Mike Wells - Baby Talk

Annie searched around the kitchen for something to write on. She finally decided to use a napkin. Just after she scribbled Neal’s name across the top, she heard the sound of footsteps coming down the hallway.

“Oh, God,” she whispered, the pen poised above the paper. She watched the door as the footsteps came closer. “Please don’t be Neal. Please don’t be Neal.”

The footsteps stopped in front of the door. Annie waited breathlessly for the jingling sound of Neal’s keys.

Instead, there was a loud knock.

Annie opened her mouth. For a second, nothing came out. “Who is it?”

“Building maintenance. Here to take care of the rodent problem.”

“Oh,” Annie said, relieved. She almost laughed. Now that she was leaving, the manager had finally decided to do something about the mice.

“Can you come back later?” Annie paused, then added, “In an hour or so?” She took satisfaction in knowing that Neal would be home then—maybe the man would fill the apartment with noxious fumes and it would smell awful. Maybe an entire army of dying mice would come crawling out of the woodwork—that would serve Neal right.

“I’ll be back later,” the man said, sounding a little miffed. Annie sat still as she listened to him walk away.

She scribbled off the rest of her short and not-quite-truthful note to Neal, promising herself that she would call him when she got to Chattanooga and explain in more detail. As bad a husband and father as he was, he at least deserved that much.

* * *

Neal’s few moments of self-righteous supremacy at Snell’s Flowers were short-lived. When Mildred handed him his final paycheck—the first and only Snell paycheck he would ever receive—Neal at first thought she had made a clerical error. The amount was quite a bit less than he expected. When he questioned her about this, she went over the math with him and he realized, with quite a shock, that he was being paid less than minimum wage. A dollar an hour less, to be exact.

He stormed back into old man Snell’s office, or at least pushed his way in as forcefully as a man can do with a bad foot and an aching shoulder.

“What is this crap?” Neal said, tossing the check on the old man’s desk.

Snell merely glanced it. “What’s the problem now, son?”

“You’re trying to pay me less than minimum wage, that’s what.”

“So?”

Neal was almost beside himself with anger. “It’s illegal!”

“No,” Snell said smugly. “Not for part-time employees, it’s not.”

Neal was confused. “What the hell are you talking about? I’m not a part-time employee—I worked forty hours a week.”

“No, sir, you did not. Look at the paycheck. You worked thirty-five hours a week, like all the other delivery boys. Seven hours a day, five days a week. Eight to four, with one hour off for lunch.”

Neal picked up the check and stared at it.

“And, in this Great State of Georgia, you don’t have to pay a part-time employee minimum wage.” He gave another smug smile.

“You...why didn’t you tell me you paid less than minimum wage?”

“Don’t recall you askin’.”

Neal could not believe what the old man was trying to pull. He hadn’t asked how much the job paid, because he assumed it was minimum wage...but now that he thought about it, the ad he saw in the paper had said DRIVERS WANTED—PART & FULL TIME.

“Look,” Neal said, “I worked eight hours a day, or even more. You gave me more deliveries at four-thirty. Five o’clock, sometimes. I didn’t get back here until almost six on some days.”

“Well, we gave you a little extra work only because you were a tad slow with your deliveries. Which is only natural, you bein’ new and all.”

“What? That’s not true! I made my deliveries faster than any of the other...” Neal’s voice trailed off—there was no point in arguing with Snell. The sneaky son-of-a-bitch would just have another snappy comeback for whatever Neal said.

Neal turned to leave, but hesitated—he couldn’t resist telling Snell one more thing. He looked the old man straight in the eye and became acutely aware of their age difference, the wrinkles on Snell’s face, the balding head, the pot-belly. Neal lost his nerve for a few seconds, but then decided that he had tell Jimmy Snell what he really thought of him, no matter what.

With his voice quavering a bit, Neal finally got it out.

“You’re a selfish prick.”

This was the worst insult Neal could conjure up, but Snell did not seem to be in the least phased by it. “No, son, I’m just a bidnessman, tryin’ to do the best I can for mysef and my fambly. If you don’t like workin’ for us, why, there’s somebody else who will.”

Neal snickered. “I can see how much you want to ‘hep out’ your fellow Georgia Tech students.”

This touched a nerve in the old man. “Now you listen to me for a minute, you smart-mouthed college boy. You don’t have a damn clue ‘bout how hard it is to make a profit these days. I try to hep out students like you much as I can, but you got to realize there’s...well, other economic forces at work here.” Snell lowered his voice, cocking his head towards the loading door. “Those nigra-boys are just happy as clams workin’ for less than minimum wage.”

This had been the last straw—Neal turned around and walked out, fighting an almost overpowering urge to tear up the check and throw it in the old man’s face. But he couldn’t do that—he and Annie needed the money too much.

Now, Neal sat in his car, parked in front of his apartment building, staring down at the miserable pittance of a paycheck in his hand, wondering how he was going to explain it all to Annie. She was probably furious about everything that had happened already.

Neal gobbled down another couple of pain killers and swallowed them dry. He wanted to dope himself into a stupor.

After staring into space another ten minutes, he finally mustered up the courage to drag himself out of the car and into the building. When he entered the apartment, he was relieved to discover that Annie and Natasha weren’t home. He then realized that he hadn’t noticed Annie’s car out in the parking lot. Annie was almost always home when he came back from work.

When he went into the kitchen, he saw a napkin taped to the refrigerator. There was writing on it, but he couldn’t read it—his vision seemed blurry. It must have been because of the pain killers. Everything seemed to be going in and out of focus.

He tore the napkin free and held it close to his face, squinting at Annie’s uneven handwriting.

Neal, gone to the grocery. Hope your foot is better—Annie.

Neal stared dully at the note, leaning against the refrigerator. After a moment, he hobbled his way into the bedroom and lay down.

He soon fell into a deep, drug-induced sleep.

CHAPTER 7

Just as Annie was approaching the entry ramp to I-75, she decided to buy some more diapers before she left Atlanta. Her nose told her that Natasha already needed another change, and she didn’t want to take any chances.

She considered trying to find a drugstore so she could buy one of the brands she liked, but decided against it—they were all too crowded this time of day. Plus, she would have to unstrap Natasha and take her inside the store with her. Unlike some mothers, Annie refused to leave her baby alone in the car, unless she could see Natasha every second.

Annie decided to go to a mini-market instead. They usually only had Pampers, she knew, but that would just have to do for the moment. She could stock up tomorrow when she and Natasha were safely in Chattanooga. The best thing about mini-markets was that Annie could leave Natasha strapped in her car seat and just run inside and be back in less than a minute, keeping an eye on the baby the whole time. Whoever came up with the idea of a mini-market was a genius, Annie mused.