The Leavers(3)

THEY LIVED IN A small apartment in a big building, and Deming’s mother wanted a house with more rooms. Wanted quiet. But Deming didn’t mind the noise, liked hearing their neighbors argue in English and Spanish and other languages he didn’t know, liked the thuds of feet and the scraping back of chairs, salsa and merengue and hip-hop, football games and Wheel of Fortune spilling from the bottoms of doors and through ceiling cracks, radiator pipes clanging along to running toilets. He heard other mothers yelling at other kids. This building contained an entire town.

There was no mention of Florida over dinner. Deming and Michael watched George Lopez, followed by Veronica Mars, as Deming’s mother folded last week’s laundry. Leon was at the slaughterhouse, nightshift. Leon’s sister Vivian, Michael’s mother, was still at work. Deming lay against one side of the couch, legs stretched out to the middle, Michael on the other side, a mirror image, still recalling Travis Bhopa. “He went down hard!” Michael’s heels pounded the cushions. “He had it coming to him!” What if the rooms were so big in Florida they could no longer hear one another?

His mother was rubbing lotion into her hands. “You’re my home now,” she said. Earlier, he had volunteered to get her cigarettes at the bodega and shoplifted a Milky Way, then gave half to Michael when she wasn’t looking. “Badass, Deming.” Michael chomped his half in one bite and looked at Deming with such admiration that Deming knew it would be fine. As long as Michael came with them, as long as he wasn’t alone, they could move. His mother wouldn’t find out about detention, and he and Michael could make new friends. He pictured beaches, sand, ocean. Wearing shorts at Christmas.

Late at night, early in the morning, Deming woke to a smack on the mattress across the bedroom, Leon and his mother whispering as Michael snored on his back. “Go fuck yourself,” his mother said. The snow shovel trucks rolled down the street, scraping the pavement clean.

Despite his efforts he fell back asleep, and when the alarm rang for school Leon was still sleeping, Michael in the shower, his mother in the kitchen in her work clothes, black pants and black shirt, half-smoked cigarette on the edge of an empty jar. The ash grew soft and long, collapsed.

“When are we moving?”

The radiator pinged black dots. His mother’s hair fuzzed up in a static halo, her glasses smudged and greasy. “We’re not,” she said. “Now hurry or you’ll be late for school.”

THE DAY SUSTAINED ITS afterglow following the scrapping of Florida—no more beaches, though—even when Travis Bhopa said “I’ll kill you” in a vampiric accent outside the cafeteria, although he’d said weirder things to other kids, like I’ll burn down your building and eat your ears. Travis lacked allies; he had no backup. After school Deming and Michael walked home together, unlocked the apartment with the keys their mothers had given them, exhumed a block of rice from the refrigerator and a package of cold-cuts, moist pink circles of ham. They were adept at making meals even their friends found disgusting. Later, these meals would be the ones Deming missed the most: fried rice and salami showered with garlic powder from a big plastic bottle, instant noodles steeped in ketchup topped with American cheese and Tabasco.

They ate on the couch, which took up most of the living room, a slippery beast printed with orange and red flowers that made zippy noises when you attempted to sit and instead slid. It was also Vivian’s bed. His mother hated it, but Deming saw worlds in its patterns, stared at the colors until he got cross-eyed and the flowers took on different shapes, fish tank, candies, tree tops in late October, and he envisioned himself underwater, swimming against the surface of the fabric. “When I manage my own salon, the first thing I’m going to do is get rid of that thing,” his mother would say. “You come home one day, it’ll be gone.”

Four to eight was the TV dead zone, talk shows and local news. There was a Geometry test tomorrow that Michael didn’t need to study for and Deming wasn’t going to study for unless his mother found out about it. He got sleepy thinking about the worksheet they had done in class today, on which he’d scribbled made-up answers next to triangles and other assorted shapes. What is the measure of angle C? Fifty hotdogs. When it was seven and his mother wasn’t home, he figured she was working late, that he had been granted a Geometry reprieve.

Vivian came home before Jeopardy ended, trailed by the scent of ammonia. She sewed at the kitchen table, piecemeal orders from a factory, but lately she had also been cleaning apartments in Riverdale.

“Polly’s not here? No one’s made dinner?”

“We had ham,” Michael said.

“That’s not dinner. Deming, your mother was supposed to get food on the way home.”

“She’s at work,” Deming said.

Vivian opened the refrigerator and shut it. “Fine. I’m taking a shower.”

When Leon returned it was eight o’clock. “Your mother’s supposed to be home already. Guess that new boss made her stay late.” He bought frozen pizzas for dinner, and the sausage balls resembled boils but were oily and delicious. Deming ate three slices. Mama never got bodega pizza.

Leon’s cell phone rang. He took the call in the hallway, and Deming put away the dishes and waited for him to return. “Was that Mama? Can I talk to her?”

“It was her friend Didi.” Leon squeezed his phone in his hand like he was wringing a wet towel.