to the hallway.

  She found a bench near the commons and sat down, the water already going cold. She thought about driving herself to the hospital, but if another contraction like that hit her on the highway, she’d find the ditch. Her sister wouldn’t answer her phone. Her mom was an hour away. Then she remembered that the Durbins were paying. She pulled out her phone and dialed 911.

  Gail

  Gail walked past dumpsters of spoiled vegetables and goat meat. The alley, even with its trash and rats and stink, was familiar, comfortable. Gail had first come to Greektown with her grandfather when she was just a child. He’d taught her the names of the men in the offices above the restaurants, and he’d taught her that although she could use the front door of a restaurant in the suburbs, in Greektown, professionals came in from the alley, through the kitchen. To do otherwise would show incompetence, weakness.

  Chicago’s Greektown was just a handful of restaurants clustered around the corner of Halsted and Adams. But the me
n who owned them—and they were all men—owned hundreds of other restaurants throughout the city. Thai and Italian and Indian and Mexican—all owned by the Greeks. When Gail’s grandfather decided to go after restaurants in a big way, he went to night school to learn to speak Greek. He called himself Georgios when he came to Greektown. He told those men that his mother was Greek—said her family hailed from Naxos—even though she was really Sicilian. Scores of Greeks showed up at his funeral. They all winked at Gail’s father in the receiving line. We knew he wasn’t one of us, they said. But he tried so hard that we had to give him the knives.

  Gail pushed through the screen door into the kitchen of Hera’s Greek Restaurant. It was almost three—that magic hour of prep between a late lunch and an early dinner. The only patrons in the restaurant would be a small group of old Greek men sipping ouzo at the bar and repeating stories they had worn out long ago. There was no shouting in the kitchen, like during a lunch or dinner rush. But everyone was moving, and the knives spoke. A half-dozen men, dressed in white shirts and checkered pants, stood at cutting boards throughout the kitchen, chopping, slicing, mincing. The muted clatter of a well-run kitchen in the afternoon, the tap, tap, tap of six different knives, was one of Gail’s favorite sounds, second only to steel on stone.

  The man nearest to her turned, although his knife kept chopping carrots. His hooded eyes peered from either side of a beak-like nose. Costas didn’t call himself a chef, but he ran this kitchen. “Gail,” he said in greeting. When he wasn’t yelling at people during the rush, he was stingy with words.

  “Costas,” Gail said. “How are my knives?”

  He shrugged. “They go dull.”

  “Good. I’m counting on it,” Gail said. She started walking toward the stairs. “I’m here to see Stavros.” Her grandfather taught her to never ask to see the owner or the chef. That would earn her a spot at a table or at the bar, waiting until someone came to tell her that the boss just can’t make the time today.

  Best to just walk in as if the boss had demanded your presence, he always said.

  She threaded her way through the kitchen, saying hello to each man by name. She kept a notebook in her glovebox devoted to lists of the staff in the kitchens she visited most often. The narrow stairs creaked as she climbed them. When she reached the top, she knocked on the first door to the right and heard something like a grunt. She pushed the door open and found Stavros bent over his big oak desk.

  The mounds of paper stacked across its surface made him look smaller than he really was. The crown of his head gleamed bald, but the gray tufts of hair everywhere else—his eyebrows, his forearms, his knuckles—made up the difference. Just like every other time she had visited Stavros, his fingers clattered the keys of the adding machine. His eyes scanned an invoice. His lips moved as his finger traced the column of numbers. Gail sat in the only chair and waited. Stavros looked old that first time that Gail visited with her grandfather, but he hadn’t seemed to age in the years since. The walls were lined with waist-high shelves, every shelf stacked with invoices. Stavros now owned seventeen restaurants across Chicago, but two decades later, his filing system hadn’t changed a bit.

  He finally reached the bottom of the invoice and looked up. His eyebrows twitched, but the rest of his face registered nothing. “Ms. Tomassi,” he growled.

  Long ago, Gail had stopped reminding him that her name was no longer Tomassi, because to Stavros, she would always be a Tomassi.

  “You come here to raise my prices again?”

  “Not this time, Stavros,” Gail said. “My grandfather told me to stick it to you at Christmas. Those were his dying words, in fact. He said you’re a soft touch around the holidays.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “How’s your father?”

  “Stubborn,” Gail said. “Just like all you old men. He’ll be calling you over the next few months, by the way. To check in. That’s why I stopped by. To tell you that.”

  “What? I get the ugly Tomassi?”

  “You won’t have to look at him. He’ll just call.”

  Stavros nodded. “I see. You got better things to do than visit an old Greek?”

  “Actually, I do,” Gail said, and she couldn’t help but smile just a little. “I’m becoming a mother.”

  Stavros’s eyes darted to her stomach and then back up to her face. Gail let him squirm with confusion and discomfort for a moment before putting him out of his misery.

