The Odds of You and Me Read online

  “Go, go,” Mrs. Ross says. “You’re all set. Last and final check-in will be April eighteenth.” She closes my file once more and slides it back in the pile. “Don’t get into any trouble before then. You know the rules.”

  I cock my head as she winks at me. “See you, Mrs. Ross.”

  “Take care of yourself, Bird.” Her voice lilts gently behind me. “See you in two weeks.”

  Chapter 2

  The sun looks like a washed-out slice of lemon hidden behind a gauze of clouds. The air, still tinged with a latent winter chill, refuses to soften, even around the edges, and the sky is a flat sheet of gray. I shiver getting behind the wheel of my car, which is parked in the first row of the probation office parking lot, and start the engine. Mrs. Ross’s words reverberate in my head as I sit there for a moment, waiting for the heat to kick in: Once all this is over, Bird, you’ll really be starting a whole new chapter. Whole new chapter, my ass. I’m out here trying to start a whole new life. I know a lot of people don’t get second chances, but mine is right around the corner, hovering there like one of those brass rings you get to snatch off a merry-go-round. And there’s no way I’m not going to grab it when it comes within arm’s reach—and then run like hell.

  Things weren’t always this hard, of course. Or quite so dire. Ma would say my problems started after I fell in with Tracy and the rest of the headbanger crowd during my junior year of high school, but she’s way off, the way she is about most things. It was the headbangers, with their black leather boots, dirty T-shirts, and oddly mournful music, that kept me afloat after Dad died that year. They were the ones who not only understood my new “screw the world” attitude, but embraced it. Encouraged it, even. The days when I got to school on time, accompanied Ma to church on Sunday mornings, and did my homework every night became a thing of the past that year, although I was diligent about my required good-night call to Ma so that she wouldn’t suspect anything and come looking for me. I saw even less of her on weekends; if she found me at home at all, it was just to grab clean clothes, or to scavenge a few dollars from the bottom of the sugar canister she kept in the pantry to contribute to Tracy’s growing pot fund. I pierced my nose, developed a perpetual, cloying scent of weed and corn chips, and turned a deaf ear to Ma’s constant ranting and raving.

  Which was not difficult to do. With his soft-spoken voice and gentle mannerisms, Dad had always been the parent I related to, not Ma. Never Ma. Her voice went up an octave after Dad died, settling at a decibel far above anything I’d ever thought humanly possible, but even before that, she was a yeller. A nagger. The proud owner of a nothing’s-ever-good-enough personality that made me want to go hide in a corner when I was younger and put a bag over my head. Being left alone in that house without Dad felt at times as if I’d been abandoned in the worst way. Betrayed, even. For years I would wake up and stare at my door, waiting for his head to poke in suddenly, listen for the light clicking sound of his wedding band as he tapped his hand against the doorway, for the singsong lilt in his voice as he called, “Rise and shine, little bird! Up and at ’em!” Dad possessed an innate sort of lightness, a steady level of calm that settled the rapid knocking pace my heart acquired whenever Ma came around. He used to say that it was their differences that made their marriage work, but I never believed him. I think he was just too nice of a guy to ever leave her.

  Every once in a while, I let myself go back to that night in the hospital, watch as my mind’s eye drifts over that picture again: Ma and me on either side of the gurney, Dad’s face, nearly unrecognizable after his car was smashed from behind and he was thrown headfirst through the windshield. His skin was a mottled eggplant shade, the shape of his head so swollen that it could have been a balloon someone blew up, a child’s plaything. Pieces of glass stuck out of his hair; a shard the size of my thumb was lodged beneath the skin on his forehead like a misplaced seashell. The surgeon, a small Indian man with dark hair and neat fingernails, had already told Ma and me that his internal injuries were so severe that there was nothing anyone could do, except to keep him company while he died. “I can’t say if he can still hear you,” the doctor said. “But he might respond to touch.”

  “Pray,” Ma said, staring at me across Dad’s still-heaving chest. Her fingers were entwined with his, fear etched on her face like the cracks in an eggshell. “Pray with all your might, Bernadette. Like you’ve never prayed before.”

