Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self Part 4

"Whatever you think is best, baby. You were always the smart one."

The smart one. That was my other nickname growing up. It was only recently that I had been able to convince people it didn't necessarily apply, either. I got up.

"I gotta go, Daddy. I'll call you."

I walked quickly and let the door slam on his parting fatherly advice.

I wanted to hurt somebody, and so far it wasn't working. My mother, when all was said and done and she finally found out, would be devastated that she hadn't been the first to know, but I couldn't even have that yet. I went to see Rafael not so much because I thought he should know as because he was woundable.

Rafael is an artist, in the most cliched college-student, nude-self-portraits-on-the-wall kind of way. There are also nude pictures of me on his wall, though I am not identifiable in any of them-an elbow here, a belly b.u.t.ton there, an arched brow, the curve of my thigh. The one with my b.r.e.a.s.t.s is in his portfolio but didn't make the wall. "I don't want other guys staring at my girlfriend's t.i.ts," he said. He does not, however, mind people looking at the picture of his p.e.n.i.s he has pasted to the ceiling, though he did take it down when his little sister came to visit.

Rafael was raised in Miami by Catholic parents who left Cuba just before Castro came to power. His father did work for the League of Cuban Voters, his mother was the president of an anti-Castro society and the most respected woman in the church that he attended twice every Sunday until he left for school. He started sleeping with me the same week that he took down the family portrait beside his bed and replaced it with a photo of Castro. I was not stupid enough to believe this was coincidence. I imagined him on the phone with his mother: No, I'm not a virgin anymore and maybe Castro was right about you and do you know what else, Ma, she's black, even darker brown than Grandma Margarita, what are you going to do to me now? No, I'm not a virgin anymore and maybe Castro was right about you and do you know what else, Ma, she's black, even darker brown than Grandma Margarita, what are you going to do to me now?

Probably this conversation never happened. I didn't particularly care if it did. I rather relished being his own personal Eve. It felt reckless and romantic. When I played I Never with my cousins over winter break, they raised impressed eyebrows when I drank to both Have you ever devirginized somebody? Have you ever devirginized somebody? and and Have you ever done it with a Catholic? Have you ever done it with a Catholic? People thought I was the good kid, but going to college was pretty much the only thing I'd done that they hadn't. People thought I was the good kid, but going to college was pretty much the only thing I'd done that they hadn't.

Now, though, confronted with Rafael, I would have traded all my good grades to know what to say to him. I had gone there to hurt him without knowing that I wasn't capable of it. He rambled about how we really only had to be part-time next year to finish and we could get an apartment somewhere uptown and he'd just take the train to cla.s.s and we'd get summer jobs to save money, floundering when he tried to be more specific and making grossly obvious mathematical errors when he tried to compute our budget in his head. He was adorable and lost and I wanted to hold him until he felt better, but then I realized I was the one in trouble.

"Rafael, shut up," I said.

"I love you," he said. It was almost an afterthought.

I could hear the subtext to it, the desperate chord underneath. I love you. I love you enough. But I knew what enough turned into. One day you could have enough, and the next you had a house full of mood crystals or an apartment full of the sound of your own voice in stereo.

"I don't think I'm keeping it," I told him.

"Angel," he said, then stopped. I could see him struggling. We'd had this conversation before, in the theoretical sense. For most of his life he'd been told that abortion was a mortal sin, that to even let a girl do it was to shirk his responsibility as a man and a Christian. Those voices echoed somewhere deep, somewhere I had never been. Then there were the more recent voices: his newly declared agnosticism that called those other voices archaic and self-righteous; the voices that asked who was he to ever tell a woman what to do with her body, as though he were the boss of her. He had been told so much and become so accustomed to his own opinion not mattering that at the critical moment he seemed not to know what his own thoughts on the matter were and couldn't finish his sentence. Or maybe it had nothing to do with that. Maybe it was just him being selfish the way that most artists are, part drawn to the idea of something that would outlast him, part worried that he couldn't control it.

"Angel," he said again.

Usually when I found myself not knowing what to say to make things better, I kissed him instead. If it were anything else he was upset about, I'd be undoing the b.u.t.tons on his shirt and kissing circles down his chest until the distressing moment was gone, our fingers in each other's hair, across each other's bodies. I would lie beneath him and raise my hips to meet his while he breathed into the curve of my neck and kept a hand cupped under my b.u.t.t. I would bite his earlobe and think I love this boy I love this boy and Fidel would watch the whole thing silently. Then it would be over and we would breathe heavily and know where we were wounded but not how to make it better. and Fidel would watch the whole thing silently. Then it would be over and we would breathe heavily and know where we were wounded but not how to make it better.

