Always Happy Hour: Stories(16)

I sit on the edge and dangle my legs in the water. It’s a public pool in a park full of concrete. There are empty flowerpots and bathrooms with metal mirrors like they have at rest stops. The baby is in my arms, making me sweat. I lift her above my head and she laughs so I pretend like I’m eating her hand and she pulls the sunglasses off my face and drops them in the water.

Diamond paddles over with her Dora the Explorer floaties to fetch them. She hands them to me and I wipe the lenses on my shirt while she moves up and down on my foot.

“It’s impolite to hump someone’s foot,” I say, and she shows me her ear as if I misspoke.

In the shallow end, Angel holds Tasia’s head under water. They call each other motherfucker and then they’re calling each other baldhead and cross-eye and scarface, making motherfucker seem generous. Monique and I look at each other and look away. Sometimes she’ll pull them aside and explain hell—how hot it is there, how all the ice cream melts before you can get your lips on it—but today we don’t care. I want to lie in the grass under a tree and take a nap but there’s only a rectangle of concrete surrounded by basketball courts and parking lots, Monique sitting under the single umbrella reading a romance novel.

“I’m gone take these off,” Diamond says, yanking at her floaties.

“You’ll have to get out if you take them off.”

“I know how to swim.”

“I know you do,” I say, “I know,” though she doesn’t know how. They imagine all sorts of lives for themselves other than the ones they’re living and I try to let them have them.

When we get back to the cottage, I adjust the temperature control with a butter knife. I put soap and toilet paper in all of the bathrooms and then sit on the couch with the girls to watch The Little Mermaid. They are despondent, listless. I ask Tasia what she wants to be when she grows up and she tells me a secretary or a waitress at Outback Steakhouse and I don’t give her the speech I usually give them, where I tell them they can be doctors and lawyers and astronauts, where I tell them success has no bounds. I should try to mix it up a bit, anyhow—it’s not as if I could be a doctor or a lawyer or an astronaut, either. I took the LSAT but I did it out of a sense of duty, to prove I wouldn’t do well on it. There are other things besides doctors and lawyers and astronauts. And how many astronauts even exist in the world? A hundred? Five hundred? Perhaps there are thousands upon thousands of them, all waiting to go up into space.

“Who wants a snack?” I ask, and they perk up.

They follow me into the kitchen. Tasia opens the refrigerator and takes out a brick of government cheese.

“Ask first,” I say. There’s no door to the kitchen but they’re not supposed to cross the invisible line unless given permission. They’re not supposed to open the refrigerator or get a cup of water. I think about a border-crossing documentary I watched a few nights ago and how a man claimed he didn’t believe in borders, how stupid I thought that was. It didn’t matter if you didn’t believe in them—other people believed in them.

I pass out graham crackers and plastic tumblers of Kool-Aid and we go outside while Monique feeds the baby. I try pushing three of them at once, but Diamond is angry because I’m not pushing her high enough. She becomes more and more upset until I finally give up and go inside and get a chair, sit by the door with my book.

She throws her body to the ground while I ignore her, and then she comes over and climbs into my lap.

“Why do you have to get so dirty?” I ask, brushing her knees. She twirls a finger around a strand of my hair. I wait for her to yank but she just twirls and twirls and I think about the first time I took her home, parked the van in my driveway and introduced her to my husband. We sat on the couch and ate cold pizza.

“Ooh, that nasty,” she says, grabbing the book out of my hand. On the cover, two people are making out in the backseat of a car. They are thin and young and beautiful and the picture somehow implies that passion requires these things, that the rest of us are going to miss out.

“It’s not nasty. They’re just kissing.”

“You nasty,” she says. I kiss her forehead. My boss stands in the doorway and asks if she can see me for a minute.

“Sure,” I say, lifting Diamond off my lap. I follow her back to her office, a Styrofoam to-go box open on her desk: fried chicken and mashed potatoes and green beans, a soggy-bottomed roll on top. She eats a wing as she tells me how much money it’s costing us to keep Diamond. “Each month, the state gives us less for her care,” she says. I look at pictures of her grandson, the framed certificates on the walls. She wants me to start collecting my own certificates—there’s a weeklong food service conference next month where I will learn how to weigh and measure, what constitutes a serving of protein. Where I will make friends with cafeteria ladies from all over the state.

“I found her a home where she’ll be the only child,” she says. “The woman’s specially trained to deal with problem children.” We both know Diamond isn’t the kind of child anyone can be trained for, but I don’t say this. She puts a wing down and picks up a thigh.

I find Diamond in her room, sitting on the bed she doesn’t sleep in.

“You’re leaving,” I say. “We have to pack your stuff.”

I fold her shirts and dresses while she kicks her toys into a pile. I haven’t seen a single suitcase since I’ve been here. I think about organizing a suitcase drive—people would get behind it. I hand her a garbage bag and she tosses the toys in, each one slamming the floor, while I stack her clothes into the other bag as neatly as possible. When we’re finished, I look around the room. The eight rooms in the shelter are identical but decorated with different lamps and bedspreads, different pictures above the beds. I can’t imagine anyone else sleeping under her ladybugs.