Xhenet Aliu - Brass

Emotional blackmail, that’s what the gift is. An emotional pacifier. It’s cheap, and it’s slightly effective, like generic cold medicine. It would’ve been much easier to leave even yesterday, before your mother went and pulled this goddamned journal crap. It’s some corny Barnes & Noble clearance thing, the kind of uninspired Brass City Mall token one would expect from a Brass City Mallrat boyfriend on Valentine’s Day, and you want to tear it to shreds for what it does to you, which is make you stop and wonder what exactly it is you think you’re doing, driving off with a near stranger to find a perfect stranger who never in his life made a trip to the mall for you, who never in his life even stopped in to say good night.

This stupid journal, with its insulting asshole empty pages just waiting to be filled, telling you that there are stories you could find for it right here if you could only find your way in.

Your phone buzzes. You coming? You need help?

No, you tell yourself, I shouldn’t have to leave this way. If she’d just given you some other choice.

Yes, and I don’t need help, you respond. You don’t know if you’ll be going forward or sideways or backward, but it’s time to make a move in some direction.

A week after the argument with Bashkim at the Ross—that’s what I called it, the argument, like we’d disagreed on what shape of pasta to buy, or whether the toilet paper should hang over or under—and I still hadn’t seen or talked to him, both of us pretending we were the holdout, the strong one, waiting to hear our apologies. I’d been back to the apartment just to grab enough of my things to get me through a few days at Mamie’s, where I showed up unannounced, and before she had a chance to ask me what I was doing there, I told her that the walls in our apartment were being painted and her little unborn grandchild shouldn’t be exposed to the fumes.

“Huh,” she answered, but didn’t ask any questions.

On the second day she asked what color the walls were being painted, and I told her ecru, a color I’d heard of but couldn’t define, realizing that if she ever stepped foot in there again she’d know straightaway that I was lying.

On the third day, she asked why my apartment being painted meant I couldn’t go in to work, and I said I’d been feeling sick so I took a few days off.

“You put down a lot of beef Stroganoff for someone who doesn’t feel good,” she said.

I told her it was doctor’s orders, iron and protein and all that.

On the fourth day, she stopped asking questions and was just happy to have someone around to keep her company while she drank, so she could convince herself it was a social habit.

“I miss having you here,” Mamie said. The ice in her glass clinked like a meek little dinner bell, a come-and-get-it that she had already come and got. “It’s too quiet around here now.”

“I still live here,” Greta said from the recliner.

“Yeah, of course you do, Greta, but you’re such a goddamned mouse I don’t even know when you’re here and when you’re not. You don’t yap and burp and fart all over the house like Shamu over here,” Mamie said.

“If you’re trying to get me to stick around, you might try saying something nice every once in a while,” I said.

“Oh come on, you know I’m just teasing. You’re just really starting to pop. That kid of yours is gearing up to be a sumo wrestler.”

“She’s still wearing a smaller pants size than you,” Greta said, and I smiled and realized that I missed having my sister around.

“You hear from any colleges yet, Greta?” I asked.

“Not yet,” she said. “I don’t know, I’m not getting my hopes up.”

“It’s not about hope for you. You’re not just getting by on wishful thinking like the rest of us,” I said.

“Don’t speak for me. I don’t do any wishful thinking,” Mamie said.

“Of course not,” I said, just because I didn’t want to get into it with her. Mamie didn’t do any wishful speaking, that was for sure, but of course it was some kind of secret wish that got her out of bed every morning. You’d never hear her talk about anything as pathetic as hope aloud, but she’d been known to spend her last ten dollars on a few scratch-off tickets while the milk in our refrigerator soured, and if she recouped two of those dollars she walked around glowing like Ed McMahon had just shown up on our front step with a bouquet of balloons and an oversize novelty check. Me and Bashkim weren’t so different in that way, which was another thing I didn’t want to bring up. Only Greta was really different from the rest of us, but it was in a way she couldn’t help, and in a way that wasn’t making her life any easier. But at least she had a plan. She saved every penny she earned, from the first dollar on a newspaper route she inherited when the last paperboy graduated to selling LSD, to babysitting the neighbor’s future sociopath, to her current weekly paychecks bagging endless conveyor belts of canned corn and Giggle Noodle at ShopRite. The sum total couldn’t have been near enough to pay for even a semester at the kind of college she wanted to attend, the kind of place with a quad and just enough black kids to put in a photograph on the brochure, but it had to be more than I’d ever seen in one account in my whole life.

I needed a plan. I needed to be more like Greta. It was too late for me to get a paper route or a scholarship or anything like that, but I decided then that there could be no more impulse trashy-magazine purchases at the checkout line at ShopRite, no more cans of black beans when a bag of dried ones would go twice as far for half as much. All I had to do was tighten the belt a little, and in about five more years, I might have enough put away to strike out on my own, and then there’d be no more tiptoeing around Bashkim or loitering at Mamie’s. The kid would be almost old enough to chip in at that point. It could use its nimble little fingers to darn the socks I fumbled over.

“Fuck,” I said.

“What?” Greta said.

“Watch your mouth,” Mamie said.

I shook my head. “I need to find some new work. Something better than what I’ve been doing. These nickel-and-dime tips aren’t going to cut it.”

Greta nodded and smiled a little, and Mamie bit into her wine-slicked ice cube and spit the little broken slivers back into the glass.

“Good luck with that,” Mamie said. “If you come across anyone handing out real jobs to people with no skills or experience, make sure you let me know.”

“I’m going to talk to Uncle Eddie. He always seems to be able to hook somebody up with something.”

“Entry-level factory jobs don’t pay any better than the Ross,” Mamie said. “Believe me, I’ve done ’em.”

“Not at first, but at least you can move up. At least there’s overtime.”

“I think it sounds like a good idea,” Greta said.

“Yeah, look at the lifestyle manufacturing work has afforded us,” Mamie said. “Sitting in this place is like winning a Showcase Showdown.”

“It affords you that box of wine you’re hooked up to. It affords you cable TV.”

“Wine’s got grapes. It’s vitamin C,” Mamie said.

“A new job’s a start,” Greta said. “And it doesn’t have to be the end if you don’t want it to be.”

“The two of you, I swear, you got everything figured out,” Mamie said. She nearly spit out the last of her wine before she walked away to refill it, this time taking her glass into her bedroom so we couldn’t bust her cozy little merlot bubble.

“So, uh, how’s everything going?” Greta asked.

“Okay,” I said.

“Still getting sick?”