A Ride Home by Kurt Scott

It’s not like I expected anything I had to say about school, what happened with Carla, or the whole damn mess to matter to my mother, but there comes a point when you have to let folks know you won’t walk around shamefaced forever, if that’s what they’re expecting. I hadn’t been home long, just a few weeks after the College put me out on my ass, before I came to accept that whenever my mother had company – old, heavy-limbed Haitian women I'd been made to call Madame so-and-so as long as I could speak - there was no stopping her from talking that trash about how I'd run away from school in a stolen moving van, and left that poor white girl stranded and at the mercy of highway perverts in backwoods Wisconsin. I should’ve made a big scene, I suppose, and called her a liar in front of her friends. It’s an adult’s prerogative to treat an attack on his reputation as criminal, and by that time I was a grown-ass man. But I figured that when all was said and done, folks would have their version of things, and I would have mine, and you’re only asking for trouble when you try to have it any other way.

The first night I walked through the door, I found my mother in the kitchen, pretending to not have just been on the phone.

“I called you last night,” I said.

“I got your message and talked to your uncle. How do you think you got here?”

My younger cousin and that loud-mouth step-father of his had just driven me home from a police station in Trempeleau County, Wisconsin, a 400 mile trip down to Chicago, with not an inch spent talking about anything that wasn’t politics, high school volleyball or the fast food industry, on account of that Wendy’s they’d finally bought. My cousin missed his match that night - a regional, they said - just so I would have a familiar face to meet me at the lock-up. As if anyone would want that. Besides, even though plenty of folks have said that those two came running to my rescue, it isn’t like they didn’t take their sweet time getting there. The whole ride home, all 400 miles cramped up in the backseat of their two-door C-class, I felt sick from the smell of the Style ‘N’ Hold some barber had sprayed on Jacob’s fresh cut. But I had to put those thoughts out of my head as I stood in my mother’s kitchen. Just like her sisters, their parents, and probably their parents before them, my mother had a talent for sniffing out ingratitude, and it was just better to stay upwind.

“You couldn’t have picked up for a quick minute? I needed to talk to you,” I said.

She took a seat on the stool by the counter and refolded a dish towel.

“Did you call your father?”

“No, they don’t let you call Frankfurt, Mama.”

“The next time you call from prison, Tobias, you can go ahead and pretend that’s where I am, too. Frankfurt.”

“I wasn’t in prison, Mama. Prison is where they put you after a trial.”

“Boy,” she said, lowering her bare feet to the tile floor and walking out of the room, “Don’t call me when they put you there either.”

My mother’s place was a big apartment with lots of light and hardwood floors, tucked away into one of the older Western suburbs, just a couple miles from where I’d grown up. I didn’t have a lot going on at first, but I found ways to keep myself busy. My mother didn’t mind that I would rearrange the paintings on the wall when I was at home alone in the afternoons, and it was as good a way as any to enjoy the quiet without thinking too much. I had a favorite, this island-looking thing, which I stashed in my bathroom right above the toilet. It was a scene that made me happy for reasons I can’t explain: three country boys, skin black as oil, carrying melons bigger than their own bodies from market, one behind the other like ducks.

It was when I was out walking one day that I lucked my way into a job. I’d often go up the street to flirt with the earthy girls who worked the registers at the Co-Op and pick up a loaf of bread for the house, or some of those almonds my mother liked. A chain restaurant had recently opened in the neighborhood, right on the busy commercial street with all of the boutiques and the camera shop, so I figured I’d see if they were hiring. Grazie was what they called the place; it was a trendy cold-sandwich and espresso franchise that served liquor in the evenings. The name alone had the moneyed white folks in the community up in arms. In a ‘burb like ours, it seemed like there was always some battle going on to keep the philistines out, and you could just laugh yourself stupid reading about it in the weekly paper. Karl, the manager who interviewed me, really talked the place up. He was just a few years older than me, so I went ahead and told him all about how I got a raw deal at school, how the whole experience had really got me thinking about what I called institutional integrity. Karl said that joining the Grazie Inc. team was exactly the kind of opportunity that a guy like me should be looking for. He offered me a job as supervisor, and I went to the Grazie Inc. facility downtown for training that same week. Most of the stuff the instructors were saying went in through one ear and out the other, but one of those guys, a dark-skinned brother in expensive jeans, showed me how to take apart and reassemble an espresso maker, which was some fascinating shit. Unless they’ve changed much in the last ten years or so, I’m pretty sure I still know my way around a DeLoghi 700. Not that they’re giving out prizes for that sort of thing.

