For You(32)
Author: Mimi Strong

“I don’t want a boyfriend.” Especially if he didn’t call.

She looked me up and down, an amused look on her face. “No boyfriend, so… girlfriend?”

“No, not like that. I just mean… I don’t want some guy around, making things confusing for Bell. I grew up with a… well, he wasn’t a stepfather, because there was nothing official, but …” My throat got tight, cutting off my voice. I never could talk about Derek with people, not even back when we were all living together.

“So don’t pick a shitty one,” she said, as if it was that simple. “Life is hard Aubrey, but it’s even harder if you pick that narrow martyr path and insist on doing everything your own damn self. Our generation of women, we were sold a pack of lies. We were told to hustle on to university right after high school. Ratchet up that student debt load. And for what? Most of us aren’t even close to having the loans paid off by the time the clock starts ticking. So you work your ass off from twenty to let’s say thirty-three, then it’s sleepless nights with the baby crying. You’re forty by the time your life gets halfway fun again, and to think, you could have just skipped the whole hard work thing and cashed in the good looks of youth back when you were twenty, to an older man with some security.”

“Is that what you did?”

She grinned as her voice pitched up in a “Hell, no! Do I look that smart? Don’t answer that.”

I sipped my sweet tea and smiled, trying to relax on her cream-colored sofa, though the food made me nervous. How could the woman have both a seven-year-old and a white sofa?

She continued, “I was one year out of college when I got pregnant with Taylor. Word of advice? The withdrawal method is not an adequate form of birth control. But I guess you know that, of all people.” She clapped her hand to her mouth. “Whoops.”

“Bell was a surprise,” I said, which was true. My mother saw the doctor for some indigestion and found out she was five months along. She quit smoking immediately, but that small change threw off everything. We were living with her boyfriend Terry at the time—I’m fairly certain it was Terry who gave Bell her light brown hair—and he seemed eager to be having a child, but not with my mother. They had always fought a lot, but he’d tell her to go have a cigarette to cool down, and she would. With the baby on the way, and without her five-minute tobacco meditations, the tension ratcheted up and wouldn’t break.

They’d fight about anything, from the dirty flip-flops Terry wore absolutely everywhere but to work, to the way my mother would have the radio and the television going at the same time, in different rooms. Terry worked at a bank, in mortgage lending. He had a good job that supported us. With skinny shoulders and a big overbite, he wasn’t any woman’s idea of a dream man, but he was beautiful to me, because he welcomed me into his nice home and never made me feel like I didn’t deserve a decent life.

One day, not long before the baby was born, he took me for a long drive to get ice cream. He told me that no matter what happened in the future, he thought of me as family, and I could ask him if I needed anything at all. That was when I knew things weren’t going to work out for us.

My mother had the baby and we left Terry with a broken heart and the hospital bill. The last we heard from him, he was trying to get a paternity test done, but my mother wouldn’t cooperate. We moved out of state, with no forwarding address, and that was the end of Terry.

Bell had skinny shoulders, like Terry, but they suited her, and she was lucky she didn’t get his overbite. Poor Terry.

Now I was in another country, and as I sat on the cream sofa across from Natalie, who perched on her coordinating plum-colored chair, I realized Terry kept living his life after we left. He wasn’t one of those prehistoric insects trapped in amber the moment we left. He might have gotten a new girlfriend, and perhaps Bell had some half-siblings she’d never know.

Natalie asked me a question, but I had to ask her to repeat herself.

She said, “How old were you when you got pregnant?”

I had to quickly work backwards. I’d been telling people I was twenty-five, four years older than reality, so that would have made me eighteen when I had Bell, and seventeen when I got pregnant.

“Nearly eighteen,” I said. “It was scary, but her father had a good job at a bank, so we got married and had her.”

“But then?”

I reached down and pulled off my lie of a wedding band. “I mostly wear this to keep guys from asking questions. The truth is, I haven’t seen Bell’s father in a very long time.”

“Don’t let me stop you from wearing that ring.” She held up her left hand, wiggling her fingers. “People started giving me way more respect once I got one of these. Oh, the men completely stopped looking in that other way, but I get great service in stores.” She grinned. “Another thing they don’t tell you about life as a woman in our culture.”

I cocked my head, that alarm in my head going off to alert me that Bell was being too quiet. What trouble was she getting into? Then I heard peals of laughter. I still couldn’t let go of my tense muscles, though, and the feeling something bad was about to happen.

I used to think a lie was a one-time thing, like an egg cracked against the edge of a pan, but a lie is more like a piece of string that you have to keep tying knots in so everything doesn’t come undone.

We had a big dinner at Natalie’s house, and I met her husband, Dave. He ran a landscaping company, putting in lawns and trees for new housing developments. Dave had a whole lot of ideas about the real estate market, based on the things he was seeing. I found out the house we were in was the fifth one they’d owned. He mentioned some other investments that were about to pay off, and plans to buy an even better house, but I could spot the lies. His face went blank when he said things that weren’t true. He practically looked dead when he said the decision to sell their current house had been Natalie’s idea.

She handed me the bowl of Caesar salad and gave me a wide-eyed look to confirm that he was bluffing.

After dinner, Natalie drove us home, and she got out of the truck so she could give us both a hug goodbye. She had insisted on giving us the small television from her daughter’s room, further insisting that I think of it as a loan rather than a gift, and give it back any time. I could see by the look in Bell’s eyes that she’d never let it go. I cradled the television in one arm and held Bell’s hand with the other.

The sun hadn’t set yet, and we were bathed in a warm, golden glow. Briefly, it was one of those perfect moments, the stillness after a big meal and togetherness.

Over by the entrance to my building, the wannabe-gangster kids were hanging out, smoking what smelled like pot.