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  The woman sighs, pulls off her reading glasses, and finally looks at you, first with mild annoyance, and then—you think, though it’s possible that you’re imagining this part—with vague confusion, as if she’d met you before but can’t place exactly where. She takes your card from you, finally, but she runs it through the card reader without even a glance at it. The whole point was for her to glance at it, to see your name and then, maybe, to see you for what you are: one of them, part of an indefinable something you’ve always been chasing, whether or not you knew it.

  But she doesn’t.

  “At least let him apologize,” she says and waves Ahmet over.

  “No, seriously, I don’t want—” you start, but it’s too late. Ahmet weaves his way to you with more finesse than you imagine he’d ever have steering his motorcycle through a parking lot of orange cones. He touches your elbow with the gentle consideration of a Boy Scout guiding an elderly woman through a busy intersection.

  “Hey, are you okay? I’m so sorry, Lulu. Lulu, right? Your friend said.”

  “It’s fine. It’s just water,” you answer.

  “Lulu?” the woman at the counter asks.

  “Yeah,” you say. And then, because she’s already handed your card back without seeing your name and all the things you suspect it might stand for, and because this is your last chance to ever make her see it, since you know you’ll never have the nerve to come back in here ever again, you add, “Well, no. Luljeta, actually. It’s actually Luljeta.”

  Ahmet’s face instantly flushes with excitement, even more than when he’d first taken notice of your boobs. “You’re Albanian?” he asks. What a prize you are, suddenly, all things in one, an American girl that could make his parents happy, a halfsie who can pull off whorish American necklines but is probably still a nice Albanian virgin. The woman at the counter’s face, meanwhile, turns approximately the same color as the split pea soup on special that evening. She looks down at the receipt you’ve just signed. She pulls on her glasses and then flings them off again to get a good look at your face.

  “Oh my god,” the woman says.

  “So, like, do you have a boyfriend?” Ahmet asks.

  Teena taps your shoulder. “Are you ready to go?” she asks.

  You take it all in, this circus around you. Your heart is racing, your mouth is dry, and you instinctively unwrap the peppermint candy you’d been handed with your receipt and pop it into your mouth.

  “I’m ready,” you say to all of them at once.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Elsie

  Greta wasn’t looking so hot. All the things in the world I should’ve been thinking about at that moment, like the tiny cluster of cells threatening to become human in my womb, and I kept coming back to that: someone’s got to do something for that girl. Greta was a trick, which was idiot-speak for trichotillomania, meaning when she was stressed out or sad or bored, when normal people bit their nails or puffed on cigarettes, she pulled out her hair one thin oily strand at a time. Who could blame her for wanting to dismantle herself: take a sixteen-year-old girl with a hairline like Willard Scott’s, no daddy, Carlo Rossi for a mother, a report card that had never seen anything less than an A, and a library card that got worn out every six months, and plop her in the halls of a high school in a place like Waterbury, where studying to be a nail art technician counted as postsecondary education. The girl was like chum in a tank of sharks. I wasn’t exactly vying for the homecoming court in high school, but at least I was unremarkable, just your standard minor slut who consistently failed to live up to her potential, a phrase so often used in my report cards that the teachers should’ve had a rubber stamp of it made to save themselves some work. Greta didn’t even get bullied anymore; she’d been picked clean, her predators had to move on to an obese girl with psoriasis just so they wouldn’t starve to death. She hadn’t come home crying in months, her face was now perfectly aloof, except for her eyes, which still always jumped around, looking for a place to run. But I’d lured her into the bathroom with me and there was nowhere for her to escape to, except for maybe the bathtub, which reeked of Jean Naté so strongly that it would have made her gag. I hadn’t had an actual friend since high school ended and my bestie-and-only ran off to marry and divorce the Marine recruiter who used to hang out in our cafeteria scouting for fresh blood, so my sister was the only person I could think of to wrangle into my mess. And now I’d managed to do what even her tormentors had given up on doing: I’d gotten her to cry.

