Amy Gustine - You Should Pity Us Instead

“What?” Karen says, aghast. “Why would you do that?”

Kevin thinks he’s kidding. They all launch into a lecture about what an idiot he is.

“You want to go to the desert and get your legs blown off for some rich guy’s oil contract?”

Lawan points out that the Marines are connected to the Navy. He doesn’t think they go to the desert.

“If you like the idea of traveling, join the Foreign Service,” Veronica says.

Lawan shrugs, unwilling to admit he has only the vaguest notion of what that is. Embassies or something. It sounds like paperwork.

“You need college for those positions,” Karen says.

Gloria offered to pay for college and Lawan’s not going has been a regular topic of discussion. Kevin used to argue college wasn’t necessary if Lawan wanted to own a business. Karen and Dennis said what business? And where would the capital come from? Lawan didn’t want to ask what capital was and when he found out later he thought, why don’t they just call it money?

After Lawan turned down Kevin’s offer to “apprentice” at the bike shop and took the job driving the kids, Kevin stopped defending him. But Lawan can’t work at the bike shop. He hates people who take bikes seriously. Does not want to discuss why frame weight matters or how comfortable a seat is on their bony asses.

“You’ve never even mentioned the military.” Karen’s tone is exasperated. He wishes she’d just come out with it: what will they do with Gloria?

“I have a friend who joined.” He details all the benefits, attributing to this fictitious friend what the recruiter told him.

“The few, the proud, the Marines,” Kevin says.

Unsure if he’s being mocked, Lawan replies, “That’s me,” hoping to sound ironic, worldly, while thinking yes, that’s exactly what he’ll be.

He slips on his windbreaker and puts the hood up. Through the window in the back door he can see Gloria staring at the yard the same way she had years ago, when as a kid he’d be flailing away with a jump rope or teetering across the patio on an old skateboard, shouting, “Look! Look!” and she’d nod, saying, “Yes, I see you, yes.”

As he’s closing the door, Dennis yells, “You do know the Marines are going to shave your head, right?”

The next weekend Lawan gets dressed to go to a Jay Z concert with Lawsandra, though he told Gloria and Dennis, who’s coming by to stay with her, that he’s going with a friend from work.

The tickets are his birthday gift. Beforehand they are going to one of those famous steak houses where they bring you a slab of meat two inches thick and you have to order everything else separately. For dessert he hopes they have carrot cake, and his piece will have a burning candle in it. After the concert they will go out for drinks, and she’ll tell him what he wants to know that he hasn’t had the nerve to ask yet, like who his father is, and if Lawsandra knows what happened to his sisters. He tried to find them, Googling their given names first, then trying versions the Millers might have substituted, like Kayla or Kay, Nita or Anita. He found several Millers with these white names and considered messaging them, but Lawkaya and Lawnita are only sixteen years old. If these other girls turn out not to be his sisters, trying to connect online could get him arrested.

At four o’clock, half an hour before Dennis is due to come over and stay with Gloria, he calls to cancel. Something about time zones and filing deadlines. He goes on, offering details as if Lawan knows what they mean. It feels like a way of putting him down, reminding Lawan he should have gone to college.

Lawan calls Kevin, who doesn’t answer, then Karen, who says she woke up with a sore throat and doesn’t want to risk getting Gloria sick.

While he waits for Kevin to call back, Lawsandra texts wanting to know where he is, and he tells her they might have to go late, skip dinner.

Finally, at six o’clock, Kevin arrives and Lawan borrows his CR-V. It’s newer and more reliable than his own car, and it doesn’t smell of cigarettes like Gloria’s, which he knows Lawsandra hates. Dope is fine, but regular cigarettes nauseate her. The facts about her are piling up, and he is storing each one like the little slips of fortune from a Chinese restaurant.

At her house Lawan takes the musty stairs to the second floor. Booker answers, looking half-asleep.

“No, she gone to the concert.”

“I was supposed to pick her up.”

“She gone with her friend Cheryl. Left a while ago.”

A few texts verify this. Lawsandra didn’t want to risk being late, so she sold his ticket to Cheryl and they’re already at the restaurant. No mention of his birthday.

Lawan hangs around, sharing a pizza with Booker, mostly to kill time. When he leaves it’s still too early to go home, so he stops at the bar, where, without Booker and Lawsandra, the other customers make him nervous, hot girls in peek-a-boo skirts draped over guys who look like they’d take his eyes out for noticing. At ten he leaves and drives around, careful to snake through the city without backtracking. Doesn’t want the same cop to see him twice. He’d get pulled over, a young black man driving in circles.

Monday, Lawan’s actual birthday, he has just dropped off Danny, a sixteen-year-old whose problems started with a car accident, and is closing the back doors when he notices Tyler drooling. Lawan wipes his mouth with a tissue. “You okay, kid?”

Tyler can talk, but it takes a while for the words to make their way to his lips, so at first Lawan isn’t worried. Then his hands begin to shake and Lawan realizes it’s a seizure. He jumps in the driver’s seat and shoots straight down Cherry to the big hospital, where his van and his uniform get the guard’s attention and he hits the ER in five minutes flat, by which time Tyler is shivering and his eyes are just white marbles and the hospital staff don’t need any paperwork or cards before they take him and Lawan stands, stunned, beginning to question if he did the right thing, or if he should have held the kid’s tongue down. Wasn’t that the risk? They could choke on it, or bite it or something.

When he calls Tricia he downplays the incident so she won’t kill herself driving over. Once she’s safely in the waiting room, he fleshes out the reality and they sit holding hands, until the doctor comes out and says Tyler seems okay, but Lawan can tell something’s changed. There is a lot of medical talk which Tricia seems to understand. She begins to follow the doctor, then stops. “You coming?”

“No, you go ahead. Your time.”

An understanding passes between them that he won’t be there for her the way she’d hoped, and she accepts it gracefully, but he knows how she feels, and that drives him out to the van, which the guard has moved to a nearby lot.

The guy hands him his keys. “Kid okay?”

“Hope so.” Lawan shrugs, safe inside the assumption that he is just the driver.

He’d planned to spend the evening at Tricia’s. Birthday dinner, birthday sex. Lawan assumes that’s off, but Gloria isn’t expecting him home for hours, so he goes to Lawsandra’s.

She answers the door without her wig, and it takes a few seconds for him to understand the rooster tail was fake. Her real hair looks like tufts of dryer lint.

“How was the concert?”

Lawsandra shrugs. “You didn’t really miss anything. The seats were shitty.”

She brought home KFC and gestures for him to make himself a plate. While they eat, she doesn’t mention his birthday even though Lawan brings up Memorial Day and the change to his schedule in a couple of weeks after school ends for the summer. He can’t think of any other way to get her to consider the date, so he asks if she knows what happened to his sisters.