The Hard Count(57)

13





“Mom? I can’t find my nice shoes!”

On my knees, I burrow into my closet, tossing loose clothing from the floor. It’s picture day at school, and I have one pair of nice shoes—the ones I wear to church.

Church!

I leap to my feet, remembering taking my shoes off on Sunday on the ride home. I’m sure they’re still in the back seat. I sprint down the hallway, sliding in my socks. I stop hard when I see Vincent standing in the front doorway, close to Momma.

“Vincent!” I shout, running to my brother.

“Shhhh,” my mom says, twisting to face me with a finger over her lips. She’s holding a tiny baby, bouncing lightly, and there are tears in her eyes.

Whose baby is this?

“Nico? I’d like you to meet your niece…Alyssa,” Momma says.

I step closer to see the tiniest person I’ve ever seen. She’s wrapped in a pink blanket, her mouth moving like a fish’s, her hand struggling to pull loose from the blanket.

“She’s hungry,” Momma says. She looks up at Vincent. “Do you have a bottle for her?”

My brother is shaking. He balls his fists and pushes them into his eyes.

“I don’t know. I…I don’t know how to do any of this. And she just left. This morning, I got up, and she was gone. And I don’t know how to do any of this,” Vincent says.

He lets his hands fall and his eyes dart from me to our mom to the tiny baby, and his chest begins to shake. My brother starts to cry, and he covers his mouth with his hand while our mom bounces the baby lightly and whispers softly in the tiny girl’s face.

“It’s okay, isn’t it Alyssa?” she says.

The baby…my niece…starts to make more noise, almost like hard hiccups. And in a second, her face turns red and her lips curl down as she begins to cry.

“Vincent, bring the bag. I’ll show you,” my mom says.

She carries the baby into the kitchen and tells my brother to sit in a chair. She hands him the baby—his baby—and he holds her close to his chest, his eyes almost frozen open. The little girl looks so breakable in his giant arms and against his chest. His arms are covered in grease marks, and the number tattoos he had before are marked over with designs and pictures.

“What happened to those?” I ask.

My brother glances to me quickly, then looks back at his child. My mom begins shaking a bottle, spilling a small amount on her arm. She wipes the drops off on the front of her shirt then hands the bottle to my brother, guiding his hand as they both work the tiny tip into Alyssa’s mouth. She starts to suck on it instantly, her cheeks pushing in and out, and the look of it makes me giggle.

“It’s pretty cute when she eats, isn’t it, Nico?” my mom says.

“Yeah,” I say, dragging my chair closer so I can watch.

We’re all silent for more than a minute, and then Alyssa makes a suckling sound that makes me laugh again. Vincent laughs with me, and he looks up, into my eyes.

“She’s amazing,” he says.

“I love her,” I say, bending forward and pressing my lips on her tiny warm forehead.

“I love her, too,” my brother says, his eyes back on his daughter.

“We’ll figure this out, Mijo. Come home,” my mom says.

My brother watches Alyssa in his arms, adjusting his feet under the chair and moving her even closer to his body. He nods.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”





14





There are some sounds that simply never happen in the Prescott house on a Saturday morning. We don’t hear a lot of pots and pans, for example, so when I catch the first few clanks, my eyes pop open instantly as if to alert the rest of my body that a foreign intruder has broken into the house.

Clank-clank-clank!

I jolt to a sitting position at the sound of a heavy pan careening off the counter onto the floor. At least, that’s what I think that sound is. It goes quiet, and I wait for another sign, but nothing happens until my nose recognizes the most magnificent scent.

Bacon.

I slide out of bed and crack open my door, leaning forward to listen closer. Then I hear something even more foreign.

Whistling.

I rub my hands over my eyes and yawn, letting my feet slide down the hallway, pausing at my brother’s door. I touch it with my fingers, relieved that it’s closed. He must be inside. He came home.

Quietly, I slide the rest of the way down the hall to the very front of the house, the blinds all still shut. I squint, looking at the clock over the refrigerator—five o’clock. My dad has four pans going—one on each burner—and he has something crackling in each. I was right about the bacon, but he also has some peppers and onions, sausage and eggs. The smell is surprisingly amazing, and I take a seat at the breakfast bar, letting my chin fall into my hands while my feet kick at the rail underneath.

“Whatcha doin?” I ask, and my dad jumps, his back to me. His eyes are red, and I doubt he slept at all last night.

“Do you know that I used to want to be a chef?” he says.

I bunch my lips and furrow my brow.

“I’m being serious. In college, when I met your mom. I had this dream that we would graduate Alabama, and then I’d head to culinary school,” my dad says, picking up the pan with eggs and rolling it from side-to-side with his wrist before giving it the perfect flick, folding the egg in half. He chuckles at it and grins. “Still got it.”