Xhenet Aliu - Brass

“Nah, morning sickness is gone.” There was another kind of sickness I was feeling, a ferocious heartburn I got when I thought about facing Bashkim again, or when I wondered why he hadn’t even bothered to look for me here, the sole place in the world he knew I could go. But Greta was only asking about the kid, just like everyone else. She was asking about the thing that still had a chance of turning out okay.

“That’s good,” Greta said.

“Yeah, it’s good. How about you? How are you doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean how are you doing? What’s up with you?”

“Oh,” she said. “Fine, I guess. Pretty good.”

“You look good,” I said, and I wasn’t even lying. Her cheeks had a little color to them, maybe because Mamie’s thermostat was set perpetually at sixty-four, but maybe not. Maybe it was the glow of the light at the end of her tunnel. She was almost there. She was almost ready to tell the rest of us what else was out there.

“Oh,” Greta said. She was blushing a little, and I realized what I said was probably the nicest compliment she’d gotten in years, maybe ever, and it made me want to cry.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Sorry for what?”

I shrugged. “I guess I just mean I’m proud of you.”

Greta did me the favor of not asking what those things had to do with each other. She just wrapped her arms around her legs and said, into her knees, “Thanks.”

We sat like that, curled up like conch shells, like we were waiting for someone, anyone, to put their ears to us.

“Things are hard,” I said eventually, when the pasta maker infomercial faded into basic cable oblivion, replaced by the easy, soothing voices of a soft rock compilation.

“I’m sure they are,” Greta said.

“I know you’re sure. You told me that before all this even started.”

“All what? Did something happen?”

“No,” I said. It was an automatic response, to deny. “It’s just the usual stuff. No money. We haven’t even started putting together the baby’s room yet. I don’t even want to think about the hospital bill that’s coming.”

“Yeah, well, it’s just a bill. They can’t put you in prison for not paying them.”

“They can’t?”

“What? No. Not anymore, anyway. Not in this country.”

“Oh,” I said. “Then what are we all so afraid of?”

“I don’t know, but it works. I’m afraid.”

“Me too,” I said.

Reunited and it feels so good, the infomercial sang.

“If you need anything, just like for now, I could lend you some, like, money or something,” Greta said.

“What? No, that’s not what I meant. I wasn’t hinting at anything. I’m just saying it’s hard.”

“I know, and it’s not gonna get any easier before the kid is born, so…”

“No.”

“Why not?” She was getting defensive, or maybe excited. “I have like six thousand dollars in the bank just sitting there right now.”

Six thousand dollars. I tried to wrap my head around that number. How the hell had she managed that? I wondered if she was sneaking off to Foxwoods on the weekends, straddling three or four slot machines, but then I realized she wouldn’t risk losing. She did it the old-fashioned way, the way I didn’t think actually worked: she’d earned it.

“That’s for school,” I said. “For you.”

“I don’t need it until next year. You could pay it back by then, right?”

“Yeah, of course, but—”

“But what? You can’t put the baby on an air mattress. You can’t dress it in your hand-me-downs.”

“But you said you weren’t going to help me,” I said. “Back when this started.”

She stared back at the TV screen. Just call me angel of the morning, angel. “It’s not for you, it’s for the baby.”

Then it wasn’t up to me to say yes or no, was it?

“Okay,” I said. “If you really really want to. But you don’t have to.”

“Someone has to,” she said.

She was so right that I didn’t even have to confirm it. “Maybe just a thousand. Or two, tops. I’ll start paying you back next week. I promise,” I said.

I’d finally hit the age where I could legally work on heavy equipment, even if I couldn’t legally go out for a beer afterward, so it was probably about time I did what my forebears crossed the ocean for and took a job at a factory. It was in our nature, the way royalty or sickle-cell anemia was for other bloodlines. The Ferruccis at Ferrucci Manufacturing respected that Great-Uncle Eddie had refused to join the union, which to him was Communist like Russia and full of either winos or whiners—it was hard to tell with his accent—and so they’d made him foreman years before. In turn he’d acted like our family employment agency, scoring jobs for a bunch of cousins I wouldn’t recognize in a police lineup.

Uncle Eddie had kissed me on the mouth when I stopped by the next day to ask him about any openings at Ferrucci. He was happier at that moment than he was when I made my first communion, and told me to show up at five.

“Third shift?” I asked.

“No, first, Elsie. Five A.M.”

“Five A.M.?” I said. I usually went to bed closer to that hour than rose at it. “There’s nothing that starts in the actual daytime?”

“Yes, for people who have earned it. Your cousin Steve was here two years before he could come in at seven. And I’m not gonna put you on the third shift, not with the kind of people who work overnight.”

From what Mamie had told me, Steve was a cousin who’d actually been in a couple of police lineups. I figured if he could do this job then I could, too, and probably well enough to make it to shift boss before the end of the year.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

I thought that at a real job there’d be some kind of application, an interview, a permed human resources lady named Sherri to fill out paperwork with before finally winding up on the floor, but somehow Uncle Eddie cut through that commie bullshit and I had a box of widgets and a metal folding chair ten minutes after walking into the shop the next day. I was an inspector, a job that sounded like it should come with a tan overcoat and tobacco pipe, but all it meant was that I had to look at the little metal ferrules Ferrucci manufactured and decide whether they were deformed or not. I didn’t even know what a ferrule was until that day, and it turned out they were just little metal rings that wrap around other things to keep them from splitting. They didn’t even get to be their own things, just tiny little parts of something better. Still, I was kind of excited. I thought about all the little round stickers I found on the inside of my clothes back when they were new: INSPECTED BY 54, INSPECTED BY 7, and it occurred to me that 54 was a person, and 7 was a person, and those people got their own stickers that made it from Indonesia or wherever they lived all the way to the Kmart in Waterbury, which made them seem a little famous, like they had their own little autographs that went out all over the world. The ferrules I’d be inspecting wouldn’t get any stickers, but they’d at least have my fingerprints on them, and they could end up anywhere, on a pencil in Egypt or an electric guitar in California.

“Eddie said we’re supposed to train you, but you don’t look like a sea monkey so you could probably figure it out yourself,” one of the three ladies at the table said when I sat down. “But just in case, I’ll show you what you need to know. I’m Deena, by the way.”

“Rini,” said another.

“Margot,” said another.

“Elsie,” I said. Deena was a black lady with the ruddy sort of orangey red hair that came from years of abusing drugstore dye, probably buying whatever shade happened to be on clearance that day. The ladies next to her, Rini and Margot, both had sandy, fluffy perms and eyeliner just slightly more purple than the circles under their eyes. They were white, but they didn’t look any more like Rosie the Riveter than Deena did. None of them had neat pin curls tucked beneath cotton kerchiefs, and they didn’t wear blue jumpsuits like in World War II–era photos of factory women, back when ladies wore Pan-Cake makeup and lipstick even to work on heavy machinery, because who knew when a news camera might show up to make stars out of them? These ladies were all in dungarees and sweatshirts that their sons had probably outgrown, Giants or Raiders logos splashed across their chests, thin gold cross necklaces tucked safely away under the neckbands.