* * *

They put me on the night shifts all by myself, and all told, it was a rough draw. The service was in that place was bad, man, and the food was always off. We were making sandwiches out of crap that didn’t belong together under the best of circumstances, and half the time the big bucket of mayonnaise – Grazie put mayo on just about everything - had been left out overnight and turned. We also had a lot of what highfalutin black people, especially immigrant stock like my folks, liked to call the element: rough cats who took the Green Line train in from the South Side of the city for work, which I could tell made those girls waiting tables uneasy. All the waitresses were white girls who’d grown up in town like I had, but you know for them, it’s different. Usually we all just rolled with the punches, but every now and then those girls lodged a complaint; Marcus said this, or Tim put his hand there. I’d seen Karl get apologetic about it and hemm and haw about write-ups, but in my opinion, you just had to be straight, and make them understand that it was the way it was going to be. Like I told Jeanette, one of the thick-waisted servers who attended the Jesuit college on Thatcher St., if they could get those girls to line up shoulder to shoulder and crank out sandwiches for seven dollars an hour, they would’ve gotten rid of those brothers a long time ago.

There was this waitress Andrea. One night, I got to work a little late and found all of the sandwich guys, bakers, and waitresses, just about everybody huddled around the unisex bathroom like some kind of police S.W.A.T. team. To me it seemed just about right; you stop on the way in to pick up a book on restaurant management, and you’re rewarded by someone croaking on your watch. It wasn’t like that, they told me. They said she’d been in there for an hour, she being Andrea. I bribed one of the nicer girls with a free dinner and a Saturday night shift to use my master key to go in and get her. A couple of minutes later, out came Andrea looking flushed, her face wet with sweat or tears or maybe just a little water she splashed on to freshen up. None of us could tell. I sat her down and asked her questions to make sure there was nothing serious going on. I said, “Are you all right? We thought you’d fallen in,” and she said, “No, this is just a little water I splashed on my face from the sink,” and then went to greet some customers at table eighteen, whose order she screwed up three times before we got them out the door.

That same night the garbage disposal broke down, and I couldn’t get anyone who would have actually been of help to put in some extra hours to help me fix it. I’ve never been one to break my back for a dime, but it seemed like everyone in that place was either shiftless or lacking in practical know-how, a good number being both. Andrea stuck around to keep me company. She leaned in the doorway, twisting her apron strings into holiday ribbons or little nooses, and watched quietly while I went at it with a plunger and a wrench.

“What you’re doing there,” she finally said, “Is it working, what you’re doing?”

“Don’t know,” I said, “They just left me with some tools and this mess, but I’m doing my best to make it work.”

“I want to help.”

“I wish you could.”

Her forehead wrinkled-up deep, so deep that her eyebrows nearly met, and then she disappeared into the dining room for some time. When she came back, she was carrying two water glasses filled to the brim with something dark and syrupy. I took a sip of the one she handed me and nearly gagged on the warm, fifty-fifty whiskey and Coke mix.

“Not bad, Andrea” I said, “I’m not gonna promise you any bar shifts for now, but it ain’t bad.”

“It’s my specialty,” she said. She sat down on the floor and leaned against the employee lockers as I worked, clicking the toes of her black flats together while she hummed something that sounded pretty and old.

