Stretch Marks

by Kimberly Stuart

  Mia smiled and said, “You’re too kind.”

  Mrs. H. tried another route. She turned to Frankie. “She was such a snazzy dresser in high school. Lovely pressed chinos, fitted knit tops that were still tasteful.” Her eyes returned to Mia, who was digging her toes into her free-trade leather sandals and wishing they were penny loafers to shut the woman up. She pulled her olive-green cotton sweater away from her middle and squirmed.

  Mrs. Hanworth cleared her throat. “But I suppose the styles have changed since then, haven’t they? Nothing wrong with being comfortable. Well,” she said, her voice lowered. “I’ll be sure to tell Babs I saw you. And you tell her,” she said, pointing a finger at Mia, “that she owes me a weekend in Vegas, girls only.” She pulled Mia into one more hug, twice as inappropriate for the closeness of it, and then bid her farewell.

  Mia sighed as she sat down. Her pasta was cold, but she continued at it with the same dedication as before.

  “She’s a character,” Frankie said. “Straight out of Mayberry, only in a coordinating nylon jumpsuit.”

  Mia snuck a glance over to the Hanworth table. All four were looking at her. She waved and then turned her chair slightly to move out of freak-show range. “That woman has had the same hair for all of my years on this earth and probably before.” She cut into another wedge of focaccia. “But she made a mean oatmeal chocolate-chip cookie.”

  Frankie snorted. “I’m going to have to adjust to this new Mia. The food-loving, broccoli-craving, carb-dwelling Mia.”

  Mia’s smile pinned back cheeks full of pasta. She pointed to Frankie’s plate. “Are you going to eat that?”

  In retrospect Mia could see she should have done more research before choosing a career. One important but neglected question would have been, “How does the average social worker fill the hours of her work day?” She’d made her selection of major during a particularly heady phase of her college experience. Big ideas tugged her from all sides: how to eradicate poverty, the flaws of twenty-first-century feminism, how the prison system failed to effectively rehabilitate. She needed to feel a part of the movement toward societal improvement. Even the words social work educed from her a feeling of well-being, a quick uptick of hopefulness that the handbasket containing her world wasn’t traveling downward at such high speeds. Mia had enough pragmatism in her to like the extra security offered by a degree that was hire-ready, something a philosophy or history major couldn’t provide. So, armed with an inspiring distaste for injustice and the chutzpah to take a whack at the roots of it, Mia found herself quickly and gainfully employed at Urban Hope, a nonprofit housing agency that happily accepted governmental funds as a part of its squeezed budget.

  Seven years into her work Mia had yet to meet a root of injustice, much less get the chance to take a whack at it. On days like the one following her lunch with Frankie, the sad majority of her office hours were consumed with paperwork, much of it redundant and all of it far removed from the real needs of the people she served.

  A young woman opened the front door, setting off an electronic chime that played the first bars of “Edelweiss” at a speedy electronic tempo. The girl scanned the long, narrow room. She looked to be around fifteen, though sincere effort had been made to increase that number. Her eyes were heavily lined and accompanied a face layered with makeup. She’d pulled her hair into a tight knot at the back of her head. Brush marks commemorated by generous hair gel showed a neat and sculpted road from the forehead back. A billowing navy blue parka swallowed her petite frame.

  Carl rose from his desk, which sat nearest the door. “May I help you, miss?” In an effort to appear casual and helpful, he leaned over his desk, propping himself up with one hand, fingers splayed on the desktop.

  “Um, maybe.” The girl’s eyes continued to sweep the room.

  Mia pushed back her chair and strode toward the front door. “Hello. I’m Mia. Would you like to come back to my office?” Mia tried to say the word without sneering, knowing Carl would not appreciate the dig on her Office Depot–purchased cubicle setup.

  The girl’s shoulders relaxed slightly. “All right.” She followed Mia to the small space near the back. Carl watched them go, hand still in the three-point stance, face deflated.

  Mia gestured to a chair. “I’m afraid we don’t have many actual doors around here. This is about as private as we can get. Can I take your coat?”

