Beyond the Family Ties

Part 3

A few days turned into a week in the blink of an eye, and Becky found herself feeling more comfortable in the shoebox apartment than she should've let herself be. Despite her badgering Becky to get a checkup with an anxious look of concern on her face, and the gently prying questions about whether she'd considered breastfeeding, Freen was a remarkably easy person to be around, and they quickly fell into a routine. Freen worked five days a week, usually pulling twelve hour shifts at odd hours, while Becky stayed locked inside the apartment and thoroughly cleaned in and tried to figure out how on earth she was supposed to look after a baby. The only time she went outside was on a trip to the doctor's office three days after the baby had arrived, an amused smile on her face as she pacified Freen and got a checkup, refusing to go to the hospital, even at Sam's offer of giving her a checkup. The rest of her time was spent resting on the sofa, the TV a quiet drone on the background as she tried to catch up on lost sleep, while her daughter slept in the laundry basket. For the time being, they'd taken to calling her Little Duck or Ducky, realizing that they couldn't just refer to her as 'the baby' until Becky settled on a name.

Things were a little awkward as they tried to grow accustomed to their new living arrangement, with Becky not used to sleeping on lumpy mattresses in a draughty apartment, the entirety of which was half the size of her bedroom in her family's home, and Freen unused to living with a stranger and a baby. Still, they managed, and Freen was easy to please, lighting up with gratitude when she came home to her laundry neatly folded, her white shirt having acquired a pinkish tone while a sheepish Becky tried to explain that she hadn't realized you couldn't wash everything together, or when she woke one morning to the burning smell of blackened scrambled eggs stuck to the bottom of the pan. Neither of them were great cooks, and they quickly established a takeout routine, eating pizza or Chinese in front of the TV as they watched reruns of NCIS.

Angel and Sam visited everyday that first week, the first coming to suspiciously check up on her sister and her new apparent roommate, while Sam came bearing other baby items she'd scrounged up from when her own daughter, who was now nine, had been a baby. She seemed even more sympathetic to Becky than the others, tentatively revealing that she'd fallen pregnant at sixteen. Along with the things that Sam brought her, Becky had to dip into the rolls of cash she'd brought with her, restraining herself from buying designer baby clothes and expensive necessities. She didn't know how long it would be before she would be able to find a source of income, and while she had millions in jewelry, she was hesitant to sell them off just yet. Still, she had to be practical for once, and while she would never have bat an eye at spending five thousand dollars on an Aston Martin pram before she'd been kicked out of home, it just wasn't realistic for her current situation. It turned out, buying everything a baby could need was actually very costly.

By the time she'd been at the apartment for a week, she was finding it easier to feed the baby and change her diaper, could bathe her in the bathroom sink with only a little difficulty, and while the drying out umbilical cord made her feel slightly queasy, Becky was coping. It was still jarring to wake up to a crying baby in the middle of the night, and the thought of another human being dependent on her was only mildly terrifying, but Freen had risen to the task as well. On her days off, or before and after her shifts, she was completely enamored with the baby, cooing at her as she cradled her and fed her a bottle, giving Becky an appreciated reprieve for five minutes. She should've been going back to college soon, with the summer vacation almost at an end, but Becky had come to realize that she didn't want to leave. She couldn't take her daughter to New Haven and raise her alone as she tried to complete her studies. She was barely hanging on as it was.