When I got everything cleaned up, I offered her a ride home. It was close to one in the morning by the time I locked up, and the blizzard had hit early. We walked the two blocks over to the garage beneath my mother’s apartment, Andrea always a couple steps back. Her legs were straw-skinny, and I guess she had a hard time keeping up in the snow banks. Once we were in my mother’s old Volvo which I had the privilege of driving just about anytime she didn’t need it to make a shift at the hospital, I asked Andrea for her address. She didn’t know it. Said she’d been staying with some friends for only a little while, and hadn’t memorized so much as an intersection or some directions, anything, so we drove up and down Roosevelt Avenue, then doubled back when we hit Pine Ridge, and cruised until we hit the Maple Valley bungalows. At night and in a storm like that you couldn’t tell where one suburb began and the other ended, so we just drove. I didn’t mind much. The only pain was that before I put the car back in the garage, I’d have to fill the tank back up so my mother didn’t give me hell in the morning, but driving just to drive, which is what we were doing as far as I could tell, wasn’t something I’d had an opportunity to do at school in Wisconsin. Life was contained to four square blocks of limestone buildings, flower beds and one big old forest that I never managed to make much use of.

The snow had gotten so bad that I could barely see where I was going. I was scared we’d wander into Berwyn, where I didn’t go by myself, let alone with some goofy white girl in the passenger seat, so I pulled into the lot of a tire retailer and parked.

Sitting there, with all the windows covered up by a layer of snow, Andrea started to talk about herself. She was twenty-four years old, which was about four years older than I’d thought, and she had no brothers or sisters. Her father had died in a bad car accident some years back. Andrea had been in the car. She lifted her Grazie-issued waitress shirt to show me a scar that stretched from just right of her navel all the way up to her arm pit. I measured it against my arm, and the scar was as thick as my wrist. It was after her father passed that her mother took up the vocation of circus production, which had to do with all the behind-the-scenes stuff that goes into putting on circuses. Wire work was her specialty. I’d never thought about it before Andrea explained it to me, but it made sense that given the importance of high-wire acts to the traditional circus the cable worker is an artist and as well as a technician.

“On one of her first days in that school,” Andrea said, “They put a man on the wire and had him walk from pillar to pillar.” She was breathing slowly as she looked straight ahead.

“As sort of a test?” I asked.

“Yeah, but they picked a small guy to start out with,” she said.“Less weight.”

“A quiz,” I said.

“And the first time he fell, because my mom had pulled the wire too tight.”

“Maybe he wasn’t that good of a wire-walker.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but he was also in love with my mother, and this was when my father was still alive.” She traced a figure eight on the dashboard with her index finger. “So there was always that.”

It had gotten late, morning almost, when Andrea got a notion that she might remember the way, and she directed us to a little duplex close to the expressway. The chain link fence was frozen wide open as if to mock the “Beware of Dog” sign that still clung to it by a couple of rusty screws. When she got out, Andrea sprang from the car in two hops to clear the snow bank, and went into the house. I retraced my steps and drove back to the apartment, where I managed to sneak over the parts of the floor I knew to be the least squeaky, and into my bedroom at the end of the hall, before my mother’s deep sleep gave way to worries about patients, the mortgage, and what in the world she was going to do about her unpurposed son.

***

The restaurant was only two doors down from the only movie theater in town, so there was no getting around the hell that was the Friday and Saturday night rushes. On Sundays, parishioners from the Lutheran church came in to listen to a bluegrass band that corporate had set up, and after only a couple of occurrences of the Lord’s day, I managed to convince the guys on the sandwich line to stop throwing pieces of Italian bread at the pock-faced lady playing the clarinet. Monday and Tuesday were fine; high school kids gathered to study, anteing textbooks and day planners in the middle of the big cherry oak tables, babysitters brought little squirts who made nests for themselves out of shredded napkins, and there were the old men who arrived early for dinner to claim the big comfortable chairs by the bay windows and just gaze out onto Lake Street, keeping time, I imagined, with the thickening and thinning of traffic. Every now and then you’d catch a slow night. Clean floors, no fights. Me and the sandwich line guys would smoke a joint in the alley, and come back in behind the sandwich counter and just lean.