Instead, I left, and told him I'd call him once I thought about it. I wouldn't, though; I decided the least I could do was make him call me. I returned to the dorm to find the girls sprawled across the common-area furniture and thought maybe they would do. It was midterm reading week, but no one was actually reading. My friends were eating chips and salsa while an underfed starlet railed against the injustice of life on MTV, buzzing in low volume while Nicole talked over it.

"You know what Laura has now?" she asked.

Value, I thought, but said nothing.

"Some d.a.m.n two-hundred-dollar jeans. Can you believe? I'm about to donate me an egg."

"Please, girl. Who you gonna find wants a Nicole egg?" Candy said.

"Well, then you're about to haul your light a.s.s in there and donate an egg, then cut me a percent." Nicole continued, "Twenty seems fair. Could get me some cute jeans anyway."

"Right. Let me go in there and sign Dulce Maria Gutierrez Hernandez on the dotted line and see how fast they throw me out the office. Who knows what could be hiding in DNA with a name like that. Maybe the kid would only get a 1400 and its whole life would be over." Candy laughed. I felt sick. Nicole kept going.

"Well, there gotta be some rich-a.s.s black people who can't have their own kids and think my 1500's worth something. C'mon, Courtney, your parents got money, right? Think they want another kid? A better one?"

Courtney threw a lime Tost.i.to at Nicole. I walked away without them noticing and tried to imagine telling them. Nicole would say to be realistic. She'd go through numbers the way Rafael had tried to, only hers would add up and show how ridiculous the situation would be. She'd tell me we didn't come this far to screw it up now. Candy would say it was only guilt keeping me from doing what had to be done right now, and then she'd go on a tangent about the government's attempts to restrict female s.e.xuality, and when I was about to walk away and she realized what she was doing she'd apologize and then have nothing left to say. Courtney would just keep asking what I wanted, which wouldn't be any more helpful than me asking my d.a.m.n self.

I knocked on Laura's door, not sure what I wanted from her. She looked startled to see it was me knocking; it had been months since we'd had a real conversation. We'd spoken only in pa.s.sing, when at all: h.e.l.lo, cold today, isn't it, psych midterm's going to be a real pain in the a.s.s.

"What do you want?" she asked, not quite rudely but headed there.

"Can I come in?" I said. "I need to talk."

Maybe she could tell it was serious, because she opened the door all the way and moved aside so that I could enter. Her first few checks had mainly gone to her mother, to paying off her loans, but the last one she'd clearly spent redecorating. The cheap navy comforter had been replaced by something purple and woven. Egyptian cotton Egyptian cotton, I thought, without knowing where the term had come from. The photos on her walls were not of us anymore; they were of her at clubs I'd never been to with girls I didn't recognize. Her pajamas were screaming Nick & Nora and her hair had recently been highlighted, and I had to look at the floor in order to pretend she was the same girl I'd once been friends with, the girl who couldn't say "Blow Pop" because she thought it sounded dirty, the girl who'd been confused about how it was possible to pee while wearing a tampon before Nicole broke it down for her. I told her the whole story, with the vomiting and the not knowing and my mother's health crystals and my father's car commercials, and Rafael being all beautiful and tortured and useless. She nodded in a kind of horrified sympathy, and then asked: "What do you need me to do?"

I needed her to stop looking at me. I needed her eyes to not be blue and liquid. I needed her to understand what she couldn't possibly: how it felt to not be her. I asked her to come with me when I got rid of it, and she was surprised but nodded.

"I'm asking you," I said, "because I can't really tell them. I was thinking, though, that maybe you know what it feels like to almost be a mother."

I let the door close as she sat there on her purple comforter, looking not sure whether to feel insulted or understood.

I wanted to schedule it in Brooklyn, on the off chance that someone I knew would be at the Planned Parenthood in Manhattan, but Brooklyn was all booked up and they sent me downtown. The whole place was pink pink pink: sh.e.l.l-pink carpeting, puke-pink plastic chairs that wobbled if you squirmed, pale pink walls. I signed in and took a number, imagining I was anyplace else. The DMV, backstage at a beauty pageant, the take-out counter at a restaurant. The lobby was full of mostly girls, with the occasional boyfriend. A boy who looked no older than fifteen patted the round belly of his even younger-looking girlfriend. Another twirled a strand of his girlfriend's hair while she read through a brochure on contraceptives and occasionally looked up nervously, as though scared someone would see her there. A grown man squeezed the hand of the young woman next to him, who looked panicked and terrified.

