The Lawn Chair at the Bus Stop
Then she looked at me.
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of one thing to say that would not have been the long speech.
Mrs. Harlan closed the book on her finger to hold the place. She looked up at my sister over her glasses, the way she must have looked up at a thousand kids who came in late with a story.
“Ashley Pratt,” she said. “Sit down.”
And my sister, who had not done what anybody told her since she was eleven years old, walked over and sat down on the curb on the other side of my daughter.
For a minute nobody said anything. Lexi offered her the pretzel bag. Ashley took one and held it and didn’t eat it.
Then she started talking, and she talked to the street instead of to me.
“I got a day shift at the Tap in August,” she said. “Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, eleven to four. Before school started. Before you asked me.”
I sat down on the curb too, then. I didn’t decide to. My knees just did it.
“I was three payments behind on the car,” she said. “They were going to take it. And the house-cleaning money isn’t enough anymore, Court. Two of my ladies went into the home this summer. And then you sat me down at your table and said a hundred and twenty a week, and I thought, I can do both. I’ll just ask the bar to let me out at three.”
“Did you ask?”
“I asked. Rick said no. Lunch rush and the shift change. He said four or don’t come in.” She turned the pretzel over in her fingers. “So I thought, it’s fifteen minutes. Then it was thirty. The first time I called the school I said ten minutes and I meant it.”
“And the text,” I said. “Home.”
She closed her eyes.
“I typed it at 3:30 from the bar bathroom,” she said. “Every time. Because if I told you, you’d find somebody else, and I needed that hundred and twenty. And because you’d look at me the way you’re looking at me now.” Her voice cracked right down the middle. “Like I was nine years old and you were standing on a chair making me macaroni.”
Lexi looked from her aunt to me and back again. She is six. She knew something was happening that was not about pretzels.
“I told myself she was okay,” Ashley said, very quietly. “I told myself, she’s at the school, there’s teachers, it’s the safest place in town. And then I’d pull up at 4:15 and she’d be sitting on that curb all by herself with that pink backpack in her lap and she would just smile at me.”
She pressed her hand over her mouth. “She never once got mad at me. Not once. I’d have rather she screamed.”
I want to tell you I said something wise. I didn’t.
What I said was, “You should have told me, Ash.”
“I know.”
“I would have figured something out. I would have paid you anyway. I would have got you out of the car payment.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I didn’t. I’m twenty-seven. I’m so tired of you having to figure it out.”
I had been angry at her for three weeks. And sitting on that curb, I found out that you can be angry at somebody and understand them at the exact same time, and it does not cancel anything out. It just sits there, both of them, side by side, like two people on a curb.