  “We’re adopting,” she finally said. “The birth mother is due any day now.”

  Stavros’s face settled back to its familiar mask. “This baby. It’s Italian?”

  Gail felt a flash of heat and wanted to say something sharp about the fact that ethnicity didn’t matter, that they would forge a family from the baby they were given, that they would remain ever grateful for that gift. But Stavros was old, so she said it in a way that he might understand. “It will be,” she said. “Just like my grandfather was Greek.”

  This finally pried a smile from Stavros. “I’m happy for you,” he said. “I was beginning to worry.”

  Gail’s phone vibrated in her pocket, but she let it roll to voice mail. She knew that checking her phone would send Stavros back to his invoices and Gail back into the alley. Before that happened, she wanted to know what he knew. “How are your cousins?” she asked.

  By this she meant the tight-knit community of Greeks who owned so many of Chicago’s restaurants. Some of them were cousins, most of them weren’t, but Stavros knew what she meant. He shrugged. “Some are good. Some, not so much. Diakos is buying those burrito places from his brother-in-law.” Diakos was Gail’s customer. His brother-in-law was not. Gail made a mental note to add Diakos to her call list. “And I hear that Karras has some new Italian friends.” Which meant that Karras was talking to another knife-grinding company for his two dozen restaurants. Another item for her list.

  Gail’s pocket vibrated again, and all at once she realized who it might be. She yanked the phone from her pocket. Sure enough. Paige. Her hand shook as she answered. “This is Gail,” she managed.

  “Carli’s going into labor.”

  Gail squeezed the phone and peered over the old man’s shoulder at the sun filtering through the blinds. It was happening. After everything they had been through, it was finally happening. She felt weightless yet unable to move. Warmth flooded her stomach, and she couldn’t speak.

  “Gail? You there?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I’m here. Mercy?”

  “Yep. Go through the doors on the north side of the building. Maternity is right past orthopedics. I’ll see you there soon.”

  Gail hung up the phone and stared at it. When Stavros spoke, he startled her.

  “Was that what I think it was?”

  Gail looked up at the old man, and his face had creased into the first full-on smile that she had ever seen from him. She stood and tried to steady herself. “It was,” she said, her voice crackling with everything. “Seems the bambino is coming today.”

  Jon

  Jon hunched over the long granite table in the main conference room, perched fifty-three stories above the Loop. The room could accommodate almost twenty, but today they were just three—Jon, the client, and Adam, the account manager. Jon wore his headphones and locked his eyes on the screen. His fingers danced across the keyboard of his laptop. The other two were arguing about some changes to the project, about expectations. He was just there in case they had detailed questions, and in the meantime, he would make the changes that they were arguing about.

  He was listening to Hendrix. When he was reworking existing code, adding new features, he listened to Jimi or Page or Knopfler sometimes. Rock respected structure, but the best guitarists used it as a starting point and then added what was needed with an unusual bridge or variations on the theme or a solo when all else failed. When he was working with data, he usually played classic twelve-bar by Stevie Ray or B. B. King, because data was all about the structure. When he was designing something, he favor
ed Reinhardt or Montgomery, because jazz kept him loose, open to any possibility. When he was coding a new system, he drifted toward Earl Scruggs or Ralph Stanley because in those bluegrass bands, the banjo players seemed to do all the work, laying down the beat and the rhythm and the melody all at once.

  Today was mainly just typing. He had built the shape of the interface in his mind the night before while riffing on a Béla Fleck solo. Listening to music helped him to focus, but playing music helped him to imagine. Whenever he got stuck on a particularly tricky design problem, he made time at night to play. Sometimes it took an hour, sometimes just ten minutes, but something about the feel of the strings under his fingers, the way the notes shaped themselves into coherent music, helped his mind drift toward the contours of a solution. And once he could see the shape of it, the rest was just typing.

  Jon’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He let it go to voice mail. He was working the hard part and tried to wall off the distraction. It stopped and then started again—his fingers froze. He fumbled the phone out of his pocket. Gail.

  He tugged off his headphones. “Hey,” he said.

  Adam glanced Jon’s way but continued talking to the client, pressing his point.

  “It’s happening,” Gail said.

  “What? Carli?”

  The client looked at Jon now, too.

  Gail laughed in a breathless, joyful way that Jon hadn’t heard in a very long time. “Yes. Of course, Carli. She went into labor an hour ago. It’s finally happening.”

  “OK,” Jon managed. He closed his laptop and crammed it into his backpack. It was happening. “Wow.” It was happening today. “I’m leaving. I’m coming.”

  “She’s at Mercy.”

  Jon stood. He felt Adam and the client staring at him. He couldn’t feel his hands or his feet, and the air filled with static. “I’ll—I’ll meet you there.”