Laura looked panicked and terrified, too, mesmerized by the tacky not-quite-tragedy of the waiting room. I imagined (this is what we did with Laura then: we never asked, we imagined) the doctor's office she'd visited to be screened and tested and have her eggs removed. I imagined it blue, with soft music in the background and fresh flowers on the waiting-room table, next to the New Yorker. New Yorker. I imagined people smiled more and struck up conversation easily. The girls there to donate would feel kinship with Laura, and if the women there to receive were inclined to be jealous of her youth and beauty and fertility, their jealousy would recede once they realized they could afford to buy her. I imagined people smiled more and struck up conversation easily. The girls there to donate would feel kinship with Laura, and if the women there to receive were inclined to be jealous of her youth and beauty and fertility, their jealousy would recede once they realized they could afford to buy her.

I wondered if Laura was uncomfortable there. Her childhood was probably free clinics like the one we were sitting in. The shyness of her voice, the way she sometimes slipped up and had to fix a grammatical error-these hinted that maybe she was what my father would have called white trash if my mother weren't there to say it was a term a.n.a.logous to n.i.g.g.e.r n.i.g.g.e.r and he ought to apologize for using it. Impostor or not, she could hide her inadequacy behind salon-lightened hair and a thousand-dollar leather coat. Sitting next to her, I did not feel a.n.a.logous. They paid her for her potential babies, and they were about to vacuum mine out of me. I felt queasy. I hoped they would forget to call my number. I didn't want or not want the baby, I didn't have any grand political problem with abortion, I didn't have any religion to speak of and thought that if G.o.d existed and expected me to follow any particular rules, I was probably going to h.e.l.l anyway, and not for this. I just didn't want to be there, didn't want to deal with it, didn't want to be any emptier than I already felt. I wanted to be full. That was one of the things the girls in Laura's egg-donor group complained about: the painful part of the drugs they had to take. They felt "full" in their abdomens, swollen with potential for life. I had wanted that forever and had never felt it yet. and he ought to apologize for using it. Impostor or not, she could hide her inadequacy behind salon-lightened hair and a thousand-dollar leather coat. Sitting next to her, I did not feel a.n.a.logous. They paid her for her potential babies, and they were about to vacuum mine out of me. I felt queasy. I hoped they would forget to call my number. I didn't want or not want the baby, I didn't have any grand political problem with abortion, I didn't have any religion to speak of and thought that if G.o.d existed and expected me to follow any particular rules, I was probably going to h.e.l.l anyway, and not for this. I just didn't want to be there, didn't want to deal with it, didn't want to be any emptier than I already felt. I wanted to be full. That was one of the things the girls in Laura's egg-donor group complained about: the painful part of the drugs they had to take. They felt "full" in their abdomens, swollen with potential for life. I had wanted that forever and had never felt it yet.

"I don't want to do this," I said.

"Me neither," she said, which didn't make a lot of sense, but I didn't really care what she was trying to say right then. I looked at her for a second. Her fingertips were pressed into her temples, and I could see her nails, the French polish on them chipping slightly, and her roots, a few shades darker than the blond of the rest of her hair. Logic was never going to save us, but I started talking anyway.

"If I took summer cla.s.ses, I could graduate in August. Before the baby. I have good grades, I could get an OK job."

Not a spy. You couldn't spy with a baby. It would cry and blow your cover.

Laura looked the other way.

"I've done this before," she said.

"This?" I asked. I asked.

"The waiting-room thing. With my older sister, when we were in high school. Twice. She wasn't one of those people who got emotional about it, she just needed me for the ride home."

"What was it like?" I asked.

"The doctors were sweeter to her than I was," Laura said. "I was sitting there waiting for her, and I kept thinking everyone in that room knew someone who knew someone who knew me, and they were all thinking it would be me next, and I'd show them, it never would be."

"It's not you," I said. I looked down at my scuffed red and black Pumas. I thought about kicking her, for reminding me where we came from, for reminding me that I used to think of her as one of us.

"Isn't it?" she asked.

"It's me. You might as well not even be here."

"Then why'd you ask me?"

"Why'd you come?"

"What am I supposed to say?"

"I don't know. What am I supposed to do with a baby?"

