Not Perfect(28)
“. . . for six days, I think it was,” a man said, clearing his throat. Was he crying? “We were just thinking we would have to go to the emergency room and fake something, or not even have to fake anything, since Daniel was really starting to feel bad. His stomach was distended, and he said he thought he might throw up, but we were going to say something worse—something like he fell, or just something so we could settle in for a few hours and hopefully he could get a meal once they figured out he was pretty much okay. Maybe we all could—some hospitals have sandwiches and snacks for the parents when they wait.” He said this as though he were saying some hospitals had unicorns and gave out winning lottery tickets. Tabitha really looked at him now. He was tall with dark, neat hair. His yellow shirt had a stain on it, but his jeans looked clean. If she walked by him on the street, she wouldn’t think anything of him, she wouldn’t think he was starving. “That was the lowest point. Then we got some government assistance and that helped so much. And now this. I think everything is about to turn around for us.”
Tabitha felt a moment of terror and regret, all mixed up into one bad feeling. Terror because she wasn’t that far away from that moment of not being able to feed everyone, of having to fake an injury to go to a hospital for a meal. But no, it will never come to that for us, she told herself. She would ask for help before it came to that, wouldn’t she? If it really came down to it, she would ask Rachel for help. And the regret because how was it possible that she was stealing from these people? She touched her bag and felt the warmth of the peppers and the hard glass of the jar. She could sneak back in there right now and return everything, but she didn’t want to. They’d worked hard, maybe she could think of it like payment, though she knew that minimized their roles as volunteers and do-gooders. She thought of being able to offer Fern cinnamon sugar on her toast tomorrow, and she decided she didn’t care. She’d just keep it.
“Hey,” Nancy came up next to her, and Tabitha immediately worried she’d smell the peppers. She shifted her bag to her other shoulder, the one farther away from Nancy. “That’s one amazing boy you have there. And girl, of course, but Levi is really something. I rarely see teenage boys follow through the way he has with me, or jump in the way he did today.”
“He is amazing,” Tabitha said, letting a good feeling replace the bad one, even if it was just for one minute. She glanced at Levi. He sat at one of the tables between two boys and laughed as one of the kids poked at him. She scanned the room for Fern and saw her sitting on the floor rubbing her knee. Tabitha shifted her deadline for calling the pediatrician. If it wasn’t better by Wednesday, she’d call. She meant it.
They helped clean up and got back to the car. They hadn’t eaten anything, and Tabitha felt strange about pulling the peppers out of her bag. Better to put them away at home and serve them like she had made them. She didn’t think the kids would buy it, or forget that they were the exact same peppers they’d helped serve, but at least there’d be some distance. It took an extra minute for Fern to bend her knee and get it inside the car before pulling the door shut, but she didn’t say anything or complain about it. Tabitha waited for the kids to say they were starving—they must be, she was—but neither said anything.
“So, I was thinking,” Tabitha said. She had been considering offering this since talking to Nancy about what an amazing kid Levi was. He deserved a treat, and she could put a little something on her credit card—just this once. “I was thinking we could go for pizza on the way home.”
“Really?” Fern asked.
“Cool,” Levi said.
Tabitha planned to find any cheap, corner pizza place where you could probably get a large pie for fifteen dollars. But now she thought, as long as they were doing it, they might as well really do it. First, she considered Tacconelli’s. She took out her phone, which she’d been worrying about lately. She knew all their plans were on Stuart’s credit card, it was an automatic monthly charge, and she hadn’t heard anything about the charges not going through, but she worried that at some point service would stop. She held the phone in her hand for a second, then she typed in Tacconelli’s. The first picture that came up looked amazing. She was just about to tell the kids when she saw the Cash Only detail at the bottom of the page.
“How about Nomad?” she asked, and the kids cheered in unison. She drove back into Center City and continued south to one of their favorite pizza places, one that took credit cards. And she didn’t try to manage them, she just let them order. A movie about animals played on the big screen at the front of the dining room; Tabitha ordered an icy beer. They ate pepperoni pizza and a special pie with creamy sweet corn. Tabitha wished they could stay there forever. The bill was eighty-four dollars after adding a 17 percent tip—15 percent seemed cheap and 20 percent extravagant, so 17 percent it was.
Fern didn’t even seem to limp that much as they headed back to the car, drove home, and finally entered the apartment, which was dark and getting darker. The stupid peppers were in her purse that whole time. There was a time when she would never eat something that was left out so long, but the peppers were still slightly warm and smelled good, so she put them in the fridge. She put the cinnamon sugar on the shelf where they used to keep it when they had plenty of it, when it was hard to find room to fit everything. Now there was plenty of room. The kids went to sleep, and she settled into bed thinking it was a good day, maybe the best they’d had in months.