Xhenet Aliu: Brass

He got me on that one, man. Even my mother, Catholic to her core even if she hadn’t said a Hail Mary since getting knocked up with me by a Holy Cross High School dropout, would agree it was something close to sin to be ungrateful.

Then Bashkim ignored me for the next three nights, even though I still walked slowly through the kitchen on my way to the employee exit to see if he’d look over. But he said nothing, so I just stepped outside to wait for my mother to pick me up, since I’d broken up with my last ride, Franky, three nights before, the timing not at all coincidental. I didn’t know if I could pronounce Bashkim’s name right, but even if I got the accents all wrong, it still sounded like a symphony to me compared to Franky . And Franky, not Frank, was his honest given Christian name, which was funny to me before it was embarrassing, although really, what did I have to be embarrassed about? One look at my stringy White Rain hair and yeah right I’d ever be the girlfriend of a boy named Laird or Lawrence or Anything the III. Those boys lived down in Westport or Fairfield and maybe, maybe the worst off of them got sent to Taft, the boarding school fifteen minutes away in Watertown. I bet it was the rich boys with disciplinary problems who got sent there: the rich parents thought their sons would watch the poor bastards who maintained their dorms pull off in dry-rotted Datsuns, and that they would imagine the poor bastards going home to their second-floor apartments on the East End of Waterbury, to their crinkly-eyed twenty-three-year-old common-law wives and their scraggly toddlers with chronic drips of Fudgsicle on their yellow tank tops even though Fudgsicles were too expensive to have in the house, and the troubled rich sons would think, Could that happen to me? though in fact, no, it could not happen to them.

So fine, I’d gotten rid of Franky, because it was true he was no knight in shining armor. But I wondered for a minute if that hunk of Toyota steel he used to drive me around in was close enough to it, because I didn’t feel a single one of the eight degrees the bank’s digital thermometer had said it was while I waited ten, then fifteen minutes for my mother, who had a history of leaving me stranded while she napped. And even if I found a dime to call from the pay-phone lobby, and even if she didn’t sleep through the ringer, it would be ten minutes minimum before her LTD could even begin to climb out of first gear and keep pace with our neighbor Jimmy riding his daughter’s pink ten-speed to some strip-mall pub after having sold his ancient Chevy for scrap metal. So I stomped my Buster Browns on the pavement, partly to keep the blood circulating but mostly just because—because the skid marks Franky’s tires had made a week before were still frozen into a blackened patch of ice that I could shatter if I kicked down hard enough, because to hell with my mother and to hell with Franky and to hell with the waitresses who were inside and warm and giving head to the cooks in exchange for baskets of hot cheese fries.

Then I heard, from behind me: What are you doing, ding-dong?

It was enough of a shock to scare the steady out of my legs and send me ass-down to the ground. “Huh?” I said and scrambled to get back to my feet.

“I said, ‘What are you doing, ding-dong?’ ” Footsteps crunched over the gravel, and then Bashkim stood in front of me, fists gripping the red ties of a half dozen weeping trash bags.

I must’ve looked like someone who knew a thing or two about trash herself, down on the tar with my legs splayed, showing off the cotton briefs bunched underneath my pantyhose, the ugly, shiny pantyhose that only fat dance-line girls and diner waitresses wore. And I was the most beautiful girl Bashkim had ever seen, right? Obviously he didn’t understand what the word meant in English, or else he’d gotten fluent enough to lie straight-faced in a second language.

“I fell down, jerk. Thanks for asking,” I said.

Bashkim offered his hand to help me up, and his skin was as cold as the air, so his touch felt like needles. And he didn’t let go when I was back on my feet, and I swore even with everything else out there frosted over I was somehow sweating, that a fever I didn’t know I had was breaking.

Still, I managed to say, “And don’t call me ding-dong. Nobody says that. Just call me an asshole if that’s what you mean.”

Instead he called my name.

“Elsie. Elsie,” he said.

Where it came from, what it meant, I didn’t know. But I knew where it went. Straight from the tips of my toes, which I thought had been frostbitten to permanent numbness, but no, I was wrong, because a feather-tickle started there and then danced on up those shiny tights, which were suddenly warm as fur. Franky had never said my name twice like that, as if it sounded so good he had to hear it again. Rocco before him had never said it, or Joe Pelletier before him. Especially not Joe Pelletier before him, who instead had just shrieked when he tore what was left of my virginity, crying because he thought the blood on his thighs was his own.

“What are you doing out here? It’s too cold for you out here,” Bashkim said.

“It’s too cold for anyone out here.”

“It feels good to me. The grill is hot. Even in winter it feels like hell back there.”

“Maybe hell froze over,” I said. “And that explains why it’s so cold in this town.”

Bashkim finally let go of my hand and squinted at me, as if he’d lost a contact lens and had confused me for someone else this whole time.

“It’s an expression,” I said. “ ‘When hell freezes over.’ ”

“I know that. I know the expression. You think this is hell here?”

Across the street, one sign remained lit in a plaza with a half dozen storefronts, a rent-to-own center that had managed to stick around a couple of years, even though the refrigerators people rented to own must’ve been hard to fill after the grocery store in the plaza had gone out of business. Next door to the Ross a floodlight shone from the garage where people brought their Dodge K-cars that had broken down on the way to the rent-to-own center, where they were shopping in the first place because they couldn’t afford to buy refrigerators outright after putting their paychecks into last month’s car repairs. And next door to the garage was a dingy twenty-four-hour laundromat, where people washed their linens while waiting for the estimates from the mechanic, bleaching the brown halos left behind on their pillowcases after sweaty, sleepless nights worrying about where the next rent-to-own payment would come from if they couldn’t get to work without their K-cars.

And then they came into the Ross for bottomless cups of Maxwell House, and left behind thin dimes for me.

“I think this is maybe the crappiest place on earth,” I said.

Bashkim laughed and pulled a cigarette from behind his ear. “How much of earth have you seen?”

“Enough,” I said, but I didn’t mention that it’d all been in my grandfather’s National Geographic s. “Can I have a cigarette?”

“You haven’t seen nothing,” he answered for me and pulled a soft pack from his front pocket, the Marlboro he shook from it curved from the shape of his thigh. The cigarette was still warm when it reached my lips, and it sent heat through the rest of my flesh before he even flicked his Bic to light it for me.

We both stood for a minute, exhaling, our white breath thick in the air between us like a chaperone.

“I’ll be out of here when I get a car. And finish school. But mostly when I get a car,” I said. My mother liked to remind me that I’d barely put away enough for a pine air freshener after three years of my big talk, but she was a woman who went by Mamie because she didn’t like the sound of Mommy, said it reminded her of creepy skinny guys who pay money to be bossed around by ladies in leather. And she couldn’t use Mom, because that was for women with tennis bracelets and husbands. I’d ride a Power Wheels down I-84 just to prove that lady wrong.