  I did, of course, closing my eyes, and bending my head over my father’s battered body, whispering fervently. Back then, I believed in things like that. Like praying. Pleading with an omnipotent, invisible force to keep my father’s breath in his body did not seem so unusual. It was what we did. What we had always done, whether for a simple request, like finding more work for Ma, or the life and death situation we found ourselves in now. We prayed, we begged, we beseeched. Pleasepleasepleaseplease. Of course, whether or not God decided to grant our wish was another thing entirely. That was up to Him. It had nothing to do with us, or how badly we wanted—or even needed—the thing. The ball was in His court. Always.

  Slowly, like some sort of strange evaporation, I watched the life leave my father’s body that night, felt his hands grow more and more limp in my own, until the one I was holding slipped out altogether, and hung there like a gutted fish. The machine he was hooked up to made an ominous sound, a single unabbreviated beep, and a nurse took us out of the room, ushering Ma and me into the hallway just outside. Ma wept silently beside me, her face in her hands, her shoulders rising and then falling again, and I leaned into her, wrapping an arm around her back, and pushing my face into the sleeve of her itchy winter coat.

  I didn’t cry, a fact that stunned me afterward, and filled me with guilt, as if I had betrayed my father with my lack of emotion. I felt numb instead, as if I was watching everything from overhead, as if it might be happening to someone else instead of us. I stared at the floor for a while, watched the lines in the neat squares beneath me blur, come back into focus, and then blur again. A movement inside the room next to Dad’s made me lift my eyes, and I looked at a nurse holding an old man’s wrist between her thumb and middle finger. She was dressed in pink scrubs, her blond ponytail anchored high on the back of her head like a tail. Her eyes watched the clock on the wall as she counted his pulse, and her lips moved just the slightest bit, keeping time with the beats. Pieces of the man’s white hair were splayed out above his head like a split milkweed pod, and even from where I sat, I could see the papery quality of his skin. His face was tilted up to the ceiling, as if searching for light or a long-lost scent. When she was finished, the nurse put his hand back down among the folds of his blanket, and reached around behind her for a plastic cup of pills. She waited as the man swallowed them, and then arranged his neck carefully in her palm as he gulped a chaser of water.

  The scene looked like some sort of a painting—framed by the white slats of the doorway, a pale afternoon light touching the nurse’s blond hair, her shadows thrown across the man’s bed as she moved quietly around his room. I didn’t want to look away, could not bring myself to turn back to my mother, still weeping violently into my shoulder, or even to my father, not ten feet away, already growing cold and stiff. It occurred to me instead that I might do that sort of thing someday, that I was the kind of person who could get through a day intermittently pocked with the beginnings and endings of life. It was a relief of sorts, knowing this, a reminder that some things would go on, even as others ended.

  Which they did, of course. Not the way I planned them, not even the way I had hoped. Since nursing school was out of the question, or at least out of my immediate grasp, I found other work after graduating from high school, waitressing at a place called the Burger Barn, and began saving up for a place of my own. It didn’t take long, especially since another waitress named Jenny expressed an interest in sharing a place with me. I was nineteen when I moved into a tiny dismal apartment with her, the ceilings so low that you could reach up and touch them, carpeting
that smelled like cat urine, and a leaky shower. But the rent was cheap, and it was two towns away from New Haven—six whole miles from Ma—which, when all was said and done, had been my only real requirement in the first place.

  It didn’t take long for me to get into trouble, and I’m not even talking about the positive pregnancy test I found myself staring at six months later, or how Angus pushed his way into the world with a cry that broke through the haze of pain between my legs and made me sit up straight. The fact that his father was not in the delivery room, and would probably never be in the same room as his child, was not so much a concern to me at the time either, nor was the fact that my new life as a single, working mother was so exhausting that some nights I literally fell asleep standing in front of the microwave, waiting for Angus’s bottles to heat up.

