by Naomi West
“I need a drink—”
“No.” Ranger darts his hand out, clamping it down on my shoulder. “You can’t just think about the bad shit. You’re going over and over all the times you did some mean shit to him, but you’re not thinking about the good times, or the times he did some mean shit to you. That’s what we do. We bust each other’s balls. Maybe sometimes we went too far, but whatever you did to him, he did the same. He loved you. You know that. How do you think he’d feel if he saw you now? What would he say to you? I know what he’d do. He’d walk in here with some leaflet about getting clean and he’d take away your bottle and just stare at you until you got the message, and then you’d stand up and hug him and that’d be that. Well, he’s gone. But we’re here, and we care about you, X. We don’t want you turning into just another drunk.”
Part of me wants to smash him across the face; another part wants to hug him; yet another part wants to leap over the table and get another bottle of whisky. But what he’s saying has some sense to it. That is what Arsen would do.
“I’ll cut the drinking,” I tell them. “All right? It’s not a big deal.”
“You have to come to a meeting with me,” Christopher says. “Tonight.”
“Goddamn …”
“X!” Ranger snaps. His eyes are watery. Is it the dust or is he getting weepy on me? I can’t tell. “Please.”
“All right.” I laugh it off, brushing his hand away. “We don’t have to get all emotional about it, goddamn. I’ll go to a meeting with the old man if that’ll get you all off my case.”
“I think this will increase your chances of becoming sober,” Maxwell says.
Ranger chuckles. “Why can’t you ever just talk, soldier? What’s with this debriefing shit?”
“What’d I say about calling me soldier?” Maxwell jumps at him, the two of them laughing as they wrestle with each other.
I join in with the laughter, although I can’t help but think the whole thing’d be funnier with a shot glass in my hand.
Chapter Two
Kayla
Cormac screams so loudly I think the apartment’s windows might shatter. I pick him up, carrying him around the living room, whispering in his ear that everything is okay. I kiss him on the cheek over and over, trying to transfer some of my love to him. I took him to the doctor yesterday and he said he was just a little under the weather, nothing to worry about. Just give him some of that special candy-smelling medicine every few hours and he’d be fine, but it’s still an awful sight to see. My little baby, his gummy mouth wrenched open in a warlike scream, who won’t settle down because his body is tormenting him.
I try to remember a time when I wasn’t stressed, when my head didn’t feel like it was constantly trapped in a vise that is getting tighter and tighter each second. I try to remember laughing with Arsen, or if we ever had any truly happy times. There were times, sure, but never anything that convinced either of us we were truly in love. But then I became pregnant and I was convinced that that was it. That would be our moment. Then he went and burned to death before ever knowing I held his child. Arson, the police said. The wicked irony wasn’t lost on me.
“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 for 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 fr
ont 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.”