"Love it," she said. Her voice sounded like it was about to break. Love it. Love it. Like it was that simple. Like loving something ever paid anyone's rent. I tugged so hard on the strand of hair I'd been twirling that it snapped off. Love it, I thought. Let it be mine. I took a breath. Like it was that simple. Like loving something ever paid anyone's rent. I tugged so hard on the strand of hair I'd been twirling that it snapped off. Love it, I thought. Let it be mine. I took a breath.

"I'd need money, though."

I ran through the numbers again. I thought of my baby like a doll, like one in a row of dozens and dozens of fancy toy dolls, all with price tags announcing that I couldn't have them. The money was such an obvious problem that I didn't even get to thinking about any of the others most of the time. It seemed wrong to me, that money should be the difference between a baby and not-a-baby. I had a thing inside of me that I could not afford, and Laura had things inside of her that she couldn't afford not to sell, and on the other end of it there were women spending tens of thousands of dollars to buy them because they felt their own bodies had betrayed them. Any way you looked at it, where there should have been a child, there was a math problem.

"At Financial Aid they'd probably cover my tuition for the summer," I said. "But I'd need the security for an apartment, and something to live on till I could get a job. Plus money for doctors and stuff. Once I graduate I can't get school insurance anymore."

Laura turned and looked at me, and it was not exactly friendship on her face. More like resignation.

"I just got paid," she said softly. "Take it."

I didn't care right then why she was doing it: guilt, or anger, or privilege. I didn't care if she needed it or not. I didn't even have the pride to reject the first offer and make her insist. It wasn't that I'd planned it that way, and I don't know when I knew what I was doing but all of a sudden it was done and I wasn't about to feel guilty.

"All right," I said. "If you can afford that."

She pulled out her checkbook, like it was nothing. I thought of telling her to stop, watched her loopy cursive fill the s.p.a.ce of the check. I wondered what I'd say to Rafael, what I'd do when the money ran out, what Laura and I would say to each other for the last few months of what was suddenly my last semester of college. I thought of telling her to stop, but like I was afraid of undoing the knot of cells growing into something alive inside of me, I was afraid of undoing what was happening.

When she handed me the check, I folded it into my wallet and didn't say a word. I didn't think I deserved it, not really, nor did I think she owed me. I thought the universe was a whole series of unfulfilled transactions, checks waiting to be cashed, opportunities waiting to be cashed in, even if they were opportunities made of your own flesh. I thought it was a horrible world to bring a child into, but an even worse world in which to stay a child. I left my number lying on the seat and stood up and walked out to Broadway, Laura behind me. I watched my feet as though they belonged to someone else. I looked up at the sky, feeling grown and full of something sad and aching to be known.

Someone Ought to Tell Her There's Nowhere to Go

Georgie knew before he left that Lanae would be f.u.c.king Kenny by the time he got back to Virginia. At least she'd been up front about it, not like all those other husbands and wives and girlfriends and boyfriends, shined up and cheesing for the five-o'clock news on the day their lovers shipped out and then jumping into bed with each other before the plane landed. When he'd told Lanae about his orders, she'd just lifted an eyebrow, shook her head, and said, "I told you not to join the G.o.dd.a.m.n army." Before he left for basic training, she'd stopped seeing him, stopped taking his calls, even, said, "I'm not waiting for you to come home dead, and I'm d.a.m.n sure not having Esther upset when you get killed."

That was how he knew she loved him at least a little bit; she'd brought the kid into it. Lanae wasn't like some single mothers, always throwing their kid up in people's faces. She was fiercely protective of Esther, kept her apart from everything, even him, and they'd been in each other's life so long that he didn't believe for a second that she was really through with him this time. Still, he missed her when everyone else was getting loved visibly and he was standing there with no one to say good-bye to. Even her love was strategic, G.o.dd.a.m.n her, and he felt more violently toward the men he imagined touching her in his absence than toward the imaginary enemy they'd been war-gaming against. On the plane he had stared out of the window at more water than he'd ever seen at once, and thought of the look on her face when he said good-bye.