  It was the money that got me in trouble—the pediatric bills that began to pile up over the next year and a half as Angus’s ear infections worsened, the cost of day care, and, of course, rent and utilities and diapers and food. I didn’t set out to engage in deliberate criminal activity. But I was too proud to apply for government assistance, and there was no way I was going to approach Ma, who was still aghast at the “predicament” I had gotten myself into. I hadn’t even realized I’d overwritten the first check until I sat down and balanced my checkbook that night. I was terrified at first, but when nothing came of it, and another week went by without any problems, I wrote another very small one. The scary thing was how easy it was. I overwrote four more checks to Super Fresh, loading up on milk and Pull-Ups and orange juice and bread like Angus and I were getting ready for Armageddon, before anyone caught on. By then, I was six hundred dollars in. And if it had taken someone a while to figure things out in the beginning, the legal notifications started coming in fast and furious once they did.

  Two weeks later, I was summoned to court, where I was sentenced to repay the cost of the checks, plus three times the total amount in restitution. Since it was my first offense, I also received eighteen months of probation and was introduced to Mrs. Ross, who would be my very own probation officer. It was Mrs. Ross who encouraged me to move back in with Ma so that I could set up a payment plan without having to worry about additional financial obligations, and of course Ma herself who, in a sudden burst of maternal sanity, insisted. What else could I do? The choice would have been an easy one if I hadn’t had Angus to think about.

  He was two and a half years old by then and just starting to make the transition to big-boy underpants. I was twenty-two and just starting to figure out that maybe I hadn’t ever learned how to make the transition to big-girl underpants.

  And so, broke, shamed, and out of options, I moved back home.

  For all my misgivings about it, though, living with Ma again hasn’t been as terrible as I thought it would be. A lot of people would say that I’m lucky. Blessed, even. (Well, that’s the word Ma uses.) And I guess I’ll give her that. She didn’t have to take me back in after I got in trouble, especially the kind of trouble that drove her to her knees, reciting novena after novena for my jeopardized salvation, which, aside from my obvious illegal activity, was in even direr straits since I’d obviously slept with someone out of wedlock. Having unmarried sex, according to Ma, had always been the sin equivalent of murder. (“You might as well just be tossing your body into a gutter, treating it like that,” she liked to say. “A woman’s body is for her husband to enjoy, only. No one else.”) She got me involved with her whole house-cleaning business, too, which, while not my life’s goal, has turned out to be much more lucrative than I ever realized.

  I even have a few steady clients of my own now—Mr. Herron, who lives over on the south side of town, and Mrs. Livingston, both of whom expect me to be punctual and do good work. I do, too, cleaning behind the furniture and scrubbing down the baseboards, even when it’s not expected or asked for. Working hard is more important than ever, especially now that I have Angus. I want to set a good example, let him know that being tired at the end of the day because you’ve worked your tail off is nothing to be ashamed of. Even if you’ve spent it on your hands and knees, scrubbing other people’s toilets. Or silently begging forgiveness.

  What’s made things most tolerable, however, has been how much Ma has taken to Angus. She has a habit of nitpicking at the little things he does, and insists on calling him Gus, which is a direct passive-aggressive jab at me. But it’s obvious that she adores him, pampering him in a way that both astounds and delights me. For someone whose idea of fun used to be taking me out to buy new socks, Ma rolls out the red carpet when it comes to my little boy. She takes him everywhere—to the park, the zoo, the movies, even the mall, which she hates, so that he can ride on the merry-go-round in the food court.

  And yet, it’s the big things that continue to amaze me. For as long as I’ve been alive, Ma has been what I consider a SuperCatholic. Someone whose answer to every question I’ve ever asked has eventually, somehow, turned out to be about God or Jesus or the Blessed Virgin Mary. Since my own religious beliefs have been challenged over the years, I informed her in no uncertain terms when we moved in that she was not allowed to talk about God or church with Angus, that his religious upbringing was my responsibility alone. It pained her enormously to have to agree to this, mostly because my religious sensibilities, which have continued to be nonexistent, are the singular bane of her life. For the most part, however, she’s kept her end of the bargain, although she doesn’t hide her displeasure about having to.

