6. Lori
Lori
Things I learn in week one of accidentally moving in with a single dad, a six-year-old, and a baby who isn't technically mine:
Also, at twenty-five, I am a person who owns a burp cloth.
Diapers, I learn at the grocery store, come in approximately forty-two sub-categories.
I stand in front of them for a full minute before a saint of a woman with three kids under five pats my arm and whispers honey, the yellow box, trust me, the yellow box, and I would like to nominate her for sainthood.
I buy the yellow box. I love her quietly all the way home.
Jason puts me on emergency leave for the first week without me asking.
He calls me one morning — Carson tells him, seeing how overwhelmed I am — asks how the baby is, and informs me that lunch shifts are not lunch shifts without me but they manage.
Come back when you can, Kid, he says as he ends the call.
By the second week, I'm ready to come back, because the alternative is being broke with a baby and sitting still in someone else's house with my thoughts.
Tina takes Junie on shift days. The first time she shows up with a casserole dish and informs me she is staying until five so I can do the lunch rush, I say Tina, I really can't, and she says Lori, the casserole is going to get cold.
That's the end of the negotiation. I work the shift.
When I come home, Tina goes back home. Junie is asleep.
The kitchen smells like roast chicken. There's a note on the counter in her handwriting:
Last bottle at 4 p.m., down by 4:30 p.m. She likes the green giraffe. T.
Carson goes back to work on Monday. He has Friday night and the weekend at the house off.
Monday morning, he walks out in the navy department blues — patch on the sleeve, badge above his heart, hat in his hand — and the only word for what my body does watching him is treason.
A man should not be allowed to look like that and fill a uniform in all the right places, as he runs into burning buildings.
I bounce the baby and look at the ceiling so I don’t stare at his butt on his way out.
He runs the standard 24-on/48-off — twenty-four hours at the station, then forty-eight at the house, ten shifts a month, give or take.
Which means, every third day I don't see him from six in the morning until seven the next morning.
The days in between he's in this house in the loose and very low gray joggers he wears when he is not working, which is somehow worse than the uniform.
Carson and I share the house like two people running a relay neither of us signs up for.
We hand off the baby in the hallway. We hand each other coffee.
He puts gas in the truck I drive, which is Jason's, technically.
A work perk loaned to me with the job, because the diner is run by a man who notices you don't have a car before you have to mention it, and quietly hands you keys.
So Carson is, without consulting either of us about it, gassing up Jason's truck for me in his free time.
By Wednesday, I can identify visitors at the screen door by sound alone. Carson lifts the door an inch so the latch doesn't bump, making as little noise as he can. Cadie, home from school, full shoulder bumps into the door. Tina just barges in, not even trying to hide any noise.
By Thursday morning, I have a standing six-fifteen appointment with a brush.
"I want a bun like yours," Cadie says, holding the brush at my chest like a court summons.
"Mine is messy."
"That's the one I want."
So I do it. She inspects it in the hallway mirror, makes me redo the bottom because the wisp is wrong, Lori, and then she's out the door with her dad.
Later that same day, between the lunch rush dying and dinner setup, Jason catches my elbow at the pie case.
"You look better, Kid."
"Than what?"
"Than you do it in months."
That catches me off guard. Here I am, the most sleep deprived I am in my life, and my boss tells me I look well. It reminds me of the time a cowboy walks into one of the worst days of my life and takes a picture of me with my hair down.
But I also realize he’s probably noticing my dead eyes before. Has notices for a while, since the Ryan robbery.
Friday morning, Carson comes back through the kitchen for his thermos.
He's covering an overtime shift for somebody in the crew going hunting this weekend.
I'm at the counter with Junie in the crook of my arm, hair down because I haven't pinned it up yet, half a bottle gone, in a T-shirt I'm sixty-percent sure used to be his warmer shirt from whatever varsity he plays.
A small alarm goes off under my breastbone before I figure out why.
He stops in the doorway. His eyes go to me, then to the baby, then back to me.
"Morning," he says.
"Morning."
"That's a good look." Points to the WEST at the back.
"It's forty percent spit-up."
"I’m not talking about that.”
The room narrows every time he and I are the only two adults in it, and for one second I forget what household I live in.