  “I want to hit you so bad,” she said. “I want to kill you.”

  “You’re going to push a turd out if you keep rocking on the toilet seat like that,” I said.

  “This isn’t funny. This is serious, Elsie. You’re going to wish it was a turd going down the toilet instead of your life.”

  “It’s going to be fine,” I said, even with the pregnancy test in my hand telling me otherwise. The pregnancy test, in fact, was telling me to fuck off, one slim pink middle finger stuck straight up the center of that stick. I flipped it right back off but Greta didn’t see it, or she didn’t react if she did see it. She blew her nose on the neck of her T-shirt and groped for strands of hair that she’d already mostly gotten to.

  “Hands off your head, Greta,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she said. “Why don’t you even care what’s happening?”

  It was a fair question. The E.P.T box was ripped apart on the counter, both of the tests undeniably positive, at least in one sense of the word. All the evidence was laid out in front of me: the two pink fingers, their tsk-tsks; the bile stain on the linoleum in front of the toilet after the latest round of sickness; a witness. When I blinked my eyes the facts went away for a second, but they kept coming back. Like cockroaches, they always came back.

  “I do care,” I said. “It’s just, like, there’s no point in freaking out about it.”

  “I’ve seen you freak out when your good pair of socks got a hole in them. This is your life, Elsie. And not just your life, another person’s life.”

  “Bashkim will be fine.”

  “I meant the baby, the baby’s the other person. Of course this guy will be fine, whoever he is. All he has to do is take off to Myrtle Beach and never think about it again.”

  “He’s not going to do that. He’s not like our father.”

  “Then why was I the one you asked to be with you while you peed on a stick?”

  “Because,” I said, and that was all I could come up with. Even if I wasn’t ready to face Bashkim with this yet, why would I turn to Greta? Why not just do it alone, like I always claimed I could? The two of us had slept within five feet of each other our whole lives without ever saying good night. We didn’t even look alike—she was pale and I had the acne-red complexion of a rug burn, she pulled out her dirty blond hair while I spent hours trying to fluff up my dirt-brown—but it was obvious we came from the same peasant stock, because neither one of us had any cavities in our teeth and both of us shared a kind of loneliness that was so innate it had to be built into our DNA. Still, most of the time we each looked at the other like a foster kid Mamie had taken in for extra money. We could outline all the things we had in common, write them out on index cards and not even have enough to fill up an hour of conversation after lights-out. She’d take a flashlight and a book under her blanket, and I’d take a Walkman loaded with Led Zeppelin I. In the morning, we’d stand behind the closet door to undress and re-dress.

  “Because you’re the smart one,” I said, finally. “I thought you might have something to say other than boo-hoo.”

  “You don’t have to be smart to see how this is going to turn out. Look at Mamie. Jesus Christ, look in the mirror.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way. It could end up like you.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I meant that as a good thing. You’re going to be fine. You’re going to get a scholarship somewhere and leave us all behind and you won’t even come back for Thanksgiving.
You said so yourself.”

  She shook her head, and I pushed her hand away from it before she could pinch a hair out.

  “Anyway, who says I’m even going to have this baby?” I pressed down on my stomach, and nothing pushed back, so it didn’t seem possible that there was any kind of life in there. “I’ll take care of it. In two weeks none of this will make a difference in the world.”

  Greta stood up from the toilet. She hadn’t used it, but she flushed it instinctively, so I was never really sure if I heard what she said correctly. What I heard was “We need a fucking difference.”

  But she probably just said something about fun indifference.

