Justin Taylor - Flings - Stories

She let me pick her up and so I rocked her until she fell asleep in my arms; then I put her in her crib, which was right there in a corner of the living room. Terese’s unit was bigger than mine, but that only meant it was two rooms instead of one.

When Mazie woke up again she was more like the happy kid I knew. She didn’t seem to miss her mom at all. I took her out of her crib. We played peekaboo and colored pictures on paper towels, then hung them up on the fridge with magnets like our own little gallery show. I put the radio on and danced with her and even sang, which is not something I do at the drop of a hat. We were blasting the classic rock station. I even did the high parts on “Reelin’ in the Years.” When she was tired again I put her back down in her crib. When Terese unlocked the front door and peeked her head in, the very first thing I said to her was “Shhh.”

I started spending most evenings a week with Mazie — some days, too, Terese now taking all the shifts she could get — and most nights I stayed over in their unit and when Terese had a day off we might all take a walk or go shopping. We knew what we looked like and we didn’t mind. And when I was alone with Mazie it was the same: We ate peanut butter and banana sandwiches. We watched the singing sunflowers till I knew their songs by heart, as good as I ever knew “Reelin’” or “Stairway” or “Help.” I made omelettes for both my girls for breakfast, drove Mazie to the park and chased her around. She got fresh air and exercise and we pet people’s dogs there and I pushed her on the swing. I only ever told her to call me Wade. In fact, I didn’t know whether the word “Daddy” was even in her vocabulary until the day she looked up from her coloring and called me it. She wanted me to hand her the blue crayon and she had to ask me twice before it registered who she was talking to, and a third time before I managed to do it.

Later that night I mentioned to Terese what had happened.

“That’s swell,” she said.

“And yet you don’t seem overjoyed,” I said.

“I’m glad you two get along, Wade.”

“You make it sound like we’re poker buddies.”

“Listen,” she said. “I’m only saying one thing, and the one thing I’m saying is goddamnit, don’t you build up all the heart that little girl has, then go and break it.”

I told her I heard her loud and clear. It was well understood. I knew right where she was coming from.

“You’re saying all the right things,” she said, “and that’s good. But it’s not the talking that counts, and we both know it. You go ahead and remember what I said.”

I helped a guy I knew out with a job he was doing — moving furniture, basically, but I don’t want to get into the boring details — and I dedicated a portion of the proceeds from that venture to a night out for me and Terese, just us: a proper date. When we got home Mazie was sleeping and the sitter was watching the TV. Some movie stars were panting against the side of a brick building. The man held a silver pistol and was bleeding from his forehead. “It looks bad,” the woman said sorrowfully, then instead of trying to stop the bleeding leaned in and kissed the man. When she pulled her face away it was bloody, too. I think the sitter wished we’d stayed out longer, but she took my money and left. Terese was in the bathroom, and I began to think about what I meant to say to her because it felt like the time had come to say something and I wanted it to be the right thing. I liked Terese, we were doing well together, and what we had was very agreeable, comfortable, beneficial to all parties, and a good time besides. So how do you say that to a woman? You don’t, I guess, and sometimes when a woman says she loves you and you are inside of her there is nothing for it but to say so back and wish to Christ to make it true.

I packed my few belongings up and moved them to the unit downstairs.

It was after seven but the sun was still high. Terese was fresh off a day shift. She’d changed out of her uniform into a robe and meant to take a shower, but was so far lying cross the couch, feet up, Mazie on her stomach.

“What’d you and Wade do today, honey?”

“I go swings.”

“Again?” Terese said. I wasn’t sure if she meant that as a question to Mazie or to me.

“She loves the swings,” I said. “And the slide, too. Didn’t we slide today, Mazie?”

There was a box of mac and cheese in the pantry, but we’d made a box the night before, and Mazie’d had the leftovers for lunch.

“Listen,” I said, “how starving are you? We need some things anyhow. I could make a quick Publix run, bring back a rotisserie chicken.”

“Pick it up last thing before you get in line,” Terese said, “and it should still be hot when you get home.”

“Aye, aye, captain,” I said.

“Aye, capan!” Mazie said.

“I can bring her with me if you want,” I said. “Take your shower in peace.”

“I haven’t seen my kid all day,” she said. I felt guilty. Here she had been out working while we had fun. Well, that was the arrangement, but still. Then Terese surprised me. She picked Mazie up off her belly and held her in the air. “You know what,” she said, “a long shower sounds like heaven. So go on — all yours.”

We made our way up and down the aisles, Mazie in the kid seat, goggling at all the colorful boxes and lights, babbling away. Peanut butter, white bread, strawberry ice cream, cans of soup. The cartons of cigarettes are locked up at the front so you ask when you get to the register. Fish sticks, more mac and cheese boxes because you can pretty much never have enough. Bunch of bananas. Can of Maxwell House. There were vitamins in the medicine aisle. I passed them by, but the notion stuck in my mind. I was over in prepared foods, deciding if I wanted to bring home a half pound of potato salad to go with the chicken or if greens of some kind would be better. I stuck a pin in this question and circled back around to the pills. There were the Flintstones ones and the “Compare to” ones. They were exactly the same. Everyone knows that. If I put the boxes side by side and read the fine print I would even know for sure. They were probably made at the same factory. There was probably some website you could go to and read all about it.

Aw hell , I thought, just this once . And bought the good ones.

“You’re a real saint sometimes, Wade,” Terese said when I showed her what I’d got. “Do you know that?” I laughed at this and she laughed with me and kissed me and I imagined myself in my saintly robes and haloed, Saint Wade, patron of wildlife shows and the cigarette tax, bestower of name-brand vitamins, who shall rise up in glory and see that the waitresses of the Lord clock in at the pan-Asian bistro on time.

But some things are out of anybody’s power, even saints’. Terese’s job turned bad overnight, the way these kinds of jobs will. She got passed over for shift manager, was the first thing, and then corporate decided that everyone had to push a new special, which was this lemongrass seafood dish. They put all the girls on a quota for specials sold per night. This went against what you might call Terese’s style. She was not going to push folks toward a nineteen-dollar plate of rice with a few shrimp and squid pieces thrown on top — one, because she thought it was stupid, and two, because when the customers were pissed at the end of their dinner it’d be her tip they took it out on. So her numbers suffered and she’d get bawled out and then come home and start bawling me out about whatever she could think up, and at first I was just taking it, but of course a man can only take so much, and we knew each other well enough by now to be cruel and soon it became a kind of nightly ritual to split a twelve-pack and tear each other apart. I never hit her, for whatever that’s worth, but it was a hell of a place for a kid. Some nights I didn’t sleep at all and ended up sitting on the couch in the dark, concentrating on the sound of Mazie’s breathing, barely audible over the wheeze of the old window unit. Just sitting there, listening and drinking, trying not to think and thinking anyway. Shark , I thought.