Mom was thirty-seven tonight. For the first time, I thought about how she was closer to Jenny’s age than my own. I tried picturing the two of them standing next to each other. Their differences went beyond the obvious—height and weight, hair and eye color, the way their faces changed and the lines that deepened when they smiled—Jenny was more of a person to me than Mom had ever been.
I thought about how Mom’s first name was Choon-Hee, although, the minute she stepped off that plane and her feet first touched American soil, she told everyone to call her Kayla. I knew that those were still her names, but I’d never thought of her as anyone other than Mom. I couldn’t imagine her talking the way Jenny did. To me, her vocabulary was limited to a small selection of words and phrases—Hi, Good morning, How was your day, Are you hungry, I can make you something, Your dad always loved, Good night, Sleep well, How is the baby—I couldn’t imagine her with her hair long, tied back into a ponytail, creating shitty paintings, lying all day on a couch dipping Hot Cheetos into a tub of cream cheese. It must be true that, like Jenny, she had so much life ahead of her, so many things she could do. But I could only picture her going gray in that Kmart uniform. It made me ache to think of Billy and me moving out of the house one day; I couldn’t imagine her bringing another man into her bed, a man who would only know her as Kayla, who’d whisper that name as he closed his eyes and pressed his lips against hers. I’d never seen her kiss Dad on any place other than the cheek and forehead when he’d passed out drunk on the couch.
Mom peeled open the wrapping paper of my gift. Underneath, there was a framed photo of her, Dad, and me, when I was just a baby. They looked young and beautiful and their smiles were wide and open-mouthed. They held me between them like I was the answer to all their problems. Mom stared at the photo and began tearing up, held the picture to her chest. “This is lovely. Where did you find this?”
Billy saved me. “She’s been looking at a lot of your old photo albums. That’s her favorite photo.”
Mom cried quietly for a few more minutes, until her birthday apple pie was brought out by a waitress. Mom hated cake—frosting made her teeth hurt. As she blew out her candles, I made eye contact with Billy and mouthed, “Thank you.” He nodded back, and his eyes were also soft and warm, and I couldn’t stare back for more than a few seconds. I was too full to eat any pie.
* * *
—
ONCE A MONTH, we stayed late at Eddie’s and held a competition for who could fold a hundred pizza boxes the fastest. The winner didn’t actually win anything. Folding pizza boxes was part of our job, we just wanted to make it fun.
“Sixty-two,” Darryl said. “Where are you at?”
“Fifty-five,” I said.
“I’m at seventy-six,” Willie shouted.
Darryl gave me a look and turned his shoulder an inch away from Willie. “So—Carl and I are really done this time.”
It was my turn to give Darryl a look. “No, no,” he said, “I really mean it. I just can’t take it anymore.”
“What can’t you take anymore?”
“Loving someone more than they love me.”
We stopped talking and focused on the folding. I wasn’t very good at folding quickly, but I secretly didn’t mind this part of the job. “Oh,” Darryl said, “did you hear about what happened with that couple you like?”
An image quickly popped into my head—Rita and Louie Booker standing in their doorway, barely clothed bodies, arms never not around each other. “The Bookers,” I said. “What’s up?”
“So my buddy Marv lives in the apartment next to them and apparently the husband—”
“Louie.”
“He was beating the shit out of his wife.”
“Rita.”
“I guess he had a thing for punching her in the stomach, so that no one could see the bruises. Last night, the cops were called. The EMT said he was beating on her so hard that she started vomiting blood.”
I was having trouble folding the box in front of me. My hands were too shaky. “That can’t be true,” I said.
“Afraid so. Marv looked out of his apartment and saw the wife being loaded into an ambulance, the husband being shoved into a police car.” Darryl sighed, shook his head. “I really did like them. They were always polite over the phone.”
“I liked them too.”
I played back every time I had ever delivered to them in my head. I pushed my mind to re-create every last detail: What was the color of Rita’s shirt, why did Louie scratch his nose like that, what did Rita mean when she opened the door, smiled, and asked me, “Hey, girl, how’s it going?” Was she trying to send me a message, trying secretly to say, “Hey, girl, how’s it going? Help me, I’m scared and I don’t know what to do, I’m dying here, every day I’m dying, and I don’t know what to do or who will save me, can you save me?” I remembered this one time delivering to them, about a month ago, and she complained of a sore back. The last time I saw her, there had been a cast on her left arm.
I stopped folding boxes and braced my hands on the table. I saw them kissing and laughing and loving each other in my head, and then I remembered that the beer in Dad’s shed was nearly gone, five cans left.
“Hey, Willie,” I said, “can you go up front and get me a big cup of Diet Coke? I’d go myself, but I’m really behind you guys on my boxes.”
He frowned. “But if I leave I’ll lose the contest.”
“Willie, the contest isn’t actually a real contest,” Darryl snapped. “Like, we don’t get anything if we win.”
Willie walked out of the kitchen, head bowed.
“After work, I need you to come with me to a liquor store and buy me a couple cases of beer.”
Darryl stopped folding too and stared at me. “I can’t do that for you.”