  The girl shook her head as she lowered herself to the chair. “I just have a couple questions.”

  Mia sat across the desk from the girl and inhaled the lingering scent of cigarette smoke mixed with cheap perfume. She gave silent thanks that smells no longer sent her running for the restroom. “Go ahead and ask anything you’d like. I’ll try to help, um, what did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t say. It’s Flor.” The girl spoke unapologetically. The only betrayal of her nerves was the feverish bouncing of her crossed leg.

  “Nice to meet you, Flor.” Mia smiled. “What questions do you have?” Before Mia had finished speaking, her desk phone rang. “I’m so sorry. Just one moment.”

  Flor nodded. Mia answered, “Mia Rathbun.”

  “Oh, my goodness. You sound so professional!” The inimitable chirp of her mother’s voice came to Mia from across the ocean.

  “Mother,” she said, her voice lowered. She turned away slightly from her desk. “Is this an emergency?”

  “Of course not, sweetheart. Do you think I would have taken a moment to chitchat before telling you about an emergency?”

  “I ask because we discussed how this number was only to be used in the case of an emergency.” Mia smiled quickly at Flor, who wasn’t watching Mia but was reading with solemn eyes a poem by Maya Angelou that Mia had tacked to her cubicle wall.

  “Well, if you’d answer your cell phone or return the messages I leave on your answering machine, I wouldn’t have to resort to using the emergency number, now would I?”

  “Mother, can I call you back? I’m working right now.” Mia did a quick mental checklist of any other, more obvious way she could communicate she did not want to be on the phone with the woman.

  “I hardly dare trust empty promises, dear, but I don’t see that I have much choice.” Mia heard the phone move away from Babs’s mouth as she said, “Thank you, Ricardo. I love the highlights. And tell Lena that facial was to. Die. For.” Mia sucked air through her teeth while Babs made kissing noises as a farewell to Ricardo, whoever he was. “Darling?” she said into the phone. Her tone had turned more urgent. “Call me back soon, do you hear me? We need to clear up some important matters.”

  Oh, good grief, Mia thought. I’m sure we do. Why am I not married yet? When will I come on a cruise with her? Don’t I know she gets an employee discount as ship hostess? Why don’t John and I plan on coming to Highlands Cove for Christmas this year and could we stay for more than two measly nights? “Fine. I’ll call you when I get off work.”

  “Promise your mother.”

  “Mother, please.”

  “Promise. I was the one to give you life, Miss I’m-Too-Busy.”

  Mia sighed. “I promise.” She hung up without saying good-bye. After a deep breath she turned to face Flor. “Sorry about that.”

  The girl shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. My mom calls me all the time. Hardly ever do I actually want to talk to her.”

  Mia bit back a smile, remembering the disorienting world of teenagedom. “Thanks. Now, Flor, you have questions for me?”

  She nodded and lowered her voice. “I’ve heard you give out free milk and stuff to people who need it. To, um, mothers for their babies.”

  Mia shook her head. “We don’t, actually, at this office.”

  Flor chewed her lower lip. The leg bouncing increased in intensity. “Are you sure? Because I’ve asked around.”

  “You’re almost in the rig
ht place. I work more with administrative issues, mostly with government housing and shelters. But we have a sister office upstairs that handles the WIC program. They’re the ones with the free milk, diapers, resources for mothers and children. We would never want anyone feeling like she couldn’t feed her child because formula’s too expensive.”

  Flor sat forward in her chair a bit. “Do I need to have a driver’s license or anything? Because I don’t have one yet. I just turned sixteen. Would I need one if I asked for something like that? Not now, but in a little while.” She looked into Mia’s face. “In case I was pregnant.”

  Mia blinked. She’d seen enough craziness at her job over the last few years not to burst into tears, but the jolt of a pregnancy this early in Flor’s life still required a moment’s pause. The housing division was relatively sheltered when it came to this kind of trouble. And Mia herself had very little experience dealing with problems like Flor’s. At sixteen her principal concerns had been acquiring tickets to ’N Sync, deciding which glitter nail polish went best with her eyes, and trying not to sweat in gym class. “No, you would not need a driver’s license. They’d want to see some proof of address, but it’s a pretty simple process.” She cleared her throat. “How far along are you?” Her voice was almost a whisper.