Karl didn’t stick around in the evenings anymore, so that little office off the kitchen, I had it all to myself. I’d sit back there either watching movies on the thirteen-inch or writing letters. I wrote letters to the college, but those turned out to be a waste of the spit I’d used to seal them. I wrote a letter to my father, a couple of my Aunts, and I wrote a letter to my mother, which I stuck in her purse one morning when she left it on the coffee table:

Hello Mama,

I decided to write you a letter because up to this point I’ve had a hard time saying some things without it turning into a lot of yelling. I’m not going to defend myself over the College’s decision. You’ve always made it perfectly clear that you’re willing to believe any stranger with his own letterhead over the word of your own son, so I’ll save my breath. Besides, I can’t say that I blame you. Dean Tuttleson is an upright man whose done work in the Peace Corp and is loved on campus for his kindness to squirrels, stray cats, animal life on the whole. There have been students who have written songs about him, and one day, I hope to write a song (or maybe just a poem) about the Dean even though I’m pretty sure I’ll never again set foot in Bennington, Wisconsin so long as I live.

As far as the other matter is concerned, I’m just going to say for the last time that Carla and I had decided to rent that truck together. I paid for half with my catering money. I know that when you met her parents in that mediation, that’s not how things came out, but you have to understand that things are different now that she and I are estranged. That is simply what happens when people get to be estranged, Mama. Things get distorted. I hope you find it in yourself to forgive a little, because it’s been a pleasure being back in your lovely home. I’ve also given thought to what you said about helping out more, and here’s what I’ve come up with for now:

1) I will boil the rice and make a salad before you get home from work. This should make it easier for you to make dinner. Nevermind what I said about the fact that I always eat dinner at the restaurant. You’re right, I often enough eat your delicious leftovers for lunch, so I will do the rice and salad from now on.

2) I am going to vacuum every Tuesday and Saturday.

Best,

Tobias

P.S. I put the Renal Estime painting in the living room. Look at the color of that lady’s skirt against your rug and tell me I’m not a genius.

It happened just like I told her. The day after I was asked to leave campus, Carla and I had decided to put all of our stuff into a U-Haul and go. It was a conversation probably made too sentimental by the Christmas lights, which she had them strung all around her apartment like jungle vines. We were sitting close on her dusty couch with a map, a couple of plastic cups, and the bottle of Jim Bean I lifted from a catering gig, when she said, "Tobias, I bet you thought you were going to have to do this by yourself," and ashed her square on the butter tile floor I'd once seen her sweep furiously for her parents' visit. The next day, we went to the rental facility in Clarksville with her father's credit card, and a few short hours after that, we were headed East on Interstate 90.

The roads were icy that day, and neither of us had ever handled a truck, so we did silly things to keep each other awake and alert, like twist the volume dial on the radio back and forth, and sneak our hands under each others pants. We had gotten as far as Eau Claire when what I can only describe as a dizziness came over me. I can think about it now and remember the dizziness perfectly, but not a whole lot else. Carla had been talking about the plan, as we called it, which was to head out to Philadelphia and stay at some friends of hers, a couple that she met in Europe the summer before. The guy was a poet, she said, a published one, and he was going to help her with some of the stuff that she’d been messing around with in notebooks, though all she had at that point were some scribblings, nothing major. I figured I’d get a job as a short-order cook, or in a mail room, or if I was lucky, I could be somebody’s chauffeur and spend my days just cruising. She said that looking back, we would know that this was the moment when we began to choose each other. Carla went on like that for a while, talking free and easy about poetry and traveling and the newness of the day, when the hills, the signs, the icy road itself all just sort of drew back from me. I’m not sick, never have been, and believe me, there have been plenty of times since that day when it would’ve been easier to just say I was. But it was like world was there, but only as something to be seen with another pair of eyes and described to me. Carla was driving then, and she wanted stop at Culver’s because they had good burgers and frozen chocolate custard. We ate inside, and after a bit, I excused myself from the table. She didn’t see me take the keys. Next thing you know, I was on the highway again. I’d only made it as far as Jackson before I got stopped for speeding, and I guess Carla called that daddy of hers because the van had been reported stolen. The following night, my cousin was apologizing to me in the parking lot of the police station for forgetting to bring a winter coat, even though I said at least three times on my mother’s answering machine that I left mine in the back of that U-Haul.

