Chapter Two
 

Marge was mad. Today was one of those days she wanted to tape up in a cardboard box and ship to China. She had walked to the Piggly Wiggly with Garrett in tow because the Lincoln’s transmission was out again, and Stacey’s dad hadn’t been home in three days. 

“Anytime you need a looksie, Miss Marge, you just let me know.” She loathed Stacey’s father, and the way he constantly called her “Miss Marge” made her feel like the neighborhood’s schoolmarm. She knew her disadvantages: mousy brown curls that had morphed into frizzy balls haloing around her head, a broken tooth that poked out the side of her mouth. And the weight. Lenny had always been onto her about the weight. But what else did she have to mollify her problems?

“Jesus.” She could hear her mother’s voice so clearly. 

“Thanks, Ma,” she said at the air, waving her hand like a bear swatting a hive. She sat on her bed, ignoring the way the cracker crumbs felt in the sheets under her legs. She rested her head against the faux wood-paneled wall behind her, and her eyes drifted to the ceiling. Another watermark had birthed next to the old one in the gypsum panel above her. She tried not to snort. It was a weird reaction to all the bad that seemed to creep up around her. But she had stopped crying a long time ago.

Like today, for instance. When Whitney was young, if something like what had happened earlier that afternoon had happened back then, Marge would have crumbled like a cookie. “Man up,” Lenny would have said, and she would have ignored him like she always did. She wasn’t sure why she only chose to listen to him now.

The walk earlier had been brutal. It was uncharacteristically hot at a record ninety-four degrees. She wore her flip-flops and suffered from feet sweat as she steered Garrett down sidewalks. He was in a particularly bad mood. Something “festered in his soul” as Marge’s mother would have put it as he started his morning routine with Richie Rich and ended it with The Littles. He’d do that sometimes—brood. And it worried Marge, the way there was something sinister inside of him she couldn’t quite see.

“It’ll be okay,” she had said blankly to the shop windows as they headed down 10th Street. They had already been walking for half an hour. Garrett was tired and grunted his frustration at her.

“I know. But remember the ice cream,” she kept saying, referring to the half-eaten carton of Rocky Road battling frostbite in the freezer. Times like this she cursed Lenny. She’d told Whitney once what a bad vacuum salesman he was, and it was true. He was dismal. But he had always found ways to put food on the table and a roof over their heads. A roof that wasn’t plagued with urine-colored water stains.

What hurt hardest of all was what she really wanted to say to him when she closed her eyes at night. “Look, Lenny. Look at what I managed for you. I have a home, and I took care of your daughter, and we’re doing just fine.” But she couldn’t because at the end of her hand was Garrett, a product of something that had nothing to do with her late husband. “A divine consequence,” her mother might say, not with a clucking tongue but with deep empathy in her heart.

“A divine consequence,” Marge repeated as she and Garrett finally stood in front of the pediatrician’s front door.

The first thing Marge didn’t like about Dr. Butler was his hair that flopped over his head. He grew it out for this purpose, creating a brown, silken wave that she often desired to rip out from the roots. It angered her that here was a full-grown man with hair like Samson, and she had to take to rubbing eyeshadow into the patches around her scalp because her hairline was withdrawing slowly to the crown of her head. 

The second thing was the way he eyed her son.

“Hello there,” he said affably enough when he entered the room, but one watery blue eye remained glued to her child as if he was a bomb about to go off.

“They’re getting worse,” Marge said, trimming the fat and getting right to the meat of it. “I’m worried he’s going to hurt himself.”

“I’ve told you before, Mrs. Marksmen, we need to consider the other option. You don’t have the resources to appropriately raise Garrett and drugging him is hardly the right course. At his age, the medication could negatively affect his growth and overall health. I think you know where that leaves us.” Marge had told him countless times before to call her by her Christian name. But the good doctor refused, and she knew it was for good reason. Get too close, and the problems start to become yours.

“I can’t.” It was a simple answer, two words that she normally buried underneath a wet pile of organs. She had thought them all her life. How she couldn’t go on without Lenny even when she knew Lenny was as dead as a doornail. How she couldn’t go on after what happened to her that night coming home from the bakery. But this version was different. She had plucked them from somewhere underneath her appendix and offered them to the doctor with a side of resolve. She couldn’t and wouldn’t send her boy to the insane asylum. 

“Well, I’m not sure what else to say. We just don’t have enough data about these things.” “These things” was her son who was rocking beside her and working his fingers in the air. He always seemed somewhat pacified at the doctor’s office, and Marge noted the sterile air and vacuous feel of a tomb. Maybe the trailer was too chