Don't Fail Me Now(13)
“Oh.” I don’t know what else to say.
“So, no, if I was in jail I don’t believe she would bail me out,” Aunt Sam sighs, throwing her half-finished second cigarette on the pavement, still burning. “I believe she would tell me how hard she was trying to come up with the money, and then she’d disappear for days, only to come back looking like she got run over by a truck with some story about some terrible something that happened that managed to drain whatever she’d managed to save.”
Mom’s bad luck is a running joke between Cass and me. She’s always losing her wallet, getting duped into signing up for memberships she doesn’t want, and bitching about bills for things that never seem to actually get fixed, like the light in our front hall, which has been out since the upstairs toilet overflowed four years ago. I know I can’t always believe what she says, but that doesn’t change the fact that she raised me and that, unlike some people in our family, I won’t give up on her.
“I still want to help,” I say.
Aunt Sam looks me straight in the eyes. “I don’t care,” she snaps. “I won’t let you.”
“You can’t tell me what to do,” I say, regretting the next sentence before it’s even out of my mouth but unable to stop myself. “You’re not my mother.”
“Tell that to Miss Child Protective Services,” she cries. “If it weren’t for me, you’d be in some group home right now.” I bite down on my tongue so hard I taste blood. “I want a $300 down payment tomorrow night,” she continues, “and if I don’t get it, I will be more than happy to escort you back to the police station and let them put you wherever they see fit. Understand?”
I nod silently, fighting back tears. She’s probably bluffing, just taking out her anger at Mom on me, but I can’t afford to find out. Despite everything we’ve already been through, Cass, Denny, and I still have each other. It’s the only thing we have left, and I won’t risk losing it, even if it means letting Mom sit in jail for another few weeks until I can figure out a new plan.
“Good,” Aunt Sam says with a self-satisfied smile. “In that case, welcome home, Michelle.”
THREE
Tuesday Night, Part 1
Baltimore, MD
Today at school I learned that whispers, which don’t even pass through the vocal chords, can be deafening. And the whispers were by far the nicest of it; three different guys thought it would be hilarious and original to make a big show of asking me if my mom could score for them. My friends were barely better. I can’t decide which is worse: Yi-Lo hugging me and confessing that her dad had recently struggled with quitting smoking, or Noemi over-apologizing for being mean about my hair, adding, “Seriously . . . that’s some Lifetime Original Movie shit.”
After my last class ends at two twenty, I practically sprint through the parking lot, desperate for the comfort of the closest thing I have to a home now, also known as Baltimore’s inner-city outpost of the country’s sixth-most popular fast-food chain, modeled to look like some kind of southwestern adobe hacienda by way of Legoland. It would be depressing under any other circumstances, but right now the Ellwood Park Taco Bell, which sits on a slow stretch of highway between an auto-body shop and a much more popular McDonald’s, feels like a five-star spa (or at least what I fantasize a five-star spa must feel like, which is getting a foot rub while lying on a bed made out of marshmallows).
I’ve been working here since I turned sixteen, doing everything from stocking napkins to washing floors to filling burritos to working the registers, and I got promoted to shift leader about eight months ago, which means I get to boss around the newer people and micromanage the soda machine so the Coke comes out perfect, not too watery or syrupy. Even though we’re in a bad neighborhood, we’ve got some good Yelp reviews going, and my manager, Yvonne, gets really competitive about beating the Taco Bell down in Lakeland. She was a high school track star back before her brother got shot and she had to start working full time to help pay for his medical bills. Apparently he’s still in a wheelchair. I’ve never seen him, but she takes home a bag of food for him every night. That’s probably why she’s so cool about me having Cass and Denny around while I work. Yvonne knows what it’s like to have people depend on you.
My shifts at this point are comfortingly predictable. From four to five we get a lot of kids, either high school age or younger ones who stop in for an after-school snack with a parent. This is by far the loudest hour, and food gets thrown on a regular basis. Afterward there is always at least one urinal full of broken taco shells, but one of the perks of being shift leader is that I can make someone else scoop them out. Then from five to six it’s Early Bird Hour, which means a lot of old people who come in alone and eat slowly while staring out the window. This overlaps somewhat with Family Circus, which goes from five thirty to seven and is mostly four-to six-person groups with your standard mom, dad, and assortment of children ranging in age from infants to teenagers. By that time the dinner rush is busy enough that I need to be on a register, and so I get to spend ninety minutes staring out at people who have the kind of life I want. You’d think families that eat dinner at a Taco Bell instead of sitting around a table at home like some Norman Rockwell painting would be kind of sad, but actually most of the ones that come in are really happy and playful. It’s a treat for them. The moms don’t freak out when a drink spills, and the dads make nachos into airplanes or show their kids how to drip water onto straw wrappers to make them wriggle like snakes. I always try to time my breaks so they happen during Family Circus. I can only take so much at a time.