***

By springtime, my hand had been forced in taking a more active role in the running of the restaurant. This broad from the Grazie national office in Delaware came by and really took a white glove to the place. She called in Karl who sat there through the whole meeting looking embarrassed, maybe because of his tan. Word was he’d been in Puerto Rico. Our branch was the poorest performing Grazie in the Chicago area, which was hard to believe because I’d seen Grazie-Evanston, and it was a goddamn pit. “This is a more, uh, fickle market,” she said, and I couldn’t argue with that. We still had time to turn it around before she sent some regional guys in there to take over, but I guess Karl had heard enough to shake him because he reached into the file cabinet and started offering up our people like nobody’s business. Tayo didn’t know how to bake the bread for shit, he said, and Alex was always late, and then Andrea, he painted her to be some kind of retard. We could’ve put them all in the street, as far as he was concerned, and be better off for it.

That week I pulled Gervaise, a baker and my main man at the restaurant, out into the alley to go over the situation. He usually wasn’t much good at advice, not because he didn’t know a lot, but because he always seemed distracted. He wasn’t a punch-in, punch-out baker like those other cats – he put a lot of care into his work. You’d talk to him, and get the impression that his mind was always half-occupied by a couple loaves that he’d left in the kiln. But he was good to talk to all the same, so I asked him about the situation.

“They want to fire Andrea,” I said. He didn’t say anything. He killed his square and reached his long arms up and grabbed the bottom rung of the fire escape ladder, casting a shadow on the slick pavement that was the shape of a tuning fork. “They want to put her out,” I said.

“So she gets put out then.”

“She hasn’t done anything wrong, G.”

“Naw, she hasn’t done anything right.”

“I figure that everyone should have a grace period, you know? Have a chance to meet expectations. I’ve treated everybody here with that idea in mind.” He shot me a look that let me know I’d better not include him in any of that. Grace period nothing. I nodded and looked at my feet, because I hadn’t.

“’Ay man, you go and do what you wanna do. You say you’re going to go back up to school and do your thing soon, so if you wanna mess around with this Andrea thing, that’s on you.” He splashed the toe of his shoe in the edge of a puddle. “You know niggers won’t judge.”

“I just wanna make sure everybody gets a fair shake,” I said. “When you manage, you have to reinforce a certain institutional integrity.” I started to tell him what I’d learned about loyalty, and how I’d learned it the hard way, but his eyes were already fixed on the door to the kitchen, as though he expected someone to bust through it any second, panicked and stinking of burnt crusts.

I took Gervaise’s advice and decided the best thing for the restaurant would be to invest in Andrea’s training. I told her about it as I drove her home one night, and she seemed to take to the idea, so I started getting up early and sitting in bed with a pen and notebook, planning the things we’d go over that day. Andrea agreed to meet early in the evenings, a little bit before our shift started, to work on the basics. I showed her the proper way to set tables and clear them. We role-played. Sometimes I’d go outside and come back in pretending to be a rude customer, seating myself wherever I pleased, or I’d order food that wasn’t on the menu, like chicken a la king, or rib-eye steak. Once, to really get into the part I brought in a blazer that I’d borrowed from my father, a big tweed thing that made my shoulders look square like the hanger was still in, and I grabbed Andrea’s arm around the bicep and shook her in pretend-anger because there wasn’t enough syrup in my Italian soda. At first she looked hurt, and I thought I’d done a bad thing. But then she stepped back and puffed up her chest - her small, alert breasts looking like aspirin bottles under her blouse - and said that if I didn’t watch out, her supervisor was going to come out and clock me. We both laughed. We laughed a lot during the trainings, so much that eventually I figured it became a bad idea to train like that out there on the dining room. The other waitresses had started to whisper about it, I was afraid, and Gervaise must not have told the brothers on the sandwich line it was his idea, because they all seemed to be talking junk too.

