Xhenet Aliu - Brass

“Well, I don’t have to charge you,” she said.

“Then why do you?”

“To give you an idea of what it’s like out there.”

“You did a good job. Now I know what it’s like out there, and I’m ready to take it on.”

“Your rent here is only a hundred fifty bucks a month. That’s not going to cut it anywhere out in the real world.”

“I’m going to be sharing the rent.”

“With who?”

“My boyfriend.”

“What boyfriend?”

“The one I told you about.”

“You never told me about any boyfriend.”

“I did, too.”

“When?”

“One night. That night I was sick.”

“Oh, that? The ‘some guy’ guy? Since when has it been that serious?”

“Since recently,” I said. “It got serious recently.” I hoped she might know what serious implied, and then I wouldn’t have to come out with it myself. Why was I afraid to tell her I got knocked up, just like she had when she was even younger than I was? Did I think she’d pummel me until I miscarried? That she’d beg me to abort it or give my one potentially valuable thing away, when I was reserving it as a gift for Bashkim?

I was afraid she’d shrug and say something like Of course, like I was exactly what everyone expected me to be.

But she didn’t even shrug. She just got quiet for a minute, poured another glass of wine over a fresh ice cube, and swallowed half of that sweet nectar like it was an antidote to the poison I was always feeding her.

“What’s his name?” she asked.

“Bashkim,” I said.

“What?”

“Bashkim. Bosh. Keem.”

“What the hell is that?”

“It’s a name.”

“What kind of name is that? Is he black?”

“No,” I said, annoyed at her obvious relief. “But what if he were?”

“I mean, I don’t care about that kind of thing, but you’d run into some trouble in the world, I bet.”

“You wouldn’t be okay with it,” I said.

“Of course I would,” she said.

“No you wouldn’t. You totally wouldn’t.”

“Stop trying to turn this around so that I’m the bad person here. You’re the one telling me you’re moving out with a guy whose name you barely know.”

“I know his name perfectly well. I just never told you because I knew you’d say ‘What kind of a name is that?’ ”

“What I’d say is exactly what I’m about to say, which is that it’s a really stupid idea to move in with someone who’s not even important enough to you to tell your mother about. Whatever happened to going on a few dates first?”

“What, am I supposed to come home with his letter jacket? I’m an adult. We’re adults. We know what we’re doing.”

“Oh, every eighteen-year-old girl in the world knows exactly what she’s doing. Yup, nobody smarter in the world than an eighteen-year-old girl.”

“Well, smart or not, I’m an adult. You can’t stop me.”

Mamie swirled the ice cube around in what was left of the wine in her glass. The burgundy was watered down by then but still unmistakable, like a bloodstain on bedsheets.

“I’m not going to try to stop you,” she said, that sad look back in her face. “It’s too late for that. I’d have to go back in time to the day you decided I don’t know a thing in the world and never wanted what was best for you.”

“That’s not fair,” I said. “I never said anything like that.”

She shrugged, grabbed her jug, and walked away, and for the first time in weeks, I felt a sickness that had nothing to do with hormones.

Gjonni and Yllka were the only people not flying the red, white, and green outside the triple-decker they owned in a Sicilian compound on Harpers Ferry Road, so when the neighbors came out on their porches to clap the dust out of their welcome mats, Gjonni and Yllka got only the smallest of nods, just enough to let them know that those welcome mats wouldn’t ever be dusty from their feet. It didn’t seem to bother Gjonni and Yllka, because in Waterbury moving on up meant trading in whatever ghetto you started off in for an Italian one, where the front porches were swept three times a day and decorated for Christmas six months of the year. Those poor Italian grandmas, looking over at Gjonni and Yllka, thinking: Marone a mi, first these Turkish-coffee-drinking bastard sons of Europe wash up on the shores of Sicily, now they follow us here? But Yllka fit in just fine, greeting me from the same Welcome Wagon that her neighbors greeted her with, her arms crossed like she was fighting off a chill on that eighty-seven-degree day.

“We can get more money for that apartment. We’re losing money on it now,” she said, in English, so that I could understand clearly how little she wanted me there.

“Beh, family is not for making money,” Gjonni said, while Bashkim walked by us all with the last of the four boxes I’d packed. All of my worldly possessions had fit in the trunk of the Fiero, and Bashkim didn’t even break a sweat carrying them up three flights of stairs. It would’ve depressed me if I thought about it, but I was drinking from the half-full cup that day, and thought instead how easy it would be to unpack and settle in.

Bashkim and I were moving into the third floor of Gjonni and Yllka’s triple-decker. It was a glorified attic, twelve degrees hotter than the ground floor, and most of the square footage was cut off by sloping walls at every corner. But it was ours, even if it was really Gjonni and Yllka’s, even if Yllka probably wanted us to be late with the rent so she’d have a reason to evict us. I very nearly wept when Gjonni handed over the keys to us. “You will be happy here. The water is good, the electricity is strong. You could run an air conditioner in here no problem,” he said.

I nodded. We didn’t have an air conditioner to prove it, or even a box fan. We didn’t have a toaster, a fry pan, a can opener, a television, a spare blanket, or a single piece of silverware. We had one bath towel between us and a glove box full of sporks from Lee’s Famous Recipe. We had each other and the makings of a country song.

We also had an almost-set of old dishware and a scratch-off ticket from Mamie, which she left along with a note on the table that morning: You can come back here if it doesn’t work out. Love, Mamie. It was nice of her; Love was a word Mamie didn’t use much. She signed our Christmas cards Sincerely . She still hadn’t met Bashkim and she didn’t know yet she’d soon be signing cards Sincerely, Grandma, but I took it as a good omen that the scratch-off was a winner, sixty dollars, so I could invite her over for a spaghetti dinner and afford the saucepan and the box of pasta both. I figured we could borrow silverware from the Ross until we could get ourselves a cheap cutlery set sometime before the baby was born, although the baby wouldn’t come out using a fork and a knife, so maybe we could buy some time on that, too.

How much time, I didn’t know. I had no idea when a baby learned how to eat with something other than its hands, if it was before or after the first words, and if the first words were before or after the first step. This was assuming, too, that we made a baby that would be able to speak and walk. There was a whole lot that could go wrong. I hadn’t been to a doctor yet, but I’d been to health class in high school and paid attention every once in a while. Plus I’d seen the canisters collecting money for the Ronald McDonald Houses or worse, Jerry’s Kids, the ones that never even had a chance to be Regular Kids first. They were the kids that didn’t even get to run and play and be tormented for their overbites before being stricken by lymphoma at age four.

I told myself to stop. Our baby would be fine. It would call me Mama and run to hold me when it scraped its knee, or else it would scrape its knee and just point because it hadn’t learned how to say Mama yet. God, when did that happen again? It didn’t matter. I knew what tears meant, and when the baby came I would know what to do about them, just like I would know how to wrap a present with perfectly crisp corners like all moms, even Mamie, seem to be able to do. I figured they taught those things in the maternity ward after you gave birth.