She had come to his going-away party like it was nothing, showed up in skintight jeans and that cheap but sweet-smelling baby powder perfume and spent a good twenty minutes exchanging pleasantries with his mother before she even said h.e.l.lo to him. She'd brought a cake that she'd picked up from the bakery at the second restaurant she worked at, told one of the church ladies she was thinking of starting her own cake business. Really? Really? Georgie thought, before she winked at him and put a silver fingernail to her lips. Lanae could cook a little, but the only time he remembered her trying to bake she'd burnt a cake she'd made from boxed mix and then tried to cover it up with pink frosting. Esther wouldn't touch the thing, and he'd run out and gotten a Minnie Mouse ice cream cake from the grocery store. He'd found himself silently listing these nonsecrets, the things about Lanae he was certain of: she couldn't bake, there was a thin but awful scar running down the back of her right calf, her eyes were amber in the right light. Georgie thought, before she winked at him and put a silver fingernail to her lips. Lanae could cook a little, but the only time he remembered her trying to bake she'd burnt a cake she'd made from boxed mix and then tried to cover it up with pink frosting. Esther wouldn't touch the thing, and he'd run out and gotten a Minnie Mouse ice cream cake from the grocery store. He'd found himself silently listing these nonsecrets, the things about Lanae he was certain of: she couldn't bake, there was a thin but awful scar running down the back of her right calf, her eyes were amber in the right light.

They'd grown up down the street from each other. He could not remember a time before they were friends, but she'd had enough time to get married and divorced and produce a little girl before he thought to kiss her for the first time, only a few months before he got his orders. In fairness, she was not exactly beautiful; it had taken some time for him to see past that. Her face was pleasant but plain, her features so simple that if she were a cartoon she'd seem deliberately underdrawn. She was not big, exactly, but pillowy, like if you pressed your hand into her it would keep sinking and sinking because there was nothing solid to her. It bothered him to think of Kenny putting his hand on her that way, Kenny who'd once a.s.signed numbers to all the waitresses at Ruby Tuesday based on the quality of their a.s.ses, Kenny who'd probably never be gentle enough to notice what her body did while it was his.

It wasn't Lanae who met him at the airport when he landed back where he'd started. It was his mother, looking small in the crowd of people waiting for arrivals. Some of them were bored, leaning up against the wall like they were in line for a restaurant table; others peered around the gate like paparazzi waiting for the right shot to happen. His mother was up in front, squinting at him like she wasn't sure he was real. She was in her nurse's uniform, and it made her look a little ominous. When he came through security she ran up to hug him so he couldn't breathe. "Baby," she said, then asked how the connecting flight had been, and then talked about everything but what mattered. Perhaps after all of his letters home she was used to unanswered questions, because she didn't ask any, not about the war, not about his health, not about the conditions of his honorable discharge or what he intended to do upon his return to civilian society. who met him at the airport when he landed back where he'd started. It was his mother, looking small in the crowd of people waiting for arrivals. Some of them were bored, leaning up against the wall like they were in line for a restaurant table; others peered around the gate like paparazzi waiting for the right shot to happen. His mother was up in front, squinting at him like she wasn't sure he was real. She was in her nurse's uniform, and it made her look a little ominous. When he came through security she ran up to hug him so he couldn't breathe. "Baby," she said, then asked how the connecting flight had been, and then talked about everything but what mattered. Perhaps after all of his letters home she was used to unanswered questions, because she didn't ask any, not about the war, not about his health, not about the conditions of his honorable discharge or what he intended to do upon his return to civilian society.

She was all weather and light gossip through the parking lot. "The cherry blossoms are beautiful this year," she was saying as they rode down the Dulles Toll Road, and if it had been Lanae saying something like that he would have said Cherry blossoms? Are you f.u.c.king kidding me? Cherry blossoms? Are you f.u.c.king kidding me? but because it was his mother things kept up like that all the way around 495 and back to Alexandria. It was still too early in the morning for real rush-hour traffic, and they made it in twenty minutes. The house was as he'd remembered it: old, the bright robin's egg blue of the paint cheerful in a painfully false way, like a woman wearing red lipstick and layers of foundation caked over wrinkles. Inside, the surfaces were all coated with a thin layer of dust, and it made him feel guilty his mother had to do all of this housework herself, even though when he was home he'd almost never cleaned anything. but because it was his mother things kept up like that all the way around 495 and back to Alexandria. It was still too early in the morning for real rush-hour traffic, and they made it in twenty minutes. The house was as he'd remembered it: old, the bright robin's egg blue of the paint cheerful in a painfully false way, like a woman wearing red lipstick and layers of foundation caked over wrinkles. Inside, the surfaces were all coated with a thin layer of dust, and it made him feel guilty his mother had to do all of this housework herself, even though when he was home he'd almost never cleaned anything.