Husband at the door. Wife at the counter. Baby in arms. The whole picture of a life I am not invited to and am pretending not to want.
Junie, with impeccable comedic timing, releases a sound from her diaper that I hear before I smell. The spell breaks like a window. Carson laughs once, picks up his thermos, kisses the top of Cadie's head on the way past, and is out the door before I stop wanting to fall through the floor.
I carry the baby down the hall to the changing pad.
Then one Wednesday, Tina calls me at 9 a.m. She says she needs help and she's picking me up at noon. The baby comes, too, she says. And bring the green giraffe that she likes.
Cadie is at school and I don’t have to pick her up until 3 p.m., so I say yes.
West Feed & Supply sits a mile out on the farm road, a long low building with a corrugated roof faded to the color of chamomile tea steeped too long, a gravel lot wide enough for trucks pulling trailers, a hand-painted sign over the door with the W done in a brand.
The smell hits before the door does: sweet feed, molasses, the green dust of alfalfa pellets, warm and yeasted, almost edible.
A cat sleeps in a folding chair by the register.
Country music plays low on a radio from a shelf.
Across the lot sits Tina's brick house, single-story, screened porch, marigolds along the front walk.
She puts me to work stacking chicken feed because, in her words, honey, you've got the back for it and I've got the talk.
Fifty-pound paper sacks. Crushed corn and the inside of a barn. I lift one onto my shoulder, slide it onto the pallet, and Tina walks Junie up and down the aisle with her on one arm and the giraffe in the other hand, easy as a woman has ever walked a baby.
"That one," she says, meaning the man whose guest room I'm currently living in, "follows his daddy around like a duckling.
Can hardly read until he was seven but he knows every truck part by name.
His daddy teaches him to drive on the back roads at fifteen, says the boy needs a job and the truck needs a driver. Isn't wrong about either."
I haul another sack and listen. Tina is not a woman who needs help holding a conversation.
"He is a quiet baby," she goes on. "The quiet ones are the ones that worry you. The screamers, you know what's going on with them. The quiet ones, you wonder what they're cooking up in there. He turns out to be like his daddy, all the way through."
I drag the back of my wrist across my forehead. Green dust has settles into my elbow creases. My shirt is sticking to my back in November.
"Cadie's first steps," Tina says, "are in the feed store, would you believe. Up against the shelves of pig pellets. The first word is truck and her second is no. I told Carson he was raising a Texan. He doesn't argue."
I laugh before I can stop myself. The sound surprises both of us. Tina smiles at the next aisle without looking at me, which is, I realize, the gentlest possible way a woman can hold a moment open for somebody else. I keep my face down and keep stacking.
She talks about the weather. The price of grocery-store coffee, which is, apparently, a sin.
A woman named Mitzi who runs the consignment shop two doors down from the diner and once tries to sell her a brooch shaped like a bird.
Tina does not forgive her for the brooch.
She does not ask me a single question, and I find that being talked to without being interrogated is almost relaxing.
Around three, an old two-tone Ford pulls in, blue over white, immaculate even under the dust. A lean, gray-bearded man climbs out, somewhere on the better side of sixty, sleeves rolled to the elbows, wrench in his back pocket like other men carry phones.
"Christina," he says.
"Hank."
He nods at me. I nod back. He walks past us to a Chevy half-ton parked in the shade, pops the hood, and bends under it like a man reading the morning paper.
"Hank Mosely," Tina says, not lowering her voice. "Retired mechanic. Lives not far from here, at the Dallas Ranch. He's here because I'm here.”
"And he is —"
"He is nothing, honey." She smiles at the back of his head from across the lot. "We are nothing. Don't put a word on it."
Twenty minutes later, Hank comes back through with a smudge of grease on his forearm and his hat tipped back. He stops at the pallet and looks at my stack, which is, for the record, professional.
He glances at Junie in Tina's arms, and his face does the change tough old men's faces do around babies.
"Just up from the Dallas Ranch," he says, mostly to Tina. "Roads were a misery."
"How are Grant and Emma?” Tina asks.
Hank holds the answer in his mouth a second. "She’s pregnant."
Tina puts a hand to her chest. "Hank!"
"What?"
"How far along?"
"Sixteen weeks. They're being careful with it."
"That's wonderful!"
"Yeah," he smiles. “Good for them.”