“You don’t gotta help,” she says, her voice a steady monotone, only breaking with a slight drawl. I knew Shauna when we were more girls than women, shortly after she came out here from Memphis to live with her sister and her aunt, and I almost forgot the sweet homesound that creeps out her lips.
“Don’t got nothing else to do.” I glance inside the crib, a small mound of cloth holding the infant. “How old?”
“She about to be two months.”
I nod, not really sure what else there is to say about the baby’s smallness. I think about the photo from the funeral home and wonder if Shauna ever thinks about how easy it is to stop breathing, to be something and then be gone, to love someone and disappear.
Shauna moves to pick up her child and walks to the couch, her sweatpants rolled down around her hips with her belly bulging. She sits, sinking in deeper until she’s cocooned in the couch’s soft red, like her baby is cocooned in her breasts. Shauna swiftly pulls her bra to the side and the child latches, sucking in deep like she was starving and is relearning how to be alive, how to feed. I think about looking away, but it doesn’t seem like Shauna minds and the infant’s lips are fascinating, the way they pulse. Shauna’s eyes are still on her girl, sucking so hard I wonder how she isn’t out of breath. Shauna’s free nipple is dry and scabbed, but there is no evidence of this pain on her face, no worry of being cracked open.
“Kiara.” I don’t remember the last time she said my full name. I look at her, the lumps beneath her eyes heavy. “Don’t get caught up in their shit.”
She’s still staring at her child, like the baby will choke if she looks away, so I’m not sure what she’s talking about until the beat picks up and vibrates through my feet.
“You didn’t have to have no baby.”
Her head whips toward me. “You don’t know nothing about what I’ve had to do. I’m just doing you a favor by telling you now not to give it all up for them.” Her child stops suckling and begins to scream, and Shauna is on her feet, returning to her moaning, waiting for someone to ask, for one of the men to look at her, to wonder what’s wrong.
Mama used to tell me that blood is everything, but I think we’re all out here unlearning that sentiment, scraping our knees and asking strangers to patch us back up. I don’t say goodbye to Shauna and she doesn’t even turn around to watch me leave, to head back out to a sky that sunk into deep blue while my brother asked me to do the one thing I know I shouldn’t, the one thing Shauna cared enough to warn me about: hollow myself out for another person who ain’t gonna give a shit when I’m empty.
The café lady sticks the pen behind her ear where her undercut fades from blue to hot pink and then blond, and she smiles the same way that the mean girls used to smile before they said I couldn’t sit at their table in elementary school, like she’s waiting for a punch or some kind of prize.
“We really can’t do anything if you don’t have a résumé.”
A group of twenty-year-olds all wearing matching Converse swing in through the front door of the café and the undercut woman waves them in, grabbing menus from where she stands behind the cash register. Even the way she picks up the menus makes me want to slap the pen from behind her ear, her fingers pinching like the menus are too dirty for her to touch.
“I don’t have nothing to put on a résumé, so don’t really make sense for me to bring a blank page, do it?” My hands are resting on the glass counter, the sweet potato pie symmetrical and staring up at me, taunting.
The woman moves toward where the twenty-year-olds sit at a corner booth, handing them menus, returning to grab a water pitcher. The smile has faded, leaving only the grimace that comes before and after the mean girls tell you to get the fuck away. Funny how the playground follows us.
“Look, I don’t have anything to give my manager and, honestly, I think it’s highly unlikely we would hire someone with such limited experience.” She pauses, pouts. “Maybe try Walgreens?”
When I step away, I make sure to make a fist and pound lightly on the glass display counter. Not hard enough to risk breaking it, but enough that the twenty-somethings look over at me with fear in their eyes before I swing out the door and back onto the street.
I tried Walgreens last week, CVS the week before. Even tried the MetroPCS that shares its building with the smoke shop nobody ever steps foot in unless they looking for a deal or a phone cheap enough to last them until they get out of town.