“Yeah, a bunch of neighborhood kids.” I motion to the pizza. “We got some leftovers if you want them.” He’s so bad at remembering to take lunch breaks, and none of the management at the hotel is in any hurry to remind him.
“Can’t say I’ve ever turned down pizza.” He gladly takes our leftovers before stumbling to bed. I’ll never figure out how it is that some people can work so hard and get paid so little, while so many people who are paid the most hardly work at all.
We put in the next movie, and before long our shoulders slump and our heads sink into our chests, and we’re both asleep.
I wake briefly when my sister and Tyler come in. Tyler is drunk. I can tell by the sound of his shuffling feet. I keep my eyes barely closed as Hattie turns off the TV and throws a blanket over the two of us.
And that’s when, in his sleep, Freddie pulls me close to him like a rag doll. Sleep is this fuzzy cloud hanging low around my head. I could force myself to wake up all the way and scoot to the other end of the couch. Or even tell Freddie he should go home. But I don’t. Because just the feeling of being touched—being held—is the release of a pent-up sigh.
A few hours later, I wake to the sound of sizzling. With the blanket wrapped tightly around my shoulders like someone’s tucked me in, I peek over the back of the couch to find Freddie in my shitty little kitchen with its peeling linoleum, making eggs in an old frying pan, one that’s not nearly as nice as his at home. He’s the first person, I think, who I’ve not been related to, who has found a way to fit into my world—my world that has always felt so much smaller and less important than everyone else’s.
NOVEMBER
EIGHTEEN
Every day I think of Grace a little less until she is an itch of a memory, like when you know you’re forgetting something, but you don’t know exactly what it is.
With Freddie around and Hattie’s stomach growing every day, life is faster and more all-consuming than I ever remember it being before. I look forward to the mornings when I go swimming with Freddie and Agnes. I’m getting faster and I feel stronger. My legs barely even burn after my paper route anymore.
One day after school, I go with Hattie and Tyler to BabyCakes to look at, well, baby stuff. “So are we registering or what?” I ask. Hattie isn’t even due until April. I can’t imagine what she could possibly need so early.
She shakes her head as she fingers through the bottle nipples in the first aisle. “Not today. I just want to get a feel for this stuff.” Her brow furrows as she checks over her shoulder. “Where’s Tyler?”
“No clue.”
“Tyler!” she calls.
“Coming!” he yells back as he rounds the corner on one of those motorized scooters.
Hattie crosses her arms over her belly. “What the hell? Those are for, like, people who need them.”
Tyler speeds down the aisle toward us and then hits the brakes hard, forcing the wheels to squeak. “Who’s to say I don’t need it? I had a long day at work yesterday, okay?”
“It was your first day,” Hattie reminds him. “You only filled out paperwork.”
“That’s why it was so long.”
Tyler finally has a job, and it’s thanks to Dad, actually. He got Tyler in with the maintenance guys at the hotel. Dad went out on a limb, but it was for Hattie, not Tyler.
We zigzag up and down the aisles, the motor on Tyler’s scooter humming behind us.
“All this shit is so expensive,” says Hattie. “How do normal people even have babies?”
“We’ll figure it out,” I say, but the truth is I don’t know. This stuff really is expensive. You need strollers and cribs and bottle warmers and diapers and ointments and diaper bags, and it never seems to end. For such a little person, it seems like an awful lot.
The three of us stop below an aisle of hanging mobiles. Fish, trucks, angels, ballet slippers, rabbits, construction hats, princess crowns, clouds, trees. Every type of thing you could think of dangles above our heads, and the three of us, even Tyler, are mesmerized. The ceilings here aren’t too terribly tall, so with my height, my head is nearly in the same space as the mobiles.
“I like the stars and the clouds,” says Hattie, pointing to a light wooden mobile with hand-painted white puffy clouds and gold shooting stars. “I wish we could paint clouds on her ceiling.”
“Maybe we can,” I say. Even though there are no extra rooms in the trailer and all the ceilings are already dark with water stains.
“Her?” laughs Tyler. “It’s a boy. I’m a straight shooter.”
“Gross,” I mumble.
“And I like the fish,” he says. “He’s gonna be a fisher.”
While Tyler plugs the scooter back in, Hattie buys a pair of lavender booties.
