Nothing More (10 page)

Little Lila doesn't turn to look toward my voice. The bell on the door chimes, alerting Posey of a customer. She looks at Lila and I nod, telling her I can sit with the girl. Going back behind the counter, Posey greets two men in suits and I turn to watch the little girl play with her toy. She's not paying any attention to me. That car is fascinating her and she's awfully cute while she rolls the little Camaro along the uneven floor. She crawls behind it, despite being clearly old enough to walk. Her little sneakers light up when her toes hit the floor, and her little fingers wrap around the body of the car, which she flips over and spins upside down, smiling all the while.

“That's an awfully cool car you've got yourself,” I tell her.

She doesn't look up at me, but she speaks. “Car,” she says.

Posey looks over as she pours soy milk from a carton into the blender. I smile at her and her shoulders relax. She purses her lips into a modest smile and gets back to work. Her fingernails are dark with little yellow dots painted on them. I watch her hands as she pours premade green tea from a pitcher into the cup full of soymilk and ice. She blends the concoction and sways her head back and forth to the Coldplay song playing on our speakers. I look back over to the little girl staring adoringly at her little plastic Camaro.

“Zoom,” Lila says softly. She lifts the car into the air and gazes off into the distance after it.

I sit quietly until the customers disappear. Posey is wiping down the bottles of flavored syrup with a wet rag. The tables are dirty, eight out of ten of them. I walk over to the trash area and grab the busser tub from inside the cabinet next to the trash can. Lila is still saying “car” and “zoom” as I start to clear off the first table. A three-dollar tip.

Not too bad. You'd be surprised at the number of customers that leave their tables a mess but don't think to leave a tip for the person cleaning it up. I'm not sure if it's rudeness or if it's just ignorance. Like Uber drivers: we assume that they get their entire tip, which is charged automatically, but I've heard people say it's not. Even if you mark the 15 percent tab, they don't actually see that money, so this one guy in my class told me you're supposed to tip them in cash. Then again, he said he was from France, but his accent was clearly German, so the possibility of him lying is probably fairly high . . .

Either way, baristas should be tipped way more than they are. Public-service announcement complete. Moving on.

The next table has at least four sugar packets emptied out into a pile. I'm impressed when I see the sugar packets folded into little stick figures. There's a toothpick with a piece of napkin for a flag stuck right into the center of the sugar hill. I try to remember what the guy looked like who was sitting here. Actually, I think it was a girl. Or woman. I didn't get a clear look at her face, but whoever she is, she's clearly an awesome force in the miniature sugar sculpture scene.

“Lila.” I call to get the little girl's attention. She looks up but doesn't move her body from its now full-on lying-down position on the floor.

“Do you want to come see this little scene over here? It's pretty cool.” I point to the sugar hill and stare at the fake sword in one of the sugar-packet people's arm.

A hearty “no” comes out of her mouth and I nod, not entirely surprised, flattening the hill with my washcloth. I go back and forth between clearing the remaining tables and keeping an eye on Lila. As I'm taking a last swipe over the second-to-last table, Posey walks from behind the counter and stands in front of me.

“You didn't have to do that,” she says; the brown of her eyes is barely noticeable because of how bloodshot they are. “It's your day off.”

“Are you okay?” I ask.

She glances around the shop and nods, sighing as she sits down at the table closest to her sister.

She shrugs. “Just tired. Work, school, the usual.” Her smile is perky still, despite her words. She doesn't like to complain, I can tell, even though she totally has reason to, or to at least vent.

“If you need to have some shifts picked up or anything, let me know. I don't mind helping and I have some free time this semester.” I actually don't have that much free time, but I would like to help her if I can. She clearly has more going on than I do.

Posey shakes her head, and her cheeks flush. Light red strands are escaping from the tiny black elastic band that's too small to hold her hair. In the light, her hair looks lighter, as if she dyed it red. Her complexion doesn't give any of her secrets away.

“I need the shifts. But if you know anyone who makes bubbles to put little four-year-old daredevils inside of while I work, let me know.”

