Xhenet Aliu - Brass

“Bashkim will be fine.”

“I meant the baby, the baby’s the other person. Of course this guy will be fine, whoever he is. All he has to do is take off to Myrtle Beach and never think about it again.”

“He’s not going to do that. He’s not like our father.”

“Then why was I the one you asked to be with you while you peed on a stick?”

“Because,” I said, and that was all I could come up with. Even if I wasn’t ready to face Bashkim with this yet, why would I turn to Greta? Why not just do it alone, like I always claimed I could? The two of us had slept within five feet of each other our whole lives without ever saying good night. We didn’t even look alike—she was pale and I had the acne-red complexion of a rug burn, she pulled out her dirty blond hair while I spent hours trying to fluff up my dirt-brown—but it was obvious we came from the same peasant stock, because neither one of us had any cavities in our teeth and both of us shared a kind of loneliness that was so innate it had to be built into our DNA. Still, most of the time we each looked at the other like a foster kid Mamie had taken in for extra money. We could outline all the things we had in common, write them out on index cards and not even have enough to fill up an hour of conversation after lights-out. She’d take a flashlight and a book under her blanket, and I’d take a Walkman loaded with Led Zeppelin I . In the morning, we’d stand behind the closet door to undress and re-dress.

“Because you’re the smart one,” I said, finally. “I thought you might have something to say other than boo-hoo.”

“You don’t have to be smart to see how this is going to turn out. Look at Mamie. Jesus Christ, look in the mirror.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way. It could end up like you.”

“Fuck you.”

“I meant that as a good thing. You’re going to be fine. You’re going to get a scholarship somewhere and leave us all behind and you won’t even come back for Thanksgiving. You said so yourself.”

She shook her head, and I pushed her hand away from it before she could pinch a hair out.

“Anyway, who says I’m even going to have this baby?” I pressed down on my stomach, and nothing pushed back, so it didn’t seem possible that there was any kind of life in there. “I’ll take care of it. In two weeks none of this will make a difference in the world.”

Greta stood up from the toilet. She hadn’t used it, but she flushed it instinctively, so I was never really sure if I heard what she said correctly. What I heard was “We need a fucking difference.”

But she probably just said something about fun indifference.

I closed the door behind Greta and lifted my shirt in front of the mirror. How was something supposed to fit in there, anyway? I imagined a bicycle pump with its nozzle in my belly button, Bashkim at the other end, pumping away. Then he’d come back with a sewing needle and pop it. He’d pop it, right? He wouldn’t want this kid, and his wife certainly wouldn’t want this kid, and I of course didn’t want this kid. It would be insane to go ahead with it, because children killed dreams, and because car seats don’t fit in Fieros. Look at Mamie, not a dream left in her soul, not even a nightmare to wake her up sweating on the couch. Just nothing, the worst thing in the world, worse than war and famine, worse than the labor camps in Albania that Bashkim talked about. Nothing. But I mean, of course I wouldn’t do it like Mamie did it, and just quit right out of the gate. I’d at least put headphones over my belly and make my kid listen to Beethoven like the yuppie moms on TV, I’d have my kid in state-run daycare only until I got my dental technician certification, then I’d get a real job and work days and switch off babysitting with Bashkim, who still worked nights, but at the pizza shop he always talked about opening someday. I’d carried a sack of flour around in high school, I knew it’d be hard at first, and then eventually it’d get better. Eventually we’d buy a raised ranch the next town over in Wolcott and only ever go back to Waterbury for grocery shopping and to visit the graves of poor dead relatives, great-uncles and -aunts who lived at the Lithuanian Social Club and were laid to rest at the Lithuanian cemetery, not having left the city limits in decades, never mind gone home to their motherland. Our kid would spend summers with his cousins in Albania, learn how to ride a horse and brine things, come back and be bored by our strip malls and discount second-run movie theaters, talk about one day busting out like a Springsteen song.

I pulled my shirt back down and turned away from the mirror. There was no use thinking of the ways things would be different when in a couple of weeks they would be nothing. Stupid, endless, soul-numbing nothing, the kind of nothing it’d be merciful not to pass on to some poor doomed offspring.

Greta was on her bed, staring at the ceiling, when I finally left the bathroom.

“Don’t say anything to Mamie, okay?” I said.

“I haven’t said anything to Mamie in about ten days. She hasn’t even noticed,” she said.

She was so thin she was almost flush with the bed.

“You’re almost out of here,” I said. “Don’t fuck it up.”

She looked over at me. “You’re giving advice about fucking up?” She didn’t even sound mean about it, just confused.

I shrugged and sat down on my bed to put on my pantyhose. “I guess that’s stupid. Never mind. Do your thing.”

She went back to staring at the ceiling, and I got ready to go back to the Ross.

When our father died seven years before, Mamie threw out the Waterbury Republican so me and Greta wouldn’t come across his name in the obituaries. Greta only ever opened the paper for the Garfield comics, me for the Bob’s Stores ads, hoping for a mythical one-day sale where the genuine Levi’s and Reeboks dropped in price to match the generics. I was twelve, Greta was ten. We weren’t yet checking every day for the names of schoolmates who might’ve died in 2:00 A.M. car wrecks on the way home from the Brass Pony, we didn’t wonder if our former elementary school teachers finally let their two-pack-a-day Pall Mall habits take them down before retirement did, we didn’t care enough about distant relatives to figure out who was still alive and who wasn’t. Mamie was the one who subscribed to the paper for the death notices and circulars only, sometimes the classifieds when Waterbury Buckle announced another round of layoffs, or when the LTD rusted off a part that looked like it might’ve been too important to ignore. Greta and I probably didn’t notice that the paper wasn’t on the table as usual. We probably read the previous day’s as if it were new, because it always looked the same anyway. That Bob’s sale was never in there.

Then, on my next birthday, my father’s parents, Grandma and Grandpa Kuzavinas, sent a card with a fifty-dollar check enclosed. I’d never held that much money in my hands. They said they were sad that Greta and I didn’t come around for Christmas anymore, even though they were just down the road in Naugatuck, that we left them when Dad left us, as if that were something me and Greta had, as kids, made a conscious decision to do. They were disappointed we weren’t at the funeral because Dad’s son was there and he looked a little like us, and we should get to know him because blood is blood, signed the Kuzavinases. The card had irises on it and said THANK YOU.

“What funeral?” I asked Mamie. “What kid?”

She read the card. “Fifty dollars? They expect us to believe that’s all they got out of that?” Her hand shook while she held the check, maybe on purpose, maybe trying to get it to vibrate so fast that it’d look like there were hundreds of fifties flying about.