We started to spend time at my mother’s place during the afternoons. My mother took the car during those times, so I’d take the bus over to Andrea’s place to pick her up, or find some scratch to have a cab go by and get her. We used my mother’s heavy silverware, the set she kept in a polished oak box under her bed, and imitated dinner parties. When she wasn’t in her uniform, Andrea wore frilly shirts that dipped low around her chest and shoulders, which were slender and freckled. Sometimes we’d take a break and watch T.V, or we’d flip through my mother’s books. We liked all the fat history volumes, especially the one about King Henry VIII, as it had all sorts of drawings of lady-like men and some very hard looking women. I was easy for a laugh whenever Andrea posed with one of my mother’s fancy wine glasses and made her lips pinched like some duke.

On Thursday nights, Gervaise would have a set over at his place on the South Side; just those guys from the restaurant hanging out, smoking that stuff, no big deal. He said I could stop by whenever I wanted. The two of us, Andrea and I, decided to take him up on it one night and drive over to his house on 67^th street, just a few blocks off the Dan Ryan Expressway. The building was a three-floor greystone with black plastic bags covering the broken windows on the first floor apartment. Gervaise met us at the door, and I barely recognized him in his street clothes, which hid his skinniness under a baggy sweatshirt and jeans.

“You’re already red-eyed, man. I guess you’ve started.” I stepped in to give him a pound, but he was staring over my shoulder. Andrea hadn’t followed me up the stone stairs. She was leafing through a sports magazine that she’d found on the walk. “Andrea, come on now,” I said. She smiled and followed me up.

Gervaise’s apartment was spare with its stained gray carpet spread from bare-wall to bare-wall, a big screen television, floor model speakers, a couple of folding chairs and small couch. A picture of a black Jesus split the two windows in the room, hanging crooked in its aged frame. Tim the meat-portioner was there, playing with the settings on the receiver, but the other two cats, big guys, I’d never seen before. The introductions never came. Gervaise went onto the enclosed back porch and brought out a couple more chairs, a glass-bowl and a few sticks of incense.

“You wanna burn one?” Gervaise said.

I nodded.

“You?” he asked.

Andrea wasn’t paying attention, which I was grateful for, because I was sure she didn’t mess with weed, and just as sure she would’ve said yes. We all sat down, looking at each other, eyes half closed. One of those bigger guys had brought a bottle of vodka, and we did a round, and then another. I smoked until my chest burned – it was a bad batch, or my lungs had been spoiled on what I’d dealt with on campus - and I had to waive off the bowl when it rounded back my way a third time. I got up to take a piss, by that point stumbling a little bit, but I made it through the beaded entrance to the hallway, and to the bathroom in the nick of time. When I got back, Tim was on the couch next to Andrea, and he had his leg draped over the third cushion. I looked at him, and then looked at Andrea, who smiled at me. This was how Tim was at the restaurant, always testing boundaries. He was smart, probably smarter than I was, and he was always looking for a leg up. One day he’d gotten walked into my office without knocking at a time when I was watching a movie that Carla had made for a film class and gave me to borrow. It was a weird little flick, all done in one shot that followed a girl, probably one of Carla’s freshman friends, as she ran through the storage tunnels that usually only the custodians could get into, trying to look scared. The girl was wearing a sports bra and shorts, which I guess gave Tim the wrong idea, because he had a look on his face that let me know I’d have to deal with his shit every day from that point on.

“You wanna slide over, man?” I asked. He only looked at me, eyes narrow and the same darkness as his hair, which he wore in an uncombed afro, naps big and round like marbles. After a few moments that Gervaise and the other guys filled with chuckles, Tim put his leg on the floor.

