The Cusp of 30 (Working Title)

Chapter 1: "Hey, How'd You Get Your Job?"

I leaned against the wall for a minute and closed my eyes—because I was tired from working all day, and the huge fucking stray dog I'd taken in, but really couldn't afford to feed, had basically dislocated my shoulder on our walk, so it was fucking sore—but I knew I had to open them eventually, so I did, and my eyes went straight to the bottle of Jack, on its side, not a single drop left to spill out. Go figure.

There was blood on the floor too. She must have hit her head on the glass coffee table on her way down—the same glass coffee table I had cut my eye on when I was only two years old, an eye I only had forty percent vision left in as a result. The doctor said that had I arrived at the hospital two hours earlier, they could have saved it, but my mother was afraid of the heavy ambulance bill she'd never be able to pay back, leaving us with a two hour bus commute. I wondered how much I had bled that day, if there was less blood then than there was right now. I doubted it.

I found the energy to walk over, and kicked the bottle out of the way. It rolled in front of the dog, who sniffed it for a few seconds before starting back up his loud, steady barking at her body on the ground. He was concerned, obviously. She was the one who fed him every morning the food I bought while I ran her errands. He loved her. I wondered if he loved me. I doubted it.

I yelled at him to shut up while I searched for her cell phone. Mine was turned off due to lack of payment. Hers was working, though. I made sure of it so that she could call me directly at the Save-A-Lot if she needed anything. She always did, as well as reminded me to use her loyalty number for points. My boss told me that my mother's purchases had made the store more money in six months than they paid me in nine. Once, she'd even won the "Loyal Customer of the Month" prized hat. Her smile beamed when I brought it home for her, forgetting the missing front tooth she made an effort never to expose. Then, she gifted the hat to me for Christmas. I had wondered if she'd honestly forgotten how she got it. I doubted it.   

I spotted her phone on the ground besides her favorite chair, my grandmother's old recliner where she would sit and knit me sweaters for hours, a chair my mother had now tainted with cigarette burns and beer stains. When I grabbed the phone, I saw a text from "Dick Head," the clever nickname she started to call my dad when I was around eight years old, despite me asking her to stop. Get a little older, kid, and you'll start calling him that too, she had warned me, but I still called him Dad.

All his text read was, "Don't." Don't, what? Don't have another drink? Don't take my kid away? Don't cheat on me with my brother? Don't hold Katie back any longer? Don't what, Dad? What didn't you want Mom to fucking do?

I dismissed the notification and dialed 911. The operator could barely hear me over the fucking dog. He kept asking me to repeat the address. How they hadn't recognized our number by now was beyond me. Every fight, every break-in, every time she passed out—this was the phone we used to call. I recognized the operator's voice too.

"Benji?" I asked.

He was quiet.

"It's Katie Mormont. You remember. We worked on a group project at my house for earth science in the eighth grade."

He remembered, I knew. How could he not. He had crazy thick hair and was smart, and I'd crushed on him super hard. Then while working on our project, my mom came out of her room and sloppily offered him a drink—a Heineken—and I apologized too loudly, and my mom heard, and she asked what the fuck I was saying sorry for, and I said for nothing and that we were busy, and she told me to get the fuck out, and when we didn't, she came up to the table and threw his textbook across the room, pages flying everywhere, and so I grabbed his hand with a Come on tug and we ran out of the trailer.

I'm so sorry, I had told him that day. She wouldn't have thrown the book if she knew it was yours. But she didn't give a fuck whose book it was. I knew that, and he probably did too. I told him I would give him my textbook tomorrow at school.

It's okay, Benji had said. Just share with me in class.

So we shared it. And for the rest of the quarter, we sat next to each other, leaning in closely to follow along with Mr. Pratt's boring straight-from-the-book lectures in, what was now, our textbook. And then after spring break, he sat next to Alyssa Poe—who didn't need custom-made glasses to see properly, whose mom volunteered for bake sales and to chaperone field trips—and from two rows behind, I watched them lean in closely together to follow along in, what was now, their textbook.

"The same trailer ... on Clover Dr.," I repeated into the phone.

    "Ambulance is on its way, Miss Mormont."

    I didn't know how to reply to that. I'd never been called Miss Mormont, especially by someone I knew.

"Is your mother breathing?" he asked

    "I never said it was my mother."

    "Oh," he said. "Is the person breathing?"

    "Yes," I said. "And, yes, it's my mother."

    "Okay, that's good."

    "I live here to take care of her."

    "Okay," he said. "Have you tried to put pressure on the wound to stop the bleeding?"

    "It's by choice. I'm trying to help her get better."

    "Miss Mormont—"

    "I could live on my own if I wanted. I have a job."

    "Your mother needs—"

    "Professional help?" I said. "Yeah, we've tried that plenty of times, trust me."

    "... for you to apply pressure—"

"I'm not paying for another detox. It's pointless. The disease is in the head, you know? She needs a fucking shrink, not a detox."

The line was quiet.

"Hey, how'd you get your job?" I asked. "I'm sure that's a good-paying job."

I heard what sounded like a deep breath.

"The ambulance will be there any moment, Miss Mormont."

I hung up the phone and bent down next to my mother. I took off my sweater, a treasure from the lost & found bin at work, and folded it, using it as a barrier between her head and my hand. I didn't know how much pressure to apply. I wondered if I'd get Benji's line again if I called back to ask. I wondered if dispatchers' phones had a decline option. And then my mother started coughing, and her eyes opened, and she was looking right up into my eyes, and then she closed them again and threw up, and it got all over my arm and on my work shirt that I had to wear again tomorrow because I only had two of them, and we didn't have a washer in the house, and I would have to hand wash it in the bathtub and hope it didn't stain, but the vomit was a dark orange color, so it probably would. I thought about calling out, about using this as an excuse to tell my manager. I'd tell him I'd have to stay with her in the hospital, but I'd go to the beach instead—well, first the laundromat and then the beach—and just stare out at the water because it's still too cold to swim or tan, but this didn't matter because I just loved looking out at the water anyway, at the dark blue color of it, and then I remembered Benji's eyes, that they were a dark blue color, almost navy, and I wondered if I'd always liked the beach because they reminded me of Benji's eyes but had just never put it together. And then I didn't want to go to the beach anymore because I was mad at Benji for calling me Miss Mormont, for basically denying our friendship, which was more than that because I had liked him and he had liked me, and I knew it for sure because he was the first boy who looked in my eyes without looking at my eye, my ugly fucking eye that could barely see on it's own because my mother, who could never keep a damn job, didn't want an ambulance bill. Then I heard the ambulance in the distance—at least I thought I did—and I hoped that they'd have to take her to the hospital, that it would cost thousands, and I told myself I wasn't going to pay it and that I would run away and transfer to another Save-A-Lot where I wasn't spending more there than I was making, and I would go back to community college and finish up, and I'd study earth science, or whatever the college equivalent of that subject was because I'd found it interesting.

There was knocking on the door.