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  “Well, they don’t make a maternity line of waitress wear.”

  “It’s shameful. Disgusting.”

  “Jesus,” I said. Maybe I did prefer his silent moods.

  “You should not have to work like this,” he said.

  “It’s not a big deal,” I said.

  “Your work should be at home. This is no place for you.”

  “Well, it’s where I am. I don’t have much choice in it, do I?”

  He shook his head and pressed down on the beef patties already overcooking on the grill. “No, you don’t have a choice. I have decided. I don’t want you here anymore.”

  “Bashkim,” I said. I knew he was in a mood and I was supposed to be careful when he was in a mood, and if I thought about it maybe I would’ve realized I was more sad than pissed off that he didn’t ask a single question about the doctor, about his own kid. But no matter what else I was feeling, rage always won. It was like mixing paints in art class: just the right amount of red to blue made a pretty purple, and just the right amount of white made it lavender, but once you added black all you got was a dark ugly gray.

  “Go home. I’ll tell Gjonni you can’t work here anymore,” he said.

  “The fuck you will,” I said.

  He dropped the spatula. “The fuck I what?”

  “The fuck you will. We don’t have a choice, now do we? We don’t have a pot to piss in.”

  He stepped closer to me. “You stop talking now.”

  “Fuck you! Don’t touch me. If I’m so disgusting don’t touch me.”

  That only made him grab on to my arm tighter. We had a crowd around us by this point, but neither one of us noticed it at that moment.

  “What do you think you’re doing with your money?” I said. “You’re not some Wall Street whiz kid. You’re not Gordon fucking Gekko. Why didn’t you just drive out to Foxwoods if you wanted to throw all your money away? Why not just burn it for fuel?”

  “Elsie,” he said.

  “We don’t even have a real goddamned bed. We don’t even have a crib or a diaper bag or any of the shit you need for a baby.”

  “You have to be quiet now,” he said.

  “You wanted this. You’re the one who wanted this baby and now I’m going to be the one on the side of the street with a sign begging for money.”

  “Quiet,” he said.

  “And it’s not just me. I bet you made your wife all the same kinds of promises you made me and I bet she’s going to be out on the street, too, thanks to you. You think you’re better than Fatmir? You think you’re better than anyone? My god, you can’t even take care of your damn self.”

  I never really believed it when people in accidents said they didn’t remember a thing about what happened. It didn’t seem possible to forget a thing like that. There were times I tried to forget entire passages of my life, banging my head against the wall to shake the bad things loose, but no matter what, I still remembered my mother sharing my twin bed with me for months after my father took off with their full-size one, and how I made my mother cry the last time I shat my pants because I was supposed to have been potty-trained for at least two years by then, and how I’d hit a kitten the first time I drove a car without supervision and drove away while it twitched because I was sure the suffering would kill me before it killed the cat. But honestly the moments before I opened my eyes and found the metal shelving and food service tins on top of me are gone. I can imagine what Bashkim’s eyes must have looked like before his fists came down on me, but I can’t remember them, and so I’ve always kind of thought, even now, years after I was supposed to have learned better, that there was something I must have misunderstood about it all. Sometimes still I think that the floor must have been extraslippery that night, that I just fell and brought a mess down on top of me. Sometimes I still think, Well, Elsie, if it was Bashkim, think about it from his perspective: you can be an extrasuperbitch.

  I’m pretty sure that I never made a sound, that it was Yllka who did all the yelling and screaming when I came to, while Janice pulled me up and checked me for fractures and then brought me outside with a glass of water when it was clear that nothing was broken. She asked how my stomach felt and I shrugged and she asked if I thought something had happened to the baby and I shook my head, and then she didn’t ask any more questions, just rubbed little circles on my back and said, “I know, I know.” I’d never thought that much of Janice, but there was something in the way she sat there that made me think that she did know. Everybody except for me seemed to have already learned it, whatever it was. Then Janice had to go back to her tables and to mine also, because Yllka forbade me to go back inside. For my own good, she said, not for Bashkim’s.

  So I don’t remember everything about that night, but I did come out with something better than memory, which was a little bit of foresight. When I got home I pulled the leftover money Bashkim had given me for the doctor from my pocket and tucked it into a little flour tin someone had donated to us as a housewarming gift that had been sitting empty behind a box of potato flakes and a couple of cans of Campbell’s chicken noodle. A rainy day was coming, it was almost certain, and I was going to need some shelter.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Luljeta

  You have to start taking Ahmet’s phone calls before you can ask him for his car.

  You learn more about him. His father runs a Subway franchise somewhere out on the West End. He expects Ahmet to work there and, eventually, take over, but Ahmet has different plans. He’s majoring in business at UConn Waterbury, and he knows what a dead end a Subway life would be for him, that weird Subway smell infusing his entire wardrobe, the complaints of too little meat and too much shredded lettuce by customers in desperate need of an extra serving of vegetables. He’s a modern guy, and his father is an old-fashioned guy, and he doesn’t understand why his father would bring them all the way to America just to live the same old bleak Communist Subway lifestyle, with its beige turkey slices that lead to satiety but never pleasure.