“What are we doing here, man?” Tim asked.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“We should be back at Grazie drinking for free, instead of dipping into my private stock.” He rolled the empty bottle of Smirnoff across the carpet to the other side of the room. “We should be back there, drinking good like you drink good in that office.”

“Then the liquor counts would be off and we’d have Karl back in there every night. Nobody wants Karl around there.” I looked at Gervaise for agreement, but he was packing another bowl.

“Nigger, please,” he said. “Karl’s not going to give up his nights just because you can’t keep the booze on lock. They’d just fire you and get somebody else to do your job.” He slung his arm over the back of the couch, the side that Andrea was sitting on. “Shit, they’d probably just get Pat to do it, or maybe even Andrea.” They all laughed again.

We sat there quiet for a while listening to music, and I was thinking of excuses to leave, trying to catch Andera’s eye every few seconds or so, when a little baby girl came out of the bedroom, rubbing her right eye. She walked up to the edge of the circle that we’d formed, squinting in the cloud of smoke, and stood, arms at her side, stomach protruding underneath threadbare blue pajamas.

“Tobias this here is my little girl”, Gervaise said. “She’s supposed to be in bed right now, ain’t you boo?” She blinked and walked into the kitchen. I heard the faucet turn on, the sound of hands and feet on linoleum, then the faucet turn off. She came out with a glass of water that she held tightly with both hands. Andrea, who had been in her own world that whole time, was on her feet all of a sudden, her body rigid like a bird-dog who’d caught a scent. She reached down and snatched up that little girl so fast that the child dropped her cup, a water spot spreading from the place where it landed soundlessly on the carpet. That little girl was in her arms, and Andrea danced around the room to MC Juice, bass thumping from the speakers. The girl’s legs twirled round and round like helicopter propellers.

“Put her down, Andrea,” I said.

“That’s the same thing her mama be doing,” Gervaise said. “Spinning her to death.”

“Andrea, I think you should put her down.”

“Naw, man,” Tim said. He put his hand on my shoulder and smiled. “She’s good.”

Andrea was now hopping in place with the little girl. She and the child had matched expressions on their faces, eyes wide and lips drawn apart in what you could mistake for grins.

“Andrea,” I said, “You’re going to make her sick. Put her down.” But she kept moving. Gervaise would have done something to stop it, I know it, but he was blazed out of his mind, and Tim enjoyed making people suffer. I was out of breath, and my heart felt like it was beating in the sides of my head.

“Put her down you fucking idiot!”

Andrea stopped, and held that baby at on her hip. The little girl grabbed a bit of Andrea’s hair in her fist, and tried to put the strands that came up between her fingers in her mouth. There was hurt in Andrea’s eyes, and I knew that tears would soon come. It’s like some people have amnesia. They forget what they did to make you say the things you say. They act like cruelty just falls out of the sky to strike them and only them, and there isn’t a thing they can do to get out of the way.

She let the girl slide down her leg to the floor.

“Toby,” she said, “fuck you Toby. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”

This had all those guys cutting up, slapping each others knees and what not. Tim leaned against his forearm, pretending to be amused beyond bodily control. Andrea had disappeared behind those beads by the time I pushed him off of me.

When it was finally quiet again, except for the sobs coming from the kitchen, I told Gervaise that I needed to get something from the car. I can’t remember what I said it was. Maybe a bottle of gin, it doesn’t matter. I nearly broke my ass going down the stairs, which were falling apart, the cement having lost big pieces which were scattered on the walk. Once in the car, I rubbed my hands over the steering wheel. I figured the engine was cold after having sat there for an hour or two, so I let it idle for a bit. At 3:00 a.m. in that neighborhood, I decided it was best to go straight west to Montrose Avenue, and then catch the I-90 back west, so I pulled a U-turn and headed for the Racine St. entrance. It was safer that way, and you caught fewer lights.