Page 13

As I get Chloe into the bath and begin rinsing the partially-formed cake batter out of her curly blonde tendrils, my phone starts ringing. I see it’s my mother and put it on speaker.

“Hello, Pierce? It’s your mother, Carol.”

Why does she announce herself like we’ve never met before? Every damn time.

“I know who you are, Mother. What is it? I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

She lets out an exaggerated sigh. “Well, darling, Your father and I have decided that you are spreading yourself too thin and need some help with Chloe. We’ve placed inquiries with a local agency about hiring someone to come in and watch her nights and weekends, just at first on a trial basis. Then maybe full time if you all get on well enough. Your father thinks it’s a little unseemly for his grandchild to be using the free employee daycare, though I think he’s being a proper snob about it.”

“When isn’t dad a snob?” I ask as Chloe starts blowing bubbles off the top of the bath water, making herself laugh hysterically. “He told me to use the daycare, you know.”

“You know him. He doesn’t quite know what to say when it comes to Chloe.”

“No, he doesn’t. He doesn’t know much of anything about how to interact with his kids, let alone his grandchild.” I sigh and lean back in my chair. The weight of the world seems to fall on me. The daycare at work is good, and my parents are in my shit, complicating things again. I guess I’m the one who had the kid. And the shitty grades in college. And the naked arrest. I bite my lip.

“Fair enough, poppet. You may be getting some calls from applicants for the job so just make sure to answer your phone. And hire someone quickly. Your father says things are about to get even busier at the office now that you have this government contract.”

I roll my eyes. “Is there anything dad doesn’t tell you? That was supposed to be entirely confidential.”

“You know your father. Kisses to Chloe!” She hangs up before I can say anything else, and I know this wasn’t so much a conversation as an edict. For all their talk about me taking responsibility, my parents still treat me like a child more often than not, and it only got worse when I came back injured. In this case, however, I can’t say I’m upset. The idea of having someone to help me with Chloe is undeniably appealing, and it would give me the opportunity to get back to work full-time, instead of just “whenever I can manage it,” like I am now.

I tuck the phone into my jeans and turn back to Chloe, who holds up her wet arms in the air and waves for me to pick her up. While she is walking really well for her age, she still doesn’t talk. Not even half-formed words or baby talk. We took her to a doctor, who said she may have delays in her speech due to all of the changes she’s endured, as well as any possible trauma we can’t really know about. Once a week, I take her to a speech therapist who works with her on developing her language skills, but so far, not a peep. Mom thinks she’ll just talk when he’s ready, and I’m happy not to rush her. She cries or babbles when she needs something, and until she’s prepared to talk, that will have to do.

I dry Chloe off and put her in a pair of pink cartoon character pajamas, and we plop back down on the couch in front of the TV, where I put on her favorite Disney movie. It was Frozen last week. Now it’s Sleeping Beauty. She does something that sounds like humming when the Tchaikovsky music plays, and her little fingers reach up and curl into my hair. It isn’t long before she falls asleep in my arms, and as her tiny chest rises and falls, and her little eyelashes flutter while she dreams, I feel a knot form in my chest.

It feels a lot like love.

Arie

I take a deep breath as I open the heavy wooden door to the bar on Avenue F where Danny told me to meet him. The truth is, I’m lucky he wanted to meet me in a bar, and didn’t just show up at the hospital the day I walked out. I don’t even know how they found out I’d been released, but I guess that’s why these guys are so good at their job, and why they always get their money back… one way or another.

I’d only been out of the hospital for a few days when my

cell phone started ringing. First it was Leo, the loan shark I’d borrowed the money from in the first place. When I explained my situation and asked for more time, I was not-so-delicately informed that I’d had more than enough time, and my time had run out. Then Danny started calling, and Danny didn’t sound like he much patience for anything. Danny would probably steal the rosary from a nun if it would get him a few bucks closer to getting his money back. And Danny was the second-to-last stop before the end of the line, in which a man with a gun followed me into an alley and decided teaching me a lesson was more important than money.

Disappointing Danny meant my life was over, once again. For someone so young, lately a lot of people have been telling me I’m going to die.

When I walk in the bar, every eye turns and stares at me, like I’ve invaded some sort of private club and their withering glances alone will be enough to send me back into the street. But in the corner, a burly man with a beard leans over from a booth and gestures for me to join him, so I assume that’s Danny, though I’m not sure how he knew what I’d look like. To be fair, I have a feeling there isn’t much these men don’t know about me by this point. I just hope they haven’t dug deep enough to find out about Chloe. Bailey promised he’d do everything in his power to make sure she could never be traced back to me, and he seems like a man of his word.

I sit down across from Danny, and he just stares right through me. When he speaks, his voice his thick with a Newark accent, and it booms throughout the bar.

“I’d ask if you want to join me for a beer, but you shouldn’t be spending any money right now.”

“I appreciate your concern for my finances,” I mouth off without thinking. I half-expect him to kill me right there, but he snorts.

“You’re a sassy one, aren’t you?”

I shrug, not wanting to push my luck. “Just tell me why I’m here. What do you want?”

“You know what we want, Arie.”

“Obviously. But I just got out of the hospital. I was broke before. Where do you expect me to come up with $75,000 out of nowhere?”

“You should have thought of that before. I ain’t stupid, girlie. You thought you’d take the money from us and then kick off before you had to pay it back. And fuck, that may have worked. But here we are. And you look pretty healthy to me. So, you have two options, as far as I can tell,” he says as he finishes off the bottle of beer in front of him.

I raise an eyebrow. “And what are those?”

“Well, you can try to run. People do that. But we will find you. And we will kill you. Or you can give us our money. I don’t care how you get it. But you have a month. Normally, we’d give a person in your situation a week. But because of all you’ve been through, my boss is feeling generous. At the end of that month, if you don’t have the money, we’re going to have another conversation, and it’s going to be a lot less fucking pleasant than this one. Have I made myself clear?”