  “Nah, man, nah. Panera Bread, that’s where it’s at. That’s what I’ma get me,” Ahmet says.

  He speaks so naturally in such an American vernacular that the slight accent seems almost like an affect, but affects are generally adapted to impress people, whereas Ahmet’s unplaceable one only confuses them. But Ahmet himself is not confusing. Ahmet himself is as transparent as the Sprite Zero that fills his ever-present Subway beverage canisters. He knows exactly what he wants and expresses it without reservation: first Panera in the ShopRite plaza on Chase; the second in Watertown next to the old two-screen cinema run by some distant relative of his; the steel-gray carbon-look vinyl skinz over the gas tank of his Kawasaki; and a nice girl. He’s way into this hypothetical nice girl; not old-fashioned, not a subservient housewife like his mother, but nice. Someone who could run the books at his shops, like Yllka, but do it with a smile on her face, very unlike Yllka.

  He talks about this nice girl, but meanwhile, he’s spending more and more time with you. You aren’t nice, no matter what ribbon you’d been handed back in kindergarten. You’ve shed the teacher’s pet thing entirely over the past couple of weeks, acting surly and handing in assignments days late, and you’re building up to skipping them altogether. What difference does it make, anyway? The $462 your mother managed to deposit in your college savings account won’t pay for a semester at Western Connecticut State University any more than it would have paid for the same at NYU. Clearly that’s how much investment has been made in your future: the equivalent of a new futon from Bob’s Discount Furniture. It’s about as much investment as had been made in your past, and only recently have you acquired the wherewithal for that to piss you way the hell off.

  So Ahmet doesn’t have a nice girl, or a good girl, or a smart girl, he has you, who every night falls asleep fantasizing about having punched Margarita right in the mouth, then coming home to tell your mother that you wish it had been her, with all her lies and silence and big talk about wanting w
hat’s best for you without ever once really planning for it. He has you, who won’t even put out, not even a little bit, not even a kiss on the mouth.

  That last part is what makes him think he has a nice girl. It never occurs to Ahmet that you would be willing to put out if he were a bearded denim model prone to bouts of depression that only you could talk him through. Ahmet is just a regular nice guy, one who deserves a nice girl with a moral code that truly forbids putting out, and you feel bad that what you really seek from him is not the day’s surplus white chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies, which he offers via text at 10:01 P.M. every night, or the tight abs that he somehow finds time to work on at Gold’s Gym between work and school and little not-nice-girl you. What you really have your eye on is his Civic hatchback, a compact, reliable thing whose backseat folds down into something approaching a sleeping cabin and whose efficient Japanese engine could get you to Texas with the $462 previously earmarked for a semester of medical sonographing textbooks.

  “I need to do it. I need to meet my family. My Albanian family,” you’d emphasized. You strategized this, knowing that even if Ahmet is the Panera to his father’s Subway, he could never bring home someone without Albanian blood.

  “Yes, yes, you should. It’s wrong that you don’t know them. I can’t even imagine,” he’d answered.

  And after two short weeks, you announce that you are going. You are going to Texas, come hell or high water, dammit. You’ll be leaving on Friday, coincidentally a week before his spring classes begin.

  “What? How?” he asks. He appears genuinely hurt that you’d make a decision that large without consulting him, your fake short-term boyfriend.

  “Greyhound, I guess. Or I’ll hitchhike. It doesn’t matter, I’m just going to go.”

  He slaps an open hand onto his forehead and holds it there, like he’s holding a compress onto an open head wound. “Hitchhike? For serious? You? You want to be raped and murdered?”

  “I don’t want to be.”

  “That’s just…It’s just crazy. What does your mother say about this?”

  “She says fine, what does she care?”

  “Your mother says she doesn’t care?” he asks, incredulous.

  “She doesn’t not care,” you say. “It’s just, like, I’m basically an adult, and of course she understands. Who wouldn’t understand wanting to know your own brothers and sisters, your own flesh and blood? I mean, what’s more important than family?” you say, and you don’t even care that you’re mostly just quoting the Kardashians.

  Ahmet understands this, though, because he is the type who will shake down his sister’s thug boyfriend if he keeps her out past 11:00 P.M.

  “I just wish you wouldn’t take the bus,” he says. “You know there’s crazy people on those things, right? Like, guys with swords that will take off your head?”

  “I’d rather not take the bus, too,” you say. “But.”

  “But what?”

  “But I can’t afford to fly, and I don’t have a car.”

  At first he’s silent. He shakes his head, takes a sip of his Sprite, leans back in the seat of the Civic in the Stop & Shop parking lot where you hold most of your dates.

  “What if I come with you?” he says.

  “What? No, I can’t ask you to do that,” you answer, and in fact, you asking him to escort you is not at all a part of the plan. Why can he not see that you just need to temporarily relieve him of the glut of motorized vehicles on his hands?

  He throws his hands in the air. “I have my break from school, and maybe I miss a few days afterwards.”

  “But your job. Your father,” you say.

  “My sister will take over. She’s grounded anyway, she won’t be having any fun for a little while.”

  “No, that’s crazy. I can’t. You can’t do that,” you say, almost panicking now, because his plan is indeed more practical than yours.

