Chapter 13
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Three Jobs
Aoife
“She made broken look beautiful and strong look invincible.” — Ariana Dancu
The new apartment was on Alderton Street, 14B, on the far east side of the city in a neighbourhood I did not know, which was the point.
It was a one-bedroom on the second floor of a building that was older than it looked, with a landlord named Mr. Petrakis who asked for first and last month's rent in cash and did not seem particularly interested in anything else.
The bedroom had a window that faced a courtyard where a single tree grew between the concrete, and in the mornings the light came through the leaves and made patterns on the wall that were the first thing I saw when I woke up.
I kept the job at Sunflower Days. Patricia knew I was pregnant by the end of the first month.
She sat me down in her office and looked at me with the steady attention of a woman who had learned that delivering news carefully was itself a form of respect.
She said my job was secure for as long as I wanted it and that she would work around whatever I needed.
I looked at her and I thought about the people in my life who had said some version of this and meant it and how few of them there had been and how large each one had been in its way. I thanked her. I went back to work.
The second diner was called Harrington's, a larger chain on the other side of the city, open until two in the morning and needing evening staff. The manager, a tired man named Glen who did not appear to have strong feelings about anything, hired me on the spot. I started Wednesday.
On Saturdays and Sundays I did food delivery.
I had bought a secondhand bicycle from a man on the corner of Alderton and Grove for sixty dollars, and I loaded the insulated bag over the handlebars and I learned the streets of the east side by necessity.
I was seven weeks pregnant and then ten and then twelve, and I adapted the bike and the bag as my body changed, and I did not think too carefully about whether this was a good idea because thinking too carefully about it would have required me to find an alternative, and there was no alternative.
At my twelve-week appointment, Dr. Priya Mehta turned the ultrasound screen toward me and said, "Ms. Walsh, I want you to look here.
" She moved the probe and the image shifted, and she said, "Do you see that?
" and I said I did not know what I was looking for, and she said, "You're looking for two.
There are two." She said it with the composed directness she brought to everything, watching my face as she said it.
I looked at the screen for a long time. There were, unmistakably, two distinct shapes. I see you, I thought, with a certainty that surprised me with its completeness. Both of you. I am here.
I cried in the car for forty-five minutes.
Then I drove to Harrington's for the evening shift and I served tables and I smiled and I thought about two small shapes on a screen and I thought about my grandmother's curtains hanging in the window of the apartment on Alderton Street and I thought: we will be all right.
The three of us. We will figure this out.
?
I ate when I remembered to eat, which was not always. I was tired in a way that accumulated rather than resolved. My face showed it. Simone told me I looked like I was running on prayer and stubbornness, and I told her she was not wrong.
She had the address by then. I had told her after the twelve-week scan because the twins had made keeping it to myself feel untenable, and she had come over on a Saturday morning with enough food for four people and sat in my kitchen and I told her everything.
She had listened without interrupting, which from Simone required visible effort, her hands flat on the table and her face set with the particular stillness of a person who has decided that her reactions are not the point right now.
When I finished she said, "Two babies, three jobs, no family, and the man who put four hundred dollars on your table and walked out doesn't know where you are. "
"That's an accurate summary," I said.
She looked at me for a moment. Something moved in her expression, something complicated that she pressed down.
Then she said, "What do you need?" and when I told her the most urgent things she said, "I'll come with you to the next appointment.
" She came to every appointment after that. She did not miss one.