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  At the very least, you’re still seeing things more clearly than your mother, who is standing outside the door, saying, “What? What did I do?”

  —

  Here’s what she did:

  When you were a kid and she brought you along to the grocery store, every time you’d ask if you could have whatever gushy, Lunchables box of fluorescent wonder you passed on the General Mills–sponsored interior aisles, she’d grab the usual ShopRite brand pea-gravel granola bars and answer, Not now. Not No, not Hell no, but Not now. She must have read somewhere how important it is to instill in children a sense of hope, and for the longest time you held on, but now, at seventeen years old, you finally realize that you’re never, never getting that Go-Gurt.

  Also: she promised you when you were little that she’d change your name someday, once you were old enough to not want to change it to Hermione. You’d get a normal first name and her last name, which was almost as unpronounceable as Luljeta but was at least shared with another couple of human beings in the world, instead of the last name you had, Hasani, which seemed like a weed growing in the vicinity of the skimpy Kuzavinas family tree. And by the time you had outgrown boy wizards, what you wanted instead of a new name was an explanation for the one you had, and what you got instead was a key chain with your name on it that she ordered special for you at some kiosk in the mall, so you could no longer be sad about the lack of personalized products that were available to Albanian bastard children. You had no keys for the key chain, and no answers to your questions, but you said thank you anyway, because you were sure this was part one in the explanation that was coming someday. Someday, you see, but Not now.

  And: when you were too young to look after yourself without DCF intervening, she used to leave you with Mamie, your de facto guardian, which was often fine, because Mamie was mostly still able to stand until around 7:00 P.M., when Mr. Carlo Rossi would gently lull her to sleep. But there were also the not-fine times when, upon returning to Mamie’s house after an afternoon at Hamilton Park, you found her slumped on the floor in the kitchen, and you would panic and call your mother at work, and your mother would calmly instruct you to check Mamie’s breathing, roll her onto her side, and sit quietly in the living room until she was able to get authorization from her supervisor to leave for the day. See this? your mother would say when she finally arrived. This is why you don’t drink. The next day, when you were dropped off with Mamie again, Mamie would point to the door your mother had just exited in an angry huff and say, See this? This is why I drink.

  And: she told you not to listen to Mamie on those days when Mamie would shake her head and tell you, God, you look just like your father.

  And: she told you, God, you take after Greta, which seemed to you like a good thing, though your mother always seemed slightly concerned when she said it. Maybe she was afraid that once you flew the nest, you wouldn’t bother to come home for most holidays like Greta, her too-good-for-everyone sister. You wondered where one drew the line between good and too-good, and if that was something you needed to be concerned about.

  And now: she stands outside your door for ten more minutes, ice cube clinking in her own glass of wine, until she’s ready for a refill. Then she walks away saying, “Fine, if that’s the way you want to be,” as if she’s ever before acknowledged that wanting and being have anything to do with one another. You feel like you have some version of that disease which makes people believe that their limbs aren’t really theirs, so they travel to Indonesia and pay doctors big American dollars to amputate their not-their arm or not-their leg, only you have a version where you feel like you ended up in a family that isn’t really yours, surrounded by bodies that are just a little off. The thought occurs to you now, for the first time, in your bedroom with a now-warm Lean Cuisine compress over your eye, that maybe you were born into the right family but just ended up with the wrong half of it. Maybe it’s time to correct that, get proactive, which, you’ve learned today, can get you bruised and bloody but can also get you moving. Yeah, you think, it’s high time to get moving.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Elsie

  And then one night Bashkim wasn’t waiting outside for me before my shift. It felt like we’d been together for years by then but it was only a couple of months, just long enough for spring to finally stick and the air to stay warm after the sun went down. The first firefly of the season landed on my thigh while I stood by the back door of the Ross and I panicked and smashed it, my uniform now bioluminescent, and I thought: I should teach Bashkim that word, bioluminescent, something I remembered from an earth sciences class back in middle school, except I couldn’t remember if bioluminescence was a real thing or if it was something like alchemy, nice to think about but debunked by actual science. Then I thought that it had to be real, because my skirt still had a faint yellow light to it, as if I was some raver whose glow stick had sprung a leak while she rolled on E and made out with strangers in enormous jeans and vintage Adidas jackets. I’d read about raves in places like Sassy magazine, but the closest I’d ever come to being part of something like that was doing the hokey pokey at the end of the afternoon free-skate session at RollerMagic. I wanted to go to a rave, or to one of those three-story dance clubs in New Haven, and put on heavy eyeliner and pay outrageous cover charges and lean against velveteen so crusted with fluids that I wouldn’t dare sit on it, but me and Bashkim had never so much as gone to the movies together. The week before we’d spent date night at the laundromat while he washed his clothes, except I was the one who actually did the work while he stood and leaned against the dryers, crunching on Chiclets from the March of Dimes candy machine. I was thinking that I was going to try to talk him into an actual night out at a place that accepted currency other than quarters, and that’s when I realized that it was already ten minutes past my starting time, and Bashkim hadn’t even shown up for our standing date, never mind my fantasy one.

