Amy Gustine - You Should Pity Us Instead

Lawan relented because he’d have to go regardless. Gloria might be able to get from her chair into a car, but just barely, and only with someone strong to lean on. Six months pregnant, Karen could hardly be used as muscle, Kevin has a bad back from the bike accident a few years ago, and Dennis is built like you’d expect of someone who sits in a chair all day. If Gloria started to go down, he’d only serve as something soft to fall on.

By the time Lawan pulls into the hospital’s drive, it’s eleven fifteen. He tells Tricia to stay put. “I’ll go see what’s what.”

The automatic doors part, sending a burst of hospital-scented air at his face. In the far corner, Gloria sits reading. That morning, when she called to verify what time he’d be there, she said what she always says: “It’s Gloria, your mom.” He doesn’t think she ever identifies herself like this with the others.

Before she even looks up, Lawan offers his alibi. “Long morning.”

The kids release him from the weight of time. If he’s late, teachers and therapists assume one of them was sick or had a meltdown. Which is sometimes true. Every week or two he has to pull over and get in the back, hold somebody’s hand or stroke their hair. Once in a while, he sings. You can do stuff like that and nobody’s embarrassed, or tells on you afterward. They all just smile. The ones that can anyway.

Still, he feels a shit for blaming the kids. What the fuck, though. They don’t know.

Gloria tucks her book, something about Chinese farmers judging from the cover, into her bag. “No worries, honey, no worries. I was perfectly content.”

“I’ll get the bags and come back for you.”

Lawan turns and there’s Tricia, looking especially hot in a tight pair of red jeans. She introduces herself as Lawan’s friend and gets behind Gloria’s chair, popping its wheels free and maneuvering around the lobby furniture. Her son, Tyler, who has cerebral palsy, is on Lawan’s route.

Once they’re underway, Gloria in back secured to the bars, Tricia and she shout out get-to-know-you questions over the engine noise until it becomes too awkward and they fall silent. Lawan tunes to public radio because he’s used to classical music. It soothes the kids better than the stuff with words.

At the house, they’re all standing on the front porch — Dennis in his lawyer suit, Karen with her white doctor’s coat peeking out below her jacket, and Kevin wearing his standard khakis and spike-soled bicycling shoes, their gleaming white and green plastic surface freshly buffed. Lawan figures they’re out there just to make a point about how late he is. Otherwise, why not go in the house and sit down? It’s only fifty degrees, a damp May day that can’t make up its mind, and they have keys, of course. They all used to live here.

They appear to be arguing, but that doesn’t worry him. They argue a lot because Frank and Gloria always promoted opinions as if they mattered.

Getting out, Lawan hitches up his jeans, rebuckling to the next belt hole, and tries to look a little harried, remind them all that he might be late, but he’s the one who brought her. He pushes Gloria’s chair with Tricia trailing and as they reach the porch, everyone looks at her a second too long before saying hello.

“Tricia,” Lawan points. “Kevin, Dennis, Karen.” He thumbs toward the house. “So what’s the plan? How are we getting her inside?”

Everybody glances at each other and Lawan can tell they hadn’t thought about that. “Never going to be able to do these stairs.”

The house, a brick colonial with rotting porch columns, has five steps up to the front door. Lawan watches Karen squirm. She’s the doctor. Should have seen this problem coming. Finally he says, “I think I can get her around back and take her in through the patio door.”

The house sits on a hill, so the basement is a walkout, but it’s been a few years since Gloria was strong enough to garden and maneuvering her chair down the weed-choked incline proves difficult. Lawan manages, though, and keeps her pitched back on rear wheels across the choppy patio, its bricks sunken and heaved because Frank didn’t dig the base deep enough. He’s dead now, and the next owner will have to deal with it.

Inside, they all realize Lawan has only changed the problem. This is the basement, with a pool table from the 1970s, an old couch on which he lost his virginity to a homely girl named Reisha and, in the other room, the furnace, water heater, and laundry. Between the rooms a narrow, steep staircase leads to the main floor.

“Well, how the hell are we going to get her upstairs?” Dennis says.

“Can you sit on the stairs,” Tricia asks, “and scoot up backward?”

Karen looks at her with a suspicious, even hostile, glance, but Gloria deems it an excellent idea.

“I’ll go up on my ass just like I came down.”

She makes a move to stand and Lawan hustles forward, offering his arm. When she leans on it, he realizes she’s lost weight, and she didn’t have much to spare. Gloria has always been tall and bony, like one of those funny birds that can’t fly.

“I’ll just carry you.”

Before she can object, he’s swung her up and she’s easier to lift than most of the kids, who flop or freeze or otherwise work against the whole process. At the top of the stairs, Gloria pumps her fist in the air. “Ha, ha! I’m not dead yet.”

Lawan began life an only child. When he was eight, his sisters were born, Lawkaya and Lawnita. Soon after, a social worker took the three of them from their mother, Lawsandra, and sent them to live with a Mexican woman and her half-black, half-white husband, last name Miller. The Millers wanted to adopt the twins and one day a very tall, skinny white woman with red hair came to explain to Lawan that his sisters were “easy” because they were babies, but they wouldn’t be easy forever, and didn’t he want them to go to a good home? The Millers moved away and Lawan was forwarded to the home of Gloria and Frank Schmidt. Gloria was also a very tall, skinny white woman, and for some reason Lawan assumed she was the other white woman’s sister, until one day he asked and she laughed. “No, we’re not related at all.”

He stayed in his old school for the rest of that year, then Gloria and Frank sat him down and asked if he wanted to be adopted. Lawan nodded. He knew he wasn’t easy anymore.

Gloria switched him to the Catholic school Kevin, Dennis, and Karen attended. It was all white, if you counted the Hispanics as white, which he did. By then he’d figured out “Lawan” was what they called “a black name,” so he introduced himself as Wan, the name that Kevin and Dennis used, hoping this was whiter because it had been bestowed by white kids. With the Hispanics around everyone assumed his name was “Juan,” so he started spelling it that way on his papers, and for a while got away with it, until his birthday, when the vice principal came on the announcements.

“We’d like to wish a happy birthday to Lawan Schmidt. Have a great day, Lawan!”

The other boys slapped him on the back the rest of the day, exaggerating his name in two drawn-out syllables, “Laaaa-waaan.”

He stopped cutting his hair that year. By the middle of the next teachers began asking when he might be “trimming” it. Kids wanted to know if he could hide stuff in there, like candy or the answers to the history test. Dennis suggested he join the Village People, and Kevin said he looked like he’d touched a power line. His hair became so tall they didn’t know what to do with him for the spring concert. His face should be in row four, but his hair would be best in row eight. The music teacher solved the problem by putting him on the end of row four, with no one behind him. In the yearbook he protruded like an inked thumbprint at the edge of the page.