  “I don’t want you to go alone. I can’t believe your mother would want you to go alone. I mean, no.” He shakes his head. “I won’t let you do that. I’m coming. I’ve never been to Texas, anyway.”

  “You have no reason to go to Texas. You only go to Texas if you have a reason,” you argue.

  “My reason is to protect you. Your mother should want that, she shouldn’t want you to go alone. I’m going to talk to her, actually. She’s as crazy as the bus people if she lets you take a Greyhound to Texas.”

  “No! No,” you say. You close your eyes and take a moment to think things through. On the one hand, you’d be sharing a few cubic feet for several days with a guy you had never even kissed. On the other hand, with two of you, there would be someone to help with the driving, and you could just pretend to sleep during your turns in the passenger seat. Plus he knows Yllka, so he has some connection to your family in some distant way, just like all Albanians seem to have some connection to all other Albanians in some distant way. He would be the adhesive between the odd American mutt and her purebred Albanian siblings. He could provide enough white chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies to get you through a couple thousand miles.

  You exhale slowly. Ahmet wasn’t a part of the plan, but then again, look how far you’d come so quickly by not thinking anything all the way through.

  “Okay,” you say. “But we’re leaving on Friday. Ten A.M. sharp.”

  —

  Does your mother really think it’s fine that you’re going to Texas? Does she really understand your need to be part of a family that isn’t composed exclusively of her?

  She doesn’t think anything. She’s as aware of your plan as you recently were of the existence of your siblings, which is to say, not at all. She knows something is up, because she’s noticed that you’ve been talking to her less and less and to your phone more and more. When she asks, you tell her it’s Teena on the other end, and you make sure to clear out your call log after every conversation. She knows; she’s checked, just like she checks your text messages, for which you’ve kept only a strategic, boring few that reveal nothing other than the due date of your history paper (already passed) and a brief recap of the previous week’s Scandal, which Teena had missed on account of her three-week anniversary with the new Burlington Coat Factory security guard. Ahmet exists only as a contact named Matt in your phone, and Yllka is renamed Yvonne, which just happens to be the name of the woman for whose drippy children you occasionally babysit. Everything checks out, but still, she knows you’re up to something. You don’t have proof, but you’re sure that your mother has scoured your room looking for drug paraphernalia or condoms, and you wonder which would have been worse for her to find.

  And what if she had been brave enough to ask you outright, and you had been brave enough to explain why you have to go? How would you have summarized it?

  She lied to you. Your father wasn’t a ghost in the Balkans, he was a man waiting to be discovered right here in your own native land. It doesn’t matter why she lied, even if it was to protect you from whatever she thought you needed protection from. She made decisions for you that weren’t hers to make. Yes, she made them on your behalf at a time when you had no capacity for language and freely shat all over yourself every few hours, but the number of words in your vocabulary is now an above-average seventeen thousand or so, thanks to the books you read for pleasure when television and even the entire Internet grow too boring, and you have been potty-trained for a good fifteen years. She’s had plenty of time to come clean, and plenty of time to have convinced you that she made the right decision all those years ago. She could have explained to you that your father had managed to love you only while you were still an abstract thing, a thing that only loved back and cooed and did not repeatedly shit itself all night and then cry about it. She could have explained that he was a frightened man, and a frightened man, like a frightened dog, was a potentially dangerous thing. She could have said those things instead of repeating, if the topic ever came up, that your father was simply an asshole, the same term she applies to people who do
n’t matter at all, like guys who cut her off in traffic and Bill O’Reilly.

  But if she lied about where he was, who’s to say she wasn’t lying about what he was? What if he wasn’t just some asshole, and you weren’t better off without him?

  To be fair, you acknowledge that you’ve been lying right back to your mother, and there’s nothing in the Don’t Lie kindergarten code that says it’s okay to do it if it’s been done to you first. And also, if you really, really think about it—if you choose not to lie even to yourself—you aren’t sure if your anger can be distilled down to the fact that your mother has told you that it was an immigration paperwork snafu that kept your father away instead of the truth, which is that it was either her or him or some combination thereof. What you learned from Yllka, for example, doesn’t explain all the nights you had quivered with rage in your bed before you even knew of the existence of the rest of your family. That rage has no clearly identified source or target. Maybe what you had gotten from Yllka isn’t the origin of your rage but an end point, a bull’s-eye.

  And let’s say you go through with this trip. Let’s say you find yourself eating dinner with a brand-new family, leaving your mother to accompany Mamie to her nightly meetings in church basements and Skype with Greta when Greta could get a signal on a neighbor’s unprotected wireless network. What makes you think that adding members to your family will somehow lead to conclusions instead of exponentially adding to the questions?

  You think about those things in your bed the night before your departure, and there you are again, quivering and cold, full of rage and fear and a new ingredient in this toxic stew, something along the lines of a preemptive regret, which some wise old people might call foresight but which a seventeen-year-old would call superfreaking annoying. Maybe you are, after all, a shitty person who’s just bored and doesn’t care about spiting those who have loved and reared and sacrificed for you. You hope not—something a truly shitty person would likely not do—but you suppose you will find out when you depart in twelve or so hours.