I smile with her and look at Lila, who is still lying on the floor.

“She's autistic,” she says. Somewhere inside my head, the pieces were put together within a few minutes of meeting her. “We aren't sure how severe yet. She's learning to talk now”—she pauses briefly—“at four.”

“Well, sometimes that's not such a bad thing.” I gently bump her shoulder with mine, trying to find a dash of humor in something so scary. She uncrosses her arms and her face relaxes into a wide smile.

“True.” She presses her fingers against her lips.

Posey bends down closer to her little sister and rests her hands on her knees. I can't hear what she says, but I can see that it makes Lila happy.

I check the time; it's close to six. If I'm going to go out with Nora and her friends, I need to get back to my apartment and shower. I'm not nervous really, I just don't know what she's thinking about me. Does she randomly kiss people often? If so, that's okay, but I wish I had some inkling of what she's feeling, or how she acts on a date. She'd been flirty before today—well, I take it as her flirting, but so far she hadn't given me any indication or warning that she was open to kissing me like she did this morning. She was so confident when she leaned into me, pressing into me, running her hands over my chest. Remembering the way her tongue tasted makes my cock ache. I need to do something about it, and this time, I won't rip the shower curtain and fall on my ass and cut my face and bruise my knee. Safe sex: I'll stay safely in my bed. With my door locked. I'll even push my dresser against the door.

I look over at Posey, who's sitting back at the table again. She has her phone next to her ear and is frowning. I watch her shake her head and mutter something into the phone before hanging up. I want to be nosy, to ask her if she's okay, but at the same time, I don't want to pry into her life without her wanting me to.

“Do you need anything before I go?” I ask while I walk behind the bar to check my schedule and make my espresso. Double espresso. I consider doing a triple, but that might not be the best idea.

Posey's shift should be close to over by now. She shakes her head, thanking me, but says she's fine. I wave goodbye to Lila and Posey, shouting goodbye to Jane loud enough for her to hear me from the stock room.

A
S I PUSH ON THE
heavy shop door and walk out into the coming night, my phone pings in my front pocket. Heavy bags of trash line the street, nearly bursting open to spill their litter onto the sidewalks. It's the same every day, but I don't see myself getting used to it. Manhattan must be even worse, with all the shops and a million and a half people sharing the smaller space. It's an impossible city to live in if you don't want to be bumped into, honked at, or hassled.

It astounds me that so many people can be shoved into so many little apartments with tiny windows and tiny kitchens. The rooms in my place are bigger than I had expected (the bathroom is snug), but I knew I couldn't afford to live in an expensive place in Brooklyn that was any bigger than five hundred square feet. My stepdad, Ken, helps pay our rent, but I've been putting money aside since I got a job and I plan on repaying him someday, at least some of it. I'm not very comfortable with the idea of him helping me with my bills. I'm responsible enough, partly thanks to him and his lectures about money management and student expenses. I don't blow my money on booze or going out. I pay my bills and occasionally buy books or tickets to a hockey game.

Having a parent who occupies such a high position at a university has unquestionably made my college life one hundred percent easier. I got help with each and every form, I had a helping hand in choosing all my classes, and I managed to get into some that were supposedly full. Ken had a lot more pull at Washington Central than at NYU for sure, but it still helps to know the ins and outs of admissions departments.

I often think about how life would be if my mom had stayed in Michigan. Would I have left her alone there and moved to New York with Dakota? I feel like I would have been less likely to move if she didn't have Ken and her group of friends in Washington. My life would be so different if she hadn't met him.

Sometimes I think that outside of the few obvious things, New York City isn't
that
different from Saginaw. The sun is often hidden in Manhattan, keeping the light from the city's residents in a small box on a beach somewhere on the West Coast. I've become so used to the overcast sky shadowing every town I've ever lived in that when the sun shines here in Brooklyn, my eyes burn for half of my walk to work. I bought a pair of sunglasses, which I quickly lost. But the sun shows its face in Brooklyn often enough that I would actually use them, marking one of the many reasons I chose to live here instead of Manhattan. In September, the overcast has blotted out everything close to the skyline. The farther you get away from the towering buildings, the more luminous the sun becomes.