  I closed the door behind Greta and lifted my shirt in front of the mirror. How was something supposed to fit in there, anyway? I imagined a bicycle pump with its nozzle in my belly button, Bashkim at the other end, pumping away. Then he’d come back with a sewing needle and pop it. He’d pop it, right? He wouldn’t want this kid, and his wife certainly wouldn’t want this kid, and I of course didn’t want this kid. It would be insane to go ahead with it, because children killed dreams, and because car seats don’t fit in Fieros. Look at Mamie, not a dream left in her soul, not even a nightmare to wake her up sweating on the couch. Just nothing, the worst thing in the world, worse than war and famine, worse than the labor camps in Albania that Bashkim talked about. Nothing. But I mean, of course I wouldn’t do it like Mamie did it, and just quit right out of the gate. I’d at least put headphones over my belly and make my kid listen to Beethoven like the yuppie moms on TV, I’d have my kid in state-run daycare only until I got my dental technician certification, then I’d get a real job and work days and switch off babysitting with Bashkim, who still worked nights, but at the pizza shop he always talked about opening someday. I’d carried a sack of flour around in high school, I knew it’d be hard at first, and then eventually it’d get better. Eventually we’d buy a raised ranch the next town over in Wolcott and only ever go back to Waterbury for grocery shopping and to visit the graves of poor dead relatives, great-uncles and -aunts who lived at the Lithuanian Social Club and were laid to rest at the Lithuanian cemetery, not having left the city limits in decades, never mind gone home to their motherland. Our kid would spend summers with his cousins in Albania, learn how to ride a horse and brine things, come back and be bored by our strip malls and discount second-run movie theaters, talk about one day busting out like a Springsteen song.

  I pulled my shirt back down and turned away from the mirror. There was no use thinking of the ways things would be different when in a couple of weeks they would be nothing. Stupid, endless, soul-numbing nothing, the kind of nothing it’d be merciful not to pass on to some poor doomed offspring.

  Greta was on her bed, staring at the ceiling, when I finally left the bathroom.

  “Don’t say anything to Mamie, okay?” I said.

  “I haven’t said anything to Mamie in about ten days. She hasn’t even noticed,” she said.

  She was so thin she was almost flush with the bed.

  “You’re almost out of here,” I said. “Don’t fuck it up.”

  She looked over at me. “You’re giving advice about fucking up?” She didn’t even sound mean about it, just confused.

  I shrugged and sat down on my bed to put on my pantyhose. “I guess that’s stupid. Never mind. Do your thing.”

  She went back to staring at the ceiling, and I got ready to go back to the Ross.

  —

  When our father died seven years before, Mamie threw out the Waterbury Republican so me and Greta wouldn’t come across his name in the obituaries. Greta only ever opened the paper for the Garfield comics, me for the Bob’s Stores ads, hoping for a mythical one-day sale where the genuine Levi’s and Reeboks dropped in price to match the generics. I was twelve, Greta was ten. We weren’t yet checking every day for the names of schoolmates who might’ve died in 2:00 A.M. car wrecks on the way home from the Brass Pony, we didn’t wonder if our former elementary school teachers finally let their two-pack-a-day Pall Mall habits take them down before retirement did, we didn’t care enough about distant relatives to figure out who was still alive and who wasn’t. Mamie was the one who subscribed to the paper for the death notices and circulars only, sometimes the classifieds when Waterbury Buckle announced another round of layoffs, or when the LTD rusted off a part that looked like it might’ve been too important to ignore. Greta and I probably didn’t notice that the paper wasn’t on the table as usual. We probably read the previous day’s as if it were new, because it always looked the same anyway. That Bob’s sale was never in there.

  Then, on my next birthday, my father’s parents, Grandma and Grandpa Kuzavinas, sent a card with a fifty-dollar check enclosed. I’d never held that much money in my hands. They said they were sad that Greta and I didn’t come around for Christmas anymore, even though they were just down the road in Naugatuck, that we left them when Dad left us, as if that were something me and Greta had, as kids, made a conscious decision to do. They were disappointed we weren’t at the funeral because Dad’s son was there and he looked a little like us, and we should get to know him because blood is blood, signed the Kuzavinases. The card had irises on it and said THANK YOU.

  “What funeral?” I asked Mamie. “What kid?”

  She read the card. “Fifty dollars? They expect us to believe that’s all they got out of that?” Her hand shook while she held the check, maybe on purpose, maybe trying to get it to vibrate so fast that it’d look like there were hundreds of fifties flying about.

