The Center of Everything - By Laura Moriarty Page 0,48

against the window glass, hard enough for it to crack. But it doesn’t. My stomach starts to buckle in on itself, and I work hard to focus on the statue of Jesus, still waving and friendly, steady on the dash.

“He’s married?” Eileen’s voice is strained, panicked.

When my mother doesn’t answer, Eileen slaps the seat in between them, and my mother jumps. She’s in trouble. You’re not supposed to have a baby with someone else’s husband. You’re not even supposed to have a baby without a husband of your own, and she has already done that once before, with me. If you have too many babies without a husband, you’re a welfare queen. Ronald Reagan says he is tired of welfare queens having babies without husbands and driving around in Cadillacs while everyone else has to work hard.

We don’t have a Cadillac. Not yet.

“You and your accidents,” Eileen says, looking at my mother. “That’s great. You thought he would stay and take care of you, maybe leave his wife? You thought you’d just help him along. Well, is he going to now? Is he?”

My mother says she doesn’t want a baby. Her voice is soft, like a little girl’s. She says she can’t have a baby, not now. Eileen says she should have thought about that earlier. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she says. She keeps looking over at my mother, straying out of our lane, and she is still so mad that I think she will slap the seat between them again, or maybe unclick the lock on my mother’s door and let her go rolling out onto the road, her head cracking open on the pavement.

We pass a sign nailed to a fence that reads WE ARE FARMLAND’S LAYED OFF FAMILIES. I know it should be “l-a-i-d” instead of “l-a-y-e-d,” but then again, that isn’t really the point of the sign.

seven

MY MOTHER KNOWS I DON’T like her anymore. She has stopped trying to get me to smile at her, and when I say I want to eat dinner in front of the television instead of with her at the table, she shrugs and says fine. But she is still my mother, she says, still the boss around here, and when she goes across the highway to get more milk from the Kwikshop, she makes me come with her, holding my hand tight in hers. She has to pay Carlotta with nickels and dimes she has found in the pockets of coats and under the cushions of the couch. The coins have lint on them, dirt, dried gum, and Carlotta touches them only with her nails.

When we get home, she waters down the milk so it will last longer. It tastes bad.

She doesn’t sleep. When I am in bed at night, I can hear her footsteps moving back and forth on the carpet in the hallway, the toilet flushing. She wants to flush the baby, I know. She would if she could.

One morning, the sun already hot and bright in my window at eight o’clock, I wake to her standing over me, saying my name. I open my eyes and we look at each other, but neither of us smiles.

“Get up,” she says. “We need to go on an errand.” She is wearing only her bra, underwear, and a shower cap. Sweat glistens between her eyebrows.

“Where?”

“Downtown. I can’t leave you here by yourself.”

“How will we get there?”

“Walk.”

“It’s too hot.”

But she has already gone back out into the hallway. I get out of bed and follow her to her room. She keeps her window shade down in the daytime now to keep the heat out, the bottom of it tucked against the top of her fan. A pile of clothes lies on the bed, dresses and shirts inside out and tangled over each other, but she is still taking more out of the closet. The fan makes a steady tapping sound, like water dripping from a faucet.

She tries on the yellow dress, the one that she wore to Wichita when the car broke down. It’s tighter than it was. Her whole body looks swollen, puffed up, especially her face. “You’ll need to wear tights today,” she says, fastening the belt. “We have to look nice.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

“It’s too hot for tights.”

“You’ll be fine, Evelyn. I’m wearing panty hose. You can wear tights.”

I say nothing to this. She’s being stupid. Yesterday it was 102 degrees, and the man on the news said the sidewalks were cracking in the heat, like bread in an