A short, stocky bundle of layered coats with a hat on top moves past me on the sidewalk, the man beneath them pushing a shopping cart full of aluminum cans and plastic bottles. His hands are encased in thick, faded brown gloves covered in black dirt. Patches of gray hair poke out from under the red-and-green plaid hat he's wearing and his eyes are half-closed, like time and hardship have wilted him to the point of near collapse. He stares straight ahead, paying me no mind, but my heart aches for him.

To me, the poverty in some parts of the city is the hardest thing to deal with. I miss my mom, but seeing the sad, shameful look on the weathered face of a middle-aged man sitting against a bank window using the words printed on a piece of cardboard to beg for food money—that kind of thing is especially hard for me. Even so, it must cut even deeper for men like that to be leaning against a building that is home to millions of dollars. To watch, with an empty stomach, as groups of suits walk past on their lunch break and spend twenty dollars on a grain salad while they are starving.

Saginaw doesn't have a large population of homeless. Most of the city's poor have homes. The siding on their old homes is almost collapsing, the walls are rotting with mold, and the beds are infested with little bugs that feed on them in their sleep. But they have roofs over their heads. Most of the people I know in Saginaw try and try to get ahead, but it's hard there. All of my friends' parents were farmers or lifelong factory workers, but since all the factories closed over the past decade, there just aren't any jobs. Outside of heroin, the city can't boast of any growth industries. Families that were doing well ten years ago can barely put food on the table now. Unemployment rates are at an all-time high, along with the crime rate and drug problems. The happiness ran away with the jobs, and sometimes I think neither will ever return.

That's the biggest difference between my hometown and this city. The hope that buzzes through New York City makes all the difference in the world. Millions of people move to the biggest city in the entire country based solely on this emotion. They hope for more. They hope for more happiness, more opportunity, more experience, and—most of all—more money. The streets are crowded with people who leave their native countries and build a home and a life for their families here. It's pretty amazing when you think about it.

People pack up and move here, some crazy statistic like over a hundred people a day. Twenty-four-hour subways—heck twenty-four-hour services of every category—and no large pickups or tractors taking up half of the road, like in Michigan. The small brown municipal buildings that we called “downtown” Saginaw aren't even close in comparison to the soaring skyscrapers in New York City.

So the more and more I think about it, New York and Saginaw have absolutely nothing in common, and I think I'm okay with that. Maybe I keep trying to make them similar to try to reassure myself that living here won't change me . . . that whatever growing up means, I will still be myself when I get there, only different.

My phone pings again. Pulling it out, I see my mom's name twice, making my heart race. When I read the messages, I relax. One of them is a link to an article about a Harry Potter–themed bar that just opened in Toronto, and the other is an update on my little sister's weight. She's a little one so far, but my mom still has four weeks to go. The last month should give little Abby enough time to bulk up in there.

The thought of my wrinkly little baby sister wearing a pink headband while lifting little pudgy arms into the air makes me laugh. I don't know how it will be to be a big brother, especially at my age. I'm too old to possibly have anything in common with the little one, but I want to be the best brother I can be. I want to be the older brother that I needed when I was young. It will be an adjustment for my mom and for Ken, to have such a young baby at home again when both of their other children are grown and finally out of the nest. My mom kept telling me that she couldn't wait to have her house to herself, but I could tell she would be lonely without me around. It's always been her and me, through the best and the worst.

As I wait for the crosswalk sign to change and show that glowing white silhouette, I remind myself how damn lucky I am to have the mom I do. She never once questioned my move and has supported every one of my whims since I was a child. My mom was that mom who would dress up in costumes with me months away from Halloween. She even told me I could live on the moon if I wanted to. When I was a child, I often wondered if I ran fast enough, if I would land on the moon. Sometimes I wished I would.