  To be fair, Angus is so young that it hasn’t even really come up much. Except once, just a few months ago, when he asked me who made the sky and the dirt and all the earthworms in the world. Ma stopped chewing, her eyes locking with mine over the dinner table. I could tell she was holding her breath, waiting for my answer, which would inevitably fall short of whatever one she would offer. I dropped my eyes and speared a green bean. “Well, the world was created a long time ago, buddy. You know, back when there were dinosaurs.”

  “I know that,” Angus insisted. “But who did it? Who made it?”

  Ma’s eyes were boring a hole into the top of my skull, daring me to omit God from the equation. I inserted the green bean into my mouth and chewed slowly. “No one created it,” I said finally. “It just sort of created itself. See, there was a big explosion once—”

  The sound of Ma’s chair scraping the floor made me wince even before I lifted my eyes. She glared at me, snatching her plate off the table as she walked over toward the sink.

  “You mean, like a bomb?” Angus breathed, undeterred.

  “Yeah, sort of like a bomb.” I stared at the veins along the side of Ma’s neck as she stalked out of the room, green and rigid against her pale skin. She yanked her cardigan sweater around her, and I caught sight of a hole in the bottom of it, near the hem. “Except much, much bigger than a bomb.”

  Later that night, after I’d explained the Big Bang Theory another three times to Angus and had tucked him into bed for the night, she appeared in my doorway, just as I knew she would. I lifted one of my headphones from my ear and raised an eyebrow, feigning surprise. “What’s up?”

  “You’re not going to teach him anything about God?” she asked.

  Robert Plant was still moaning in my other ear about needing every inch of his love. I switched it off. “Not yet.”

  “Well, when?” She crossed her arms.

  “When it feels right. When it comes up naturally. When he asks me about it.”

  “Him, Bernadette, not it. God is not an ‘it.’” Her nostrils flared white around the edges. “And what do you mean, ‘when it feels right’? To you or to him?”

  I shrugged. “To both of us, I guess. I haven’t really thought about it.”

  “Maybe you should. Giving him some cockamamy story about a star exploding in the universe—”

  “It’s not a cockamamy story, Ma.” I struggled to keep my voice level. “It’s science, okay? And why are we arguing about this? You seem to forget that�
�”

  “I haven’t forgotten anything,” she said. “And don’t use that tone with me, please. I’m still your mother.” She raised an eyebrow. “In case you’ve forgotten.”

  I tipped my headphones back over my head as she closed the door and turned the volume up to a near deafening level. “Whole Lotta Love” bled into my ears again like a salve. I closed my eyes and let the music fill me. It wasn’t difficult. Robert Plant had a voice that was alternately orgasmic and abrasive, often at the same time. Right now, the combination of his words—“way down inside, girl, you need it”—and the pitch at which he delivered them stirred something in my belly. My aggravation about Ma began to dissipate, hovering along the very edges of Plant’s groaning and shrieking until, with one final wail, it disappeared altogether.

  Now, though, that part of my life is over. I’ve served my time. In a little less than two weeks, I’ll be able to start clean. No more probation, no more Ma, no more anything hanging over me. It’ll just be Angus and me inside the tiny apartment on Moon Lake. A fresh start. Maybe even new dreams.

  Two weeks. Thirteen days. Three hundred and twelve hours to freedom.

  Some days, it feels like forever.

  Chapter 3

  Everything go all right with Mrs. Ross?” Ma turns around from the stove as I walk inside the house. Her apron is tied around her waist, the sleeves of her denim shirt rolled up to her elbows. The thick scent of coffee and melting butter mingles in the air.

  “Yeah, same old stuff. Where’s Angus?”

  “Still in bed.” Ma traces the bottom of the pan with a pat of butter, moving it around in a figure-eight shape.

  “Still in bed?” I drape my jacket over the back of one of the chairs. “Ma! Come on! It’s almost eight!”

  “There’s no need to shout, Bernadette. And believe me, I tried. He would not get up for me. I mean, he absolutely refused. He has the will of a goat, that child. An absolute goat.”