Xhenet Aliu - Brass

“Yllka,” I said. “Slow down.”

“How is Aggie supposed to live? She has no husband, no money, no apartment. Where is his heart?”

I winced when Yllka talked about Aggie like that, like a wife instead of an ex-wife-to-be.

“His heart is here,” I said. “With me.”

“Oh god,” she said. “You’re just as far gone as him.”

“I’ll talk to him. But he’s not working this hard for nothing. He’s obviously onto something.”

“You really don’t know this man, do you?”

“Of course I do. He’s my,” I said, but I couldn’t think of the word to put at the end of that sentence.

“Do you know what Bashkim said when Gjonni and I picked him up from JFK a year ago? He said, ‘The streets are black.’ And we said, ‘Of course the streets are black. The streets are paved,’ thinking he was surprised that they weren’t dirt. And he said, ‘I thought the streets here were gold.’ Do you understand that? He thought the streets here were made of gold . He thought that was true, not just an expression. A grown man believed that. We laughed so much at that time, but it turns out that wasn’t funny after all.”

I thought then that she must have been confusing Bashkim for Adem or Fatmir. Bashkim wasn’t any kind of naïve. That’s one of the things that made me fall for him, that he already knew everything, or at least wasn’t surprised by anything. That’s how he got that swagger, the kind where he’d walk out to his car and start it so he could light a cigarette off the engine, when using the lighter that was always in his pocket would’ve been just fine. He’d pose against the hood like some kind of greaser, except the grease he modeled was all lard and vegetable oil instead of 10W-30.

And all of this was just occurring to me now, and I wondered who really was the naïve one.

“I’ll talk to him,” I said.

“Don’t talk, just do,” she said. “Talking is not going to put clothes on your baby. Just make sure you have something put aside. Promise me, Elsie. Promise.”

“I promise,” I said, but I said it the classic American way, which was to get someone to shut up. I didn’t want to be the one making promises, I wanted to be the one hearing them.

Fatmir was manning the deep fryer as usual. He seemed more serious about his job that night, like he suspected Gjonni and Yllka would be watching him extrahard, working like he was paid by the cheese stick and could make back all the money he lost with a couple of good tables of pregaming middle schoolers en route to a Seven Minutes in Heaven party. But there weren’t going to be any raises that night or in the near future, and if he had left out a coffee can for his own charity fundraiser, it would’ve stayed as empty as the one out front for MS. I thought about saying hello but didn’t have the guts to pretend that everything was normal or, worse, to tell him everything would work out in the end. Instead I looked past him to Bashkim, who seemed calm enough from where I was standing, or rather the same as he always did, a little hunched over, lips pressed tight together to keep flies and his own sweat out while he worked the grill.

“Hey, babe,” I said.

“Hi,” he said, his lips opening up just enough to let the word out.

See, I thought, it can’t be that bad. When he was in a real mood he wouldn’t even bother to answer. He’d just look at me like he stepped right off the boat and forgot all of his English, like the Atlantic was still wedged between him and me.

“What’s up?”

He shrugged. “Work,” he said.

“As usual, right?”

“Always work.”

“This kid’s gonna pop out of me wearing orthopedic sneakers, I swear.”

He shook his head. “No,” he said.

“Well, the kid’s got the feet for them, at least,” I said. “I saw them at the doctor’s office today. It was.” I closed my eyes for a second and remembered her little dance, her slow, soft kicks. “It was pretty amazing.”

He scraped charred bits of fat from the grill with his spatula. They dropped through the grates and caught fire and burned out almost immediately.

“I wish you would’ve been there,” I said.

Scrape, scrape, sizzle.

“I mean, I know you had to work.”

“You should not have to be working like this,” he said.

I shrugged. “Everybody’s gotta do it. No use complaining about it.”

“I know how to work,” Bashkim said.

“I know you do.”

“I don’t complain about it.”

“I know.”

“But you.”

“But me what?”

“Look at you,” he said. “You hang out of that uniform. It doesn’t even fit you anymore.”

“Well, they don’t make a maternity line of waitress wear.”

“It’s shameful. Disgusting.”

“Jesus,” I said. Maybe I did prefer his silent moods.

“You should not have to work like this,” he said.

“It’s not a big deal,” I said.

“Your work should be at home. This is no place for you.”

“Well, it’s where I am. I don’t have much choice in it, do I?”

He shook his head and pressed down on the beef patties already overcooking on the grill. “No, you don’t have a choice. I have decided. I don’t want you here anymore.”

“Bashkim,” I said. I knew he was in a mood and I was supposed to be careful when he was in a mood, and if I thought about it maybe I would’ve realized I was more sad than pissed off that he didn’t ask a single question about the doctor, about his own kid. But no matter what else I was feeling, rage always won. It was like mixing paints in art class: just the right amount of red to blue made a pretty purple, and just the right amount of white made it lavender, but once you added black all you got was a dark ugly gray.

“Go home. I’ll tell Gjonni you can’t work here anymore,” he said.

“The fuck you will,” I said.

He dropped the spatula. “The fuck I what?”

“The fuck you will. We don’t have a choice, now do we? We don’t have a pot to piss in.”

He stepped closer to me. “You stop talking now.”

“Fuck you! Don’t touch me. If I’m so disgusting don’t touch me.”

That only made him grab on to my arm tighter. We had a crowd around us by this point, but neither one of us noticed it at that moment.

“What do you think you’re doing with your money?” I said. “You’re not some Wall Street whiz kid. You’re not Gordon fucking Gekko. Why didn’t you just drive out to Foxwoods if you wanted to throw all your money away? Why not just burn it for fuel?”

“Elsie,” he said.

“We don’t even have a real goddamned bed. We don’t even have a crib or a diaper bag or any of the shit you need for a baby.”

“You have to be quiet now,” he said.

“You wanted this. You’re the one who wanted this baby and now I’m going to be the one on the side of the street with a sign begging for money.”

“Quiet,” he said.

“And it’s not just me. I bet you made your wife all the same kinds of promises you made me and I bet she’s going to be out on the street, too, thanks to you. You think you’re better than Fatmir? You think you’re better than anyone? My god, you can’t even take care of your damn self.”

I never really believed it when people in accidents said they didn’t remember a thing about what happened. It didn’t seem possible to forget a thing like that. There were times I tried to forget entire passages of my life, banging my head against the wall to shake the bad things loose, but no matter what, I still remembered my mother sharing my twin bed with me for months after my father took off with their full-size one, and how I made my mother cry the last time I shat my pants because I was supposed to have been potty-trained for at least two years by then, and how I’d hit a kitten the first time I drove a car without supervision and drove away while it twitched because I was sure the suffering would kill me before it killed the cat. But honestly the moments before I opened my eyes and found the metal shelving and food service tins on top of me are gone. I can imagine what Bashkim’s eyes must have looked like before his fists came down on me, but I can’t remember them, and so I’ve always kind of thought, even now, years after I was supposed to have learned better, that there was something I must have misunderstood about it all. Sometimes still I think that the floor must have been extraslippery that night, that I just fell and brought a mess down on top of me. Sometimes I still think, Well, Elsie, if it was Bashkim, think about it from his perspective: you can be an extrasuperbitch.