  I waited two more minutes and then threw a little rock at the employee door, assuming he’d lost track of time and needed to be jarred into checking a clock, but still I found myself standing alone, waiting to be courted in a car before walking into the Ross alone, pretending nobody had figured out what was going on with us. That’s when the bad thoughts came: he had an accident and was comatose at St. Mary’s, and Gjonni and Yllka never bothered to call me because they were just as aware that I was not Bashkim’s wife as they were that I was his lovergirl, to quote the Teena Marie song that was dated even then but on near-constant rotation in the miniature jukeboxes in the booths at the Ross. But the Fiero was parked right where it was always parked, in the farthest-off corner space. I walked over to it and peered inside but Bashkim wasn’t waiting in there, either. Then the thoughts got even worse: he wasn’t head-injured at all, he had just walked away. Just like that, I was another past he left behind.

  I ran back to the employee entrance but walked through it slowly, trying to play it cool. And there he was, Bashkim looking straight into my eyes before he turned his back to me, as if he would turn to salt if he so much as caught another glimpse of my face. So I changed my plan. Screw cool; I was no cool kid, I was no club-hopping New Haven scenester, I was a hard-knocked Brass Valley bitch and I was going to prove it by marching right up to him and turning him around and slapping his face with the spatula I pulled right out of his own greasy hand. But my legs missed their cue and instead marched me all the way out to the dining room, and I sat down in an empty booth and began counting backward from ten over and over again to calm myself and get the nerve to walk back into the kitchen. It was too neon-bright in the dining room, but it was empty enough to hide out in. I had to share it with only a couple of old ladies still mobile enough to walk up the street from the old lady home, and a kid serving his time-out sentence in a booth far away from the one where his mother was sucking down Newport Lights.

  “Waiting for someone to take your order?” Cheryl said, once she noticed me there. Cheryl was a skinny pockmarked waitress who I was
always stuck working with, obviously a punishment from Yllka, who clearly hated me. “Get up, slowpoke, you’re late for your shift as it is.”

  “I’ll be there in a second. I don’t feel too good,” I said.

  “None of us feel good. Look around you. You think you’re supposed to feel good?”

  “Just a second. I’m coming.”

  “That’s what he said. Get it? No, really, though, on your feet, girly.” She shot me a look that dared me to disobey, and even though she was my elder by about twenty years, she wasn’t my superior, so I took my time unfurling, at least until I noticed Yllka at the front counter. She wasn’t looking at me, but I bet she could smell trouble even over all the grilled meats.

  “Thank you, princess,” Cheryl said. “Jesus, what’s up with this place tonight? Bashkim’s panties are in a bunch, too.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?” I said.

  “Oh, nothing, I was just remarking,” she said, which she and the other waitress, Janice, found hilarious for no reason I could figure out. Maybe remarking was a vocab word on the GED test both of them were studying for, the two of them bosom buddies even though one didn’t have bosoms and the other had enough for three or four women. Like a horse, Cheryl lifted her top lip over her buckteeth in something kind of like a smile. Mrs. Ed, I called her under my breath. The name I bet she had for me wasn’t quite as nice as horse, although it sounded a lot like it.

  But who were they to talk, even if they’d figured out what Bashkim and I were up to in the parking lot? Bashkim loved me, he told me so every other night, starting from before he even knew my last name. He got into his quiet moods sometimes, when it was like he’d forgotten all his words, but when he got his voice back he made up for them by telling me about the necklace he was going to buy for my birthday, or what he was going to do to me later in his car. It was Cheryl and Janice who made it through every one of the back of the house staff in exchange for a free meatloaf special or sometimes even actual money, at least a couple of quarters to feed the fortune-teller machine out in the lobby. They tested their fortunes at least three times a night, until finally the fortune-teller fed them the answers they wanted in return for pocket change, which they should’ve used for ramen noodles to feed their kids.

  But never mind them. I wasn’t like those ladies. No way would I let their fates happen to me.

  I’d gotten some of my nerve back and I steeled myself to walk into the kitchen, but I was intercepted again, this time by Yllka. This whole place was booby-trapped, only as far as I could tell, there were no secret treasures around to protect.

  “Where are you going?” Yllka asked me. She held an envelope in one hand, tapped it into the other.

  “To work?” I said.

  “What do you need in the kitchen? You haven’t taken any orders yet.”

  “A rack of coffee cups?”

  “Are you asking or telling?”

  “Telling?” I said.

  “Cheryl can get the cups. You have a table that was just sat.”

  I started walking away, grateful for the out, but she stopped me before I took three full steps.

  “Actually, here, take this to Bashkim. He forgot it out here,” she said and handed me the envelope.

  “What is it?”

  “A letter,” she said. “From Aggie, his wife.” She smiled a little, just a tiny little bit, just enough for me to understand that she knew what she was doing.

