Always Happy Hour: Stories(17)

We sit on her bed and she runs her hand up and down my arm like the black girls do sometimes, imagining what it feels like to have white skin. Nothing special, I tell them—hurts the same, bleeds.

“You pretty,” she says, digging her nails into my arm. I don’t say anything so she digs harder, her eyes all pupil.

“Thank you.”

“No, you ugly.”

“That’s not nice.”

“I’m kidding—you pretty, you pretty,” she says.

“Stop.” I push her hand away.

Diamond is preoccupied with ugly. She wants to know if she’s ugly, if I’m ugly, if the baby full of scars and fungus is ugly. I tell her we are all beautiful. I tell her we are children of God.

“Come on. You need a bath.”

As soon as I turn the water on, she’s naked and stepping into the tub. “It’s cold,” she says, cupping her vagina.

“It’s going to take a minute to fill up.”

She sits and stretches her legs, knees locked. “I want bubble bath,” she says, but there’s no more bubble bath and I’m not allowed to buy any more because it’s not essential. Bubble bath is the good ole days, I tell her, and those are over, but she hasn’t known any good ole days. I soap up a towel and hand it to her; the water turns gray as she slops it over her body.

“When’s the last time somebody washed your hair?” I ask. She shrugs. “I know it wasn’t last night, or the night before, because I bathed you.” She shrugs again and holds her nose. My coworkers don’t like me to wash her hair because all I can do is brush it back into a bushy ponytail, but they don’t want to bathe her; they don’t want to deal with her. I feel like I’m in a marriage and we have too many children and all we can do is catalogue our efforts and it all seems like too much, like more than anyone could ever expect, and we’re being grossly taken advantage of.

She swishes her head from side to side. Her hair doesn’t want to absorb water, not like mine. I squeeze some shampoo on top and soap it up and she wants me to play with her but I just want to get her out and dressed so I can do meds and clean the kitchen, so I can relax for an hour before the next shift comes on.

She stands and bends over, makes her anus pulse.

“Very nice,” I say, “lovely. Now get out.”

I bundle her in a towel and hold her like my mother used to hold me, when she called me her little papoose and rocked me before bed. I sigh and she sighs in response and I’m reminded how smart she is, too smart for a seven-year-old.


I unlock the pantry and open the medicine cabinet, shake Diamond’s bottle of Adderall to see how many are left. I started taking them occasionally—though the occasions are becoming more and more frequent—because it makes the time go faster and nobody counts; we just refill the prescriptions when they run out. Along with the Adderall, Diamond takes half a yellow pill that melts on her tongue, a tiny white one she swallows with water, and a spoonful of a pink refrigerated liquid. I’m pretty sure the pink one is for her cough, though I haven’t noticed her coughing. The kids always seem to be taking medicine for problems they don’t have.

Diamond sits in my lap while I pass out small cups of water and pills. We were given a book that describes the medications—side effects and proper dosage—and the director said we’d be tested but I knew we wouldn’t so I didn’t bother to learn them. Had there been even the vaguest possibility of a test, I’d have studied.

There’s a knock at the door and we look at each other. A few minutes later, I’m buckling her into the backseat of a blue sedan.

I sit next to her while my boss talks to the woman. “You’ll be back,” I say, though maybe she won’t this time. Maybe she’ll flourish under this specially trained foster mother. Maybe this woman will adopt her and she’ll go to college and make good grades and have a lot of friends.

I hold her hand and we sit quietly until the woman gets in her car and looks back at us. I don’t know her name, though I’ve met her a dozen times. The social workers are all pleasant and cheaply dressed and we only see them when they’re shuffling the kids around. Like the girls, I ignore them unless I need something.

“Well,” I say.

“Well,” the woman says.

“Well,” Diamond says, so I open the door.


She’s gone five days. The only difference is she has less stuff now.

She runs and jumps into my arms and I carry her around the cottage on my hip. She bucks up and down and I tell her to stop and then we sit at the kids’ table and color, occasionally looking up to comment on each other’s pictures. I color the sky red and the grass blue and Strawberry Shortcake gray but I stay within the lines. Diamond colors everything the right color but doesn’t stay within the lines. When we finish one, we tear it out, make a neat stack on the table.

“I want that one,” Diamond says, so I give her my coloring book. She looks at the picture I was working on—Strawberry Shortcake taking a bubble bath while her cat paws at a bubble—and says she doesn’t want this one, she wants another one. I sort through the shelf of coloring books she can’t reach and hand her Beauty and the Beast and Spider-Man and Blue’s Clues and they all go skidding across the floor, open-faced. Then she shoves the baby, who falls, cushioned, on her ass. The baby looks at me to confirm that something terrible has happened to her before screaming.