  Flor shrugged. “I’ve missed a couple periods. Still enough time to decide what to do, whether to go through with it or not.” She clenched her jaw and kept her eyes on the poem by Angelou.

  “I understand,” Mia said. Far more than you’re probably giving me credit for. “If this scenario would turn out to be a real one,” she locked eyes with Flor, “and if you should need any help, for anything, I hope you’ll come see me.” She fished out a card from her desk drawer and flipped it over. “This is my cell phone number.” Mia had been told repeatedly, often by Carl the Rule Magistrate, not to give out personal information to clients, but she suspected Flor wouldn’t be one to leave a message on the work line. “Call anytime.”

  “Thanks,” Flor said and dropped the card into one of her pockets. When she rose to go, Mia stood with her. “Maybe I’ll see you,” the girl said by way of good-bye. Mia watched her back until the last note of “Edelweiss” faded from the air.

  7

  Sweet Spot

  Silas sat perched on the top step. He’d brought out a stadium cushion and had propped it against the stone wall at the top of the staircase. The picture of repose, he scanned the day’s Tribune, which he’d opened to the travel section and used to shield his face from the sun.

  “Hi, Silas,” Mia said. She smiled when he looked up but his mouth creased into a frown.

  “You look dead-dog tired, girl. Work beating all the life out of you?”

  Mia sighed. She looked around, wishing for an armchair and cup of mango tea to appear. When it didn’t, she plopped down on the step below his. “Silas, can I ask you an indelicate question?”

  Silas folded the paper and creased it carefully before laying it on the pavement beside him. As always, he was impeccably dressed and clean shaven. A paisley ascot hugged his neck. With a pipe in hand he might have passed for a classics professor. When the breeze lifted, Mia could smell mint and the slightly sweet memory of aftershave.

  “I’ve never met a question that made me less of a man, indelicate or otherwise. Ask.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Ah,” he said, nodding slowly. “You won’t believe me, but I don’t exactly know.”

  Mia raised one eyebrow, wary from many entertaining but questionably accurate storytelling sessions she’d enjoyed with her neighbor from the first floor.

  “Naw, I’m telling the truth. My mama wasn’t so good with dates and numbers.” He chuckled. “But I can tell you I celebrate twice a year, just to make sure I’m covered. And at last count I was sixty-seven and one half years old.”

  Mia let out a low whistle. “That’s a lot of years.” She turned to him. “What’s your secret?”

  “You mean to long life?”

  “Not just long. Fulfilled. You seem fulfilled, satisfied. How do you do that?”

  “Apricot juice cocktails at nine each night and a healthy sex life as long as you can manage it.”

  Mia’s eyes bulged slightly and Silas laughed.

  “Just kidding about those apricots.” He laughed again, so much so that he needed to extract a handkerchief from his coat to blot his eyes. “My Bonnie would have slapped me on the back for that joke, and not for her approval of it.” He wheezed slightly and turned his gaze to Mia. “Honey, you want the good news or the bad news first?”

  “Bad.”

  “I see. A glass-half-empty kind of lady. All right, the bad news is that there is no formula. The secret is a wily one, and just when you think you’ve got life tucked neatly into your pocket, it rears up and shows you another side, one that makes you weak in the knees for all its toughness.”

  Mia slumped against the stone railing. “And the good news?”

  “The good news is you get to sixty-seven and one half years by walking through your days one moment at a time. Ain’t nobody got the right to hurry you up, so you just take a good deep breath and ask the Lord for the strength to get from morning to night.”

  Mia sighed at the thought of all those mornings and nights ahead of her. “I wish it were closer to apricot juice and a good libido.”

  Silas rubbed the hint of white whiskers dotting his chin. “Now you need to offer a man some help here. I need more information. What’s keeping you from peace of mind? The Book says peace can be like a river in one’s soul, and rivers aren’t always tame and quiet, you know.”