“Oh, okay.”
Willie ran back in and practically threw a full cup of Diet Coke at me. A little sloshed out and spilled onto my shoes. We didn’t say anything to each other for the rest of the competition. It was silent until Willie yelled, “One hundred! Done!” and Darryl yelled back, “Shut the fuck up, Willie! No one cares!”
* * *
—
WILLIE’S CAR wouldn’t start. Darryl and I played Rock, Paper, Scissors to decide who would stay and help him jump-start it.
Best two of three, he beat my paper with scissors, I rocked his scissors, but on the third round we kept picking the same thing—paper-paper, scissors-scissors, rock-rock, scissors-scissors. Willie stood in front of us, doing his best not to look completely pissed. After we tied for the fifth time, we sighed, shrugged, and both went to help Willie hook his Malibu up to my Festiva.
We got Willie’s car to start and waved until his taillights turned the corner. We burst out laughing.
“He’s right to hate us.”
Darryl abruptly stopped laughing and put his hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” I shrugged a little, hoping he’d take the hint and move his hand away. It stayed. “Why are you asking me that?”
I expected an immediate answer—Darryl was so smooth, always had words on his tongue that he was ready to spit out, no matter what situation—but he just stood there, hand on my shoulder, opening his mouth and closing it. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I’m just worried about you.”
“You don’t have to worry about me. That beer thing—I was just kidding.”
“No. You weren’t.” Darryl moved his hand from my shoulder, shoved it into his pants pocket. “And it’s not only the beer thing. You just seem like you haven’t really been here lately.”
“I’m here all the time. I’ve never missed a shift.”
“I’m not talking about attendance. I’m just saying that even when you’re here, even when you’re doing something or talking, I feel like you’re somewhere else. I can always he
ar you thinking. Not like your actual thoughts, but I can hear the strain of it. I don’t even know what you do when you’re not here. Like you didn’t even tell me when you were pregnant, you just came back from lunch one day with an armful of pregnancy tests, and then, another day, you’re asking me to cover your shift so you can go to the doctor. I guess I figure you must be lonely, and all I’m trying to say is, if you need someone to talk to, you can talk to me.”
Darryl was staring down at the asphalt and leaning his weight from foot to foot, both his hands in his pants pockets. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him so uncomfortable, and as I watched him rocking back and forth on his feet, sweating in his ugly Eddie’s polo, I felt strongly that he was a good person. I knew so many good people. “Darryl,” I said, “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me, worry about you. Carl’s going to call you again and you’re going to answer, so you better prepare for that. Find a real friend to talk to about it, not just some girl you work with.”
He tried not to look hurt, but I saw it, even if it was only for a second. I tried to communicate to him silently that it was better this way, he didn’t want to sit across from me and hear everything that was swirling around in my head—even if he could hear the strain of me thinking, it didn’t compare to the sound of my actual thoughts spoken, hanging in the air.
“Okay,” Darryl said. “I’ll see you whenever our next shift is.”
I got into my car and he got into his. I waved as he pulled out. He didn’t see.
* * *
—
RITA AND LOUIE BOOKER’S place was empty. I knocked on the door until my fist started to hurt and a guy in a pink robe poked his head out of the apartment next door and asked me to please fucking stop.
“Marv?”
“Dale. Now please go away.”
I got back into my car and was headed home when I remembered it was Thursday. It was weird to go to Jenny’s house. It wasn’t weird to go to an open-to-the-public Current and Expecting Mothers meeting held at the local church.
She wasn’t at the meeting. I tried to walk back up the basement stairs when I scanned all the heads and didn’t see her ponytail among them. A very pregnant woman in a cutoff T-shirt that ended just above the swell of her belly smiled at me, her teeth yellow and crooked, the front one cracked; she put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Stay.”
“Each chicken nugget has about fifty-nine calories in it. Seventy-two calories per mozzarella stick. A whole PB and J has approximately three hundred and eight-five calories in it. I haven’t done the math to see what a single bite is. I have to stop eating what my kids are eating.”
“I’m having sex dreams about everyone, and I mean everyone. The other night I woke up sweaty and throbbing after dreaming the bagger at the grocery store had his head between my legs. I gotta tell my husband, right?”
“There’s this bird that sits outside my window every morning and it won’t stop chirping. I’m slowly going insane.”
“Maybe you could put one of those bird feeders outside your window,” I said.
Every head in the room swiveled to me. The woman who’d been talking was frowning, her nose wrinkled. “What?”
“Maybe the bird is chirping so much because it’s hungry. I just thought maybe if you got a feeder it might help the noise.”
The woman gave me a tight-lipped smile, then quickly turned away from me. “So this goddamn bird is waking me up at four a.m. every goddamn day. My shift at the diner ends at two a.m., it takes me twenty minutes to get home, then I have to slip my mom a twenty and some home fries for watching the kids, I have to brush my teeth and put lotion all over my body—trying not to look like a leather handbag one day—and my mattress is hard as a rock, it takes me at least another twenty to get to sleep. You all do the math—how much sleep am I getting each night?”