  “Got out of what?”

  “The insurance settlement, the whatever. Even people who aren’t worth nothing alive are worth something dead.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Your father, Elsie. I thought you knew that.” She handed the check back to me, but it missed my fingers and fluttered slowly to the floor. “At least it didn’t bounce, right?” she said when it landed.

  I’d always believed Dad would try to come back someday. I’d planned the whole thing out. I would be wearing those genuine Levi’s when he knocked on our door. Or sometimes I’d be wearing a corduroy skirt instead, short and black though, not preppy and stupid. Mamie was at work; it was just Greta and me, sitting at the kitchen table we never sat at in real life, me doing the homework I didn’t do in real life. We wouldn’t let him in. We wouldn’t cry or anything, we wouldn’t yell, we’d just tell him from behind the screen door that it was too late. It’s too late, we’d say, we’re all grown up. The work is all done, and you don’t get to come in now and reap the harvest.

  “I didn’t know he died. How was I supposed to know?” I asked, and at first I didn’t hear her because her back was turned and the water was on full stream, and she was always saying that she didn’t know why we bothered to talk to her when she was washing dishes, she couldn’t ever hear anything over the faucet.

  But then she shrugged. “What’s the difference anyway? That’s what I thought. I thought what’s the difference if he’s alive or dead?”

  I didn’t know. I think that’s why I was crying, because there was a correct answer but I just couldn’t tap into it, like when I tried to learn the past perfect tense in French class.

  There had been only a couple of cereal bowls and coffee mugs in the sink to begin with, but the water kept running, Mamie kept her hands underneath the stream, and I wondered if she was like me, if her hands got cold when she was upset about something. “The bastard couldn’t handle it here. He did jack shit, and he still couldn’t handle it. Don’t miss him, okay? Don’t mourn him just because you think you’re supposed to. He was already gone, Elsie. Nothing has changed.”

  “Yes it has,” I said. “Now I’ll never be able to tell him to fuck off.”

  Mamie finally shut the water off. She turned back to me and pressed her wet palms against my cheeks, but hers were wet, too, and not from dishwater. “Oh, but there will be so many other men that you can tell to fuck off, baby, I promise you.”


  —

  I didn’t want Bashkim to fuck off. I wanted the opposite of that, for him to fuck on, or whatever you’d call it. It was impossible to predict from night to night which version of him I’d be getting: the one who was going to take me away from the tedious, sweaty, forevermore kind of life lived in ugly sensible work sneakers, or the one who was condemning me to live it forever. Some nights he was a month away from cashing in, because fortunately he had diversed, because he wasn’t an idiot—I am not an idiot, he’d say, to me or to Gjonni or whoever he thought was secretly accusing him of being one—so the money he lost in one account was being made up for in another. On those nights, he was already in contact with a divorce lawyer back in Tirana, and on those nights he would drive me to his place on his break so we could lie side by side on his air mattress, not even screwing, just lying there until his stopwatch beeped ten minutes later and we had to head back to the Ross. On those nights, I would go home with a plan to tell Mamie that I was done paying her rent to keep living under her roof, that I had a new home with a guy named Bashkim, and that she’d better just deal with the fact that he wasn’t Lithuanian, and that we had made a baby together and the baby would be a mutt, which everyone knows are stronger, smarter, healthier breeds. I never really said those things to her, though, because she was always passed out on the sofa by the time I got home, and because eventually I’d remember that I wasn’t going to have this baby, especially since I didn’t even have the guts to tell him about it.

  On the other nights, Bashkim was so far away from me that he might as well have been back in Tirana. Those were the nights when I realized I was never going to tell him, because I didn’t want him to have to pay for me to get rid of the thing. I was afraid he’d get so bent out of shape about it that we’d never have one of the good nights again.

  And then there was Greta, who kept asking, “Do you have an appointment yet?”

  “In two weeks or so,” I’d say.