  “I would definitely not characterize my life as tame and quiet right now. Think more along the lines of rushing, wild abandon, maybe a rickety canoe that keeps tossing me overboard every few minutes.” Mia let her head lean against the railing. She was silent a moment. They watched an elderly woman shuffle down the sidewalk opposite them. She never took her eyes off the pavement but placed one foot carefully in front of the other until she turned the corner. When the woman was out of sight, Mia said, “Silas, I’m going to have a baby.”

  “Oh, Lord, Lord, Lord,” he said, his face broken into a wide grin. Deep wrinkles creased the sides of his cheeks and eyes, illuminating the decades of joy and sorrow that had crossed his face. “A baby. Well, congratulations, Miss Mia. This is fine, fine news.” He nodded to himself, still propped on the back of the stadium chair.

  “Thanks,” Mia said. “Before you need to ask, the baby is Lars’s and he, as you might have noticed, has conveniently disappeared.”

  “Now that you say it, I haven’t seen that boy for quite some time. How’s that sitting with you?”

  Mia felt a lump in her throat. “Some days are better than others.” She swallowed hard. “If you’d asked me yesterday, I would have said I was lucky to dodge a bullet. But today …” Her voice trailed off. Suddenly her pants felt very tight around the middle, even with the rubber-band trick. She stood and looked at Silas. “I should go in. Rest or something. Isn’t that what pregnant women are supposed to do?”

  He chuckled. “My Bonnie, God rest her soul, was like a tiger when she was pregnant with our little ones. I could not please the woman, no matter how I tried. This was at the very beginning and the very end. But the middle,” he shrugged and winked at her. “The middle was the sweetest time. You just about there, that right? Near about four, five months?”

  Mia nodded, sad to her bones that Silas knew more about where she was and who she was becoming than the father of her child.

  “Sweet spot might be just around the corner,” he said. His face softened, his eyes looked long into hers. “The Book says there’s a peace that passes understanding. That’s what I’ll be praying for you.” He nodded slowly. “You’re gonna be okay, Miss Mia Rathbun. Green, sweet valleys always come, even
after a mountain climb you’re sure will be the death of you.”

  “Have a good night, Silas.” Mia stepped up to the front door and turned her key in the lock. What a beautiful mess, she thought as she forced her feet up the stairs to her apartment. I’m pregnant, dumped, overworked, emotionally drained, and unloading my fears on an innocent neighbor. She pushed on the door to her apartment and set about looking for sweatpants.

  “He is lying!” Mia shouted. “You’re a fool to take him back!” She shoveled a spoonful of chocolate and peanut butter ice cream into her mouth and continued shouting around it. “It’s a good speech, you idiot. Do you honestly think he’s changed?” She looked around and found only a hemp drink coaster, which she hurled at Hugh Grant. “Just because you’re British, you think you can charm your way right back in. You know what I think of you? I think you’re a sad sap of a human who is caught in the grip of an overwhelming ego that allows you to think we are needy, spineless women, that’s what.” She swallowed the ice cream and could feel drips of it on either side of her mouth. She ran her sleeve across her lips. “And you know nothing about what Julianne is going through, no matter your teary little talk. So you’ve picked up What to Expect. You haven’t been there, you jerk.” She was crying and she felt grand about it.

  The start of this debacle had begun minutes after her retrieval of the sweatpants off the bedroom floor. She’d eaten three slices of vegetarian pizza heated up from the day before and had settled on the couch with an unopened pint of Ben & Jerry’s. TBS was running a Hugh Grant marathon and Nine Months began just as she dipped up her first peanut butter chunk. Now, an hour and a half later, she’d cried through the entire film, particularly loudly in the least emotionally touching parts. There was a scene with Tom Arnold, clearly written for comic relief, which involved Tom and Hugh attacking a man in a dinosaur suit at a toy store. She’d wept bitterly, making noises that she hadn’t heard out of herself since a violently hormonal viewing of Steel Magnolias in junior high.