I didn’t speak again for the rest of the meeting. Outside the church, the night actually felt cool for once. No dark heat, a breeze too. A hand gripped my arm and I turned to see a young pregnant girl, the one I was almost 80 percent certain I’d gone to high school with.
“Hey,” she said, “I have one of those bird feeders in my backyard. The birds really do like it. I saw a blue jay the other day.”
She looked so young. She smiled and I noticed she had braces and I wondered what I looked like to her.
“Do you want to go grab a coffee? There’s a diner not too far from here.”
The rubber bands of her braces were a bright neon-green. I thought I remembered her from ceramics class, sitting in the back, chewing the ends of her hair when she thought no one was looking.
“I can’t,” I said. “I have to go home. Maybe next time.”
10
ON FRIDAY, Jenny finally called.
I was sitting at an empty table making a giraffe out of straws with my iPod on, the volume a little higher than I was used to. When I got home the night before, Mom had been sitting at the kitchen table, all the lights off. I wouldn’t have even known she was there if I hadn’t gone to the kitchen and opened the fridge to take a chug of orange juice. The carton had barely touched my lips when I heard a voice behind me. “Hi.”
I spilled orange juice down my polo. “Jesus, Mom. Why are you sitting in the dark? Did we run out of lightbulbs again?”
“Do you hate me?” she asked.
“Why would you think that?”
“It’s hard not to think it with the way you’ve been acting. Please look me in the eye.”
“I don’t hate you.”
“Then why are you always trying to leave?”
I turned on the lights and settled into the chair across from her. I tried to think of something to say, but failed. Mom got up after a while, I don’t know how long. She just patted me on the back and told me to sleep well. I went to the shed and finished three of my last five beers.
Now Darryl had to pull my headphones off and yell into my ear to get me to hear him. “That woman wants her pizza.”
I put together Jenny’s pizza with joy. I found a rhythm as I cut the pickles, the perfect even sprinkling of them; when it came out of the oven I wanted to cry and have a slice for myself. The cooks gave me a big cup of water with ice.
The song on the drive over was one I would’ve normally skipped over. Slow, syrupy lyrics that coated your tongue, got stuck on your gums. I didn’t mind it then, added lyrics of my own.
I walked up to her door, an extra bounce in my step. I felt like my life would’ve been different if I’d had this bounce all the time. I would’ve gone out for the school basketball team, straight A’s wouldn’t have been a problem, friends either, I would’ve been the loud one in the cafeteria. Before Billy and Becky Rivas, I’d had this intense kind of crush on this girl in my English class who never spoke unless called on, spent the whole time writing in her notebook, her long green hair protective curtains on both sides. Mr. Keener wasn’t that interesting, his tests were the same multiple-choice ones he’d been using since the 1980s, answer keys up for sale—she couldn’t have possibly been taking notes the whole time. I would’ve had no problem going up to her after class, putting my hand on her shoulder, asking to read her notebook, please. I always had to beg Mom and Dad for rides or promise near sainthood in order to borrow one of their cars—none of that, I would’ve happily walked everywhere, no matter how many miles away.
I heard the lock on her door click open. I ran a hand through my hair and gave the gum in my mouth one last strong chew, spit it onto the lawn. Jenny answered the door and I thought I might throw up.
Her ponytail was gone. If she’d tried to gather her remaining hair and tie it up, it would’ve formed a small, sad palm tree. Her new cut stopped a couple inches above her shoulders—not a mom bob, but also not her. I blinked a few times and wondered if she had looked into the mirror after the hairdresser was done, and been as devastated as I was now,
her hands moving to the ends of her hair and mourning what she had lost. I tried to find positives—lightweight, quick drying after a shower, it could be fun to bang your head to loud music, watch the strands spring back and forth. But I could only see what had been, the long, flowing freedom that fell softly down her back, tied up by a yellow elastic hair-tie.
She stood there in front of me, smiling like nothing was wrong. “Your hair.” I couldn’t make any other words come out of my mouth.
“Do you like it?” She twirled like she was a doll or the young heroine in a movie, a quirky girl you just had to root for.
“Why did you do it?”
Her smile fell. “I don’t know, I just wanted to. Why do I need a ‘why’?”
“You don’t, but there usually is one.”
We stood there, so much space between us. This wasn’t how I thought it would go. The door was supposed to open and she was going to look at me and I was going to look at her and we’d just look at each other and know it was all going to be okay. I didn’t know that now. It wasn’t just the haircut, as unsettling as it was to see her looking like someone she wasn’t—there was more. The space between us felt deliberate, her eyes were flicking from my face to beyond me. I almost turned around to see what she could possibly be looking at. But I kept my eyes on her, wanted to reach and close the gap between us. I knew I would be okay if I could touch at least a part of her.
“I just wanted a change, is all,” Jenny said. “And I figured, where we’re moving, short hair might come in handy.”
My palms itched, but I refused to scratch them. “Moving? What do you mean?”
“Oh, well, Jim is getting transferred to the company headquarters in Bakersfield. We’re leaving early tomorrow.”
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