  “Fine,” I said, though I was burning so hot that I felt like any piece of paper could turn to tinder in my hands. The white envelope had those red and blue stripes around the edges, the same colors as the American flag but clearly from someplace where Americans couldn’t really ever go. France, for example. I’d had a French pen pal in middle school, if you could call someone you exchanged one letter with for a French class assignment a pal. I told mon ami I danced jazz and wore Levis et T-shirts, and he sent back a photo of what was clearly an actor from a French après école special. I knew how letters could lie. I bet I could pick out all the lies in Aggie’s letter without even being able to read the text. I bet it said:

  Dear Bashkim,

  Everything is fine, really, just fine. The bread I eat for dinner is satisfying, the crumbs make a perfect confetti to celebrate the close of another day. I want for nothing. I feel your love from here.

  Love,

  Agnes

  So finally I had an excuse to talk to Bashkim, but now looking at him was impossible.

  “I got something for you,” I said, holding the envelope straight out to him like a sword. “It’s from your wife.”

  He blew his nose into a hankie and stuffed the envelope into the pocket of his apron.

  “What’s it say? Does she miss you so much? She can’t wait for that Mercedes you’re going to buy her?”

  He pulled a Marlboro from behind his ear and lit it on the gas flame before walking outside.

  “Asshole,” I said, once he was safely out the door. I was going to follow him there, but Yllka had been watching the whole thing.

  “I told him not to mess around with that stuff,” she said. “I told him, ‘Bashkim, there is no shortcut to make money. You work and you save, and that’s it.’ ”

  “What stuff?” I said, a little defensively, because I knew she wouldn’t be talking to me about anything unless it somehow had the potential to hurt me.

  “His investments, as he calls them. You know, the money he probably promised you the world with.”

  “What about them?” I said. “And he hasn’t promised me the world. I don’t even want the world. I don’t even like the world that much.”

  “I told him, ‘Bashkim, you don’t know anything about capitalism. There is nothing wrong with just putting money in a piggy bank.’ ”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I know you don’t, Elsie. You two, it’s like they call it, the blind leading the blind.”

  Not too blind to see the reinforced toe of your pantyhose under your sandals, lady, I wanted to say, but because I needed the job, I just repeated, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not leading Bashkim or vice versa.”

  “Okay then, why do you have one foot out the door to follow him? Maybe instead you should get out to your tables,” she said, even though she was the one who sent me into the kitchen in the first place.

  For the rest of the night I tried to catch Bashkim’s eye every time I walked through the kitchen, letting a plate sit in the window when I was right there to run it, asking for a fresh hamburger bun when the drippy coleslaw seeped all over the plate. “It’s fine,” he said to me, or “What are you waiting for?” Or he’d say nothing at all, wouldn’t even glance up, wouldn’t even wink an eye with a face so serious that he either meant that wink more than anything on earth or he didn’t mean it at all, it was nothing more than a twitch.

  Finally I followed him into the walk-in cooler, his arms full of frozen meat. Never had a rump roast looked so much like the skinned dead creature that it was as when it was cradled in his arms.

  “Hey,” I said. “We need some honey mustard out there.”

  “You know where it is.”

  “What’s up with you tonight? What did I do?”

  “You did nothing. This isn’t about you. Not everything is about you,” he said.

  “Well then what’s up with you? Your whatever, your investment.”

  He flinched when I asked it. Those goose pimples on his arm were not just from the cold.

  “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m not worried about it, I’m worried about you. I don’t care about your money.”

  “Then don’t worry about me at all. I will be fine. The money will be fine.”

  “Jesus, I don’t care about the money! I never thought you had any to begin with. Why would I be with a line cook if I was looking for someone with money?”

  “Because you like losers.”

  “No,”
I said, after a second.

  “But I am not a loser.”

  “I know,” I said. “I never said you were.”

  “It will be fine, it’s not a big problem. It’s just a little, what you say, burp.”

  “Hiccup.”

  “What?”

  “You mean hiccup, not burp.”

  He looked at me long and hard, and then he said it again. “I am not a loser, Elsie.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “So let’s get back to work. We’re wasting time.”

  “Wait. Can you just kiss me first?”

  “Kissing is not what we’re paid for.”

  “It’ll just take a second. Gjonni can dock it from my check.”

  “Don’t be a child. This is for later, this kind of thing.”

  And he didn’t kiss me. He didn’t look at me when he opened the door and left me in there alone, surely didn’t wonder why I didn’t follow him out, why I instead sat on a stack of six dozen frozen beef patties with labels that read GRADE D BUT EDIBLE. Those boxes were shredded before they were thrown into the dumpster outside, because no customer would accept Grade D, even if the package explicitly said no really, it’s fine, what grade do you think you deserve?

  I tried to cry but in that cold the tears just froze and iced over my eyes. It was for the best, really, because nobody would then notice my eyes were red and swollen and have to ask me what was wrong, and that worked out perfectly since nobody was going to anyway.