He'd barely put his bags down when she was off to work, still not able to take the whole day off. She left with promises of dinner later. In her absence it struck him that it had been a long time since he'd heard silence. In the desert there was always noise. When it was not the radio, or people talking, or shouting, or shouting at him, it was the dull purr of machinery providing a constant background soundtrack, or the rhythmic pulse of sniper fire. Now it was a weekday in the suburbs and the lack of human presence made him anxious. He turned the TV on and off four times, flipping through talk shows and soap operas and thinking this was something like what had happened to him: someone had changed the channel on his life. The abruptness of the transition overrode the need for social protocol, so without calling first he got into the old Buick and drove to Lanae's, the feel of the leather steering wheel strange beneath his hands. The brakes screeched every time he stepped on them, and he realized he should have asked his mother how the car was running before taking it anywhere, but the problem seemed appropriate: he had started this motion, and the best thing to do was not to stop it.

Kenny's car outside of Lanae's duplex did not surprise him, nor did it deter him. He parked in one of the visitor s.p.a.ces and walked up to ring the bell.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h! What's good?" Kenny asked when he answered the door, as if Georgie had been gone for a year on a beer run.

"I'm back," he said, unnecessarily. "How you been, man?"

Kenny looked like he'd been Kenny. He'd always been a big guy, but he was getting soft around the middle. His hair was freshly cut in a fade, and he was already in uniform, wearing a shiny gold name tag that said KENNETH, and beneath that, MANAGER, which had not been true when Georgie left. Georgie could smell the apartment through the door, Lanae's perfume and floral air freshener not masking that something had been cooked with grease that morning.

"Not, bad," he said. "I've been holding it down over here while you been holding it down over there. Glad you came back in one piece."

Kenny gave him a one-armed hug, and for a minute Georgie felt like an a.s.shole for wanting to say, Holding it down? You've been serving people KFC. Holding it down? You've been serving people KFC.

"Look, man, I was on my way to work, but we'll catch up later, all right?" Kenny said, moving out of the doorway to reveal Lanae standing there, still in the T-shirt she'd slept in. Her hair was pulled back in a head scarf, and it made her eyes look huge. Kenny was out the door with a nod and a shoulder clasp, not so much as a backward glance at Lanae standing there. The casual way he left them alone together bothered Georgie. He wasn't sure if Kenny didn't consider him a threat or simply didn't care what Lanae did; either way he was annoyed.

"Hey," said Lanae, her voice soft, and he realized he hadn't thought this visit through any further than that.

"Hi," he said, and looked at the clock on the wall, which was an hour behind schedule. He thought to mention this, then thought against it.

"Georgie!" Esther yelled through the silence, running out of the kitchen, her face sticky with pancake syrup. He was relieved she remembered his name. Her hair was done in pigtails with little pink barrettes on them; they matched her socks and skirt. Lanae could win a prize for coordinating things.

"Look at you, little ma," he said, scooping her up and kissing her cheek. "Look how big you got."

"Look how bad she got, you mean," Lanae said. "Tell Georgie how you got kicked out of day care."

"I got kicked out of day care," Esther said matter-of-factly. Georgie tried not to laugh. Lanae rolled her eyes.

"She hides too much," she said. "Every time they take the kids somewhere, this one hides, and they gotta hold everyone up looking for her. Last time they found her, she scratched the teacher who tried to get her back on the bus. She can't pull this kind of stuff when she starts kindergarten."

Lanae sighed, and reached up to put her fingers in her hair, but all it did was push the scarf back. Take it off, he wanted to say. Take it off, and put clothes on. He wanted it to feel like real life again, like their life again, and with him dressed and wearing cologne for the first time in months, and her standing there in a scarf and T-shirt, all shiny Vaselined thighs and gold toenails, they looked mismatched.

"Look, have some breakfast if you want it," she said. "I'll be out in a second. I need to take a shower, and then I gotta work on finding this one a babysitter before my shift starts."

"When does it start?"

"Two."

"I can watch her. I'm free."

Lanae gave him an appraising look. "What are are you doing these days?" you doing these days?"

"Today, nothing."

"Tomorrow?"

"Don't know yet."

"I talked to your mom a little while ago," Lanae said, which was her way of telling him she knew. Of course she knew. How could Lanae not know, gossipy mother or no gossipy mother?

"I'm fine," he said. "I'll take good care of her."

"If Dee doesn't get back to me, you might have to," said Lanae. She walked off and Georgie made himself at home in her kitchen, grabbing a plate from the dish rack and taking the last of the eggs and bacon from the pans on the stove. Esther sat beside him and colored as he poured syrup over his breakfast.

"So, what do you keep hiding from?" he asked.