David Koepp - Cold Storage

Plus they’d all have a baby to raise. Everybody wins.

Mistakes two and three for Naomi fell fast after that first one, and they were things she failed to do rather than things she did. She failed to drive immediately to CHC in Overland Park to get an abortion, and she failed to tell Tara Snyder, who would have driven her immediately to CHC in Overland Park to get an abortion. Instead, she allowed the Snyder parents to sit her down and paint a picture of such joyous, multigenerational familial love around the presence of this new young life that it carried her through her first trimester and most of her second in conspiratorial silence. It wasn’t until her well-conditioned eighteen-year-old body finally started to show in the fifth month that she knew, for sure and for real, that she had made a massive mistake. But by then it was too late to do anything about it.

Sarah turned four the other day, and Naomi would be the first to tell you that she thanked God she had the kid after all. It was impossible to look at that little face and think otherwise, but that didn’t mean Naomi’s life was any better because things turned out this way. It was just different. Mike had taken off to join the Peace Corps within a week after the baby was born, and in truth that was a relief; he’d turned into a real pain in the ass once it sank in that Naomi wasn’t going to marry him, or sleep with him ever again. He would have made a lousy father anyway.

The Snyders made good on their offers to help raise the kid, but Naomi’s hand to God, they were morons, and she ended up living with her sister in a half-decent two-bedroom in a new development called Pine Valley, which had nary a pine tree nor a valley within its borders. But the apartment was clean, and things were okay. Naomi had gotten used to radical changes in her domestic situation with her mom, so what she was most comfortable with was something that was safe, temporary, and had an uncertain future. Boxes checked on all that. She’d started a job and classes at the community college once Sarah was old enough for day care, and if she played it all just right, she could be done with veterinary school in another six and a half years.

The most painful part of all of it was the part she never told anyone. Naomi Williams didn’t like her child. Yes, she adored her. Yes, she felt a deep and uncompromising love for her. But in moments when Naomi was honest with herself, she would silently admit that she didn’t really like her kid. Sarah could be the most loving child you’d ever met in your entire life, and also the most hateful, angry, and debilitating. For two years after Naomi’s father died of a sudden heart attack at age fifty-three, Sarah, just picking up on the concept of death, had brought up the sensitive issue to her young, grieving mother with the painful consistency of an abscessed tooth. Someone would mention fathers and the kid would say, “But you can’t ever talk to your daddy again, right, Mama?”

Or the subject of parents in general would come up, and Sarah would look at Naomi and say, “You only have one parent now, and your other one won’t ever come back, right, Mama?”

Or, shit, people would just mention that they’d called somebody on the goddamn phone, and the kid would say, “Your daddy won’t ever call you again, will he?”

Everybody would wince and laugh and say, “She’s trying to make sense of death, the poor thing!” but Naomi knew vindictiveness when she saw it. Her own kid didn’t like her, and she guessed that was okay, because it cut both ways. Yeah, yeah, she loved her, but… she didn’t know. Maybe someday. Right now, she just wanted to keep her head down, grab night shifts at the storage place whenever she could, and put a little more money away. Vet school. That was the prize. Both eyes on it at all times.

NAOMI DUMPED THE TRASH IN THE BIG BIN IN THE FAR CORNER OF THEloading dock and was turning to head back inside when she almost physically bumped into Teacake, who’d just burst through the security door from the other side of the complex, feigning a casual demeanor.

“Oh, hey,” he said. “You work here?”

Naomi glanced down at her uniform shirt, then back up at him. “Doesn’t everybody wear these?”

He laughed. “I’m Teacake.”

“Teacake?”

“Nickname.”

“Clearly,” she said. “You must have loved that book.”

“What book?”

“ Their Eyes Were Watching God .”

“Never heard of it.”

“Well, somebody named you after a famous character in it.”

“Nah, that’s not it,” he said.

“How’d you get the name?”

“Long story, fairly annoying.”

It wasn’t like Naomi didn’t have time, so she just looked at him, waiting. Her brown eyes, Jesus, he never knew, you couldn’t tell from the video, those brown eyes, they didn’t look away, and did she ever blink? Her eyes told him to keep going, so he did.

“I was, like, sixteen or thereabouts, or what have you, me and some of my boys are rolling around. We got the munchies, so we pull into the Kickapoo on 83. Gonna get some Twinkies. I’m last one in, though, they scoop up all the good Hostess stuff and whatnot, all’s they got left is Sno Balls, and coconut makes me gag, right?”

“If you say so.”

“I do,” he said. “For real. Like, it closes off my throat? What’s that one dessert? It’s got, like, chocolate powder on it, I had it at an Italian restaurant in Wichita, and if you breathe in wrong, you suck up all the powder and it closes up your throat and you choke and you can’t breathe?”

“I can’t say I’ve ever had that experience.”

“Well, it’s weird. Coconut’s like that for me, but chunkier. Hang on, where was I? I wander sometimes. Like, verbally.”

“All the Hostess was gone.”

“Right! So the only thing left is something called an Aunt Sarah’s Teacake. I buy it, I eat it, it’s pretty good, so, I don’t know, is that a crime? I say I want to go back and get another one, my boys, they think this is some kind of hysterical funny shit, ‘He wants a teacake, he wants a teacake, hey, Teacake, where’s your teacake?’—you know, like, crazy brilliant witty shit like that starts flying around.”

“Were there any of those marijuana cigarettes that I’ve heard about involved in this situation?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Anyway, that was it, I was Teacake, and I haven’t heard my given name since.”

“Your parents call you Teacake?”

“My dad thinks it’s a riot.”

“Your mom?”

He shrugged. “Even longer story.”

She held out her hand. “I’m Naomi.”

He took her hand, trying not to look at the way her beautiful brown skin folded gently over her knuckles, not all gross and shit the way some knuckle skin can be, those weird crackly semicircles that look like an evil knothole in a tree in that one cookie commercial or whatever, but that’s how his mind was, it grabbed hold of something and ran off with it, and now he was holding her hand too long, thinking about knuckles, for Christ’s sake.

She reclaimed her hand with a light tug.

He tried to extend the moment any way he could. “I know you haven’t been here long, so if there’s anything, you know, I don’t know, like, that you don’t know, or whatever, just hit me up, okay?”

“Nothing I can think of, but thanks. Guess I gotta go.”

“Yeah, me too, super busy. This place, man. Always something, except it’s never anything.”

She smiled at him. It was hard not to find Teacake moderately charming. She noticed the badly inked snake wrapped around his right biceps, but let it pass without comment. His ink was his business, and she’d seen enough to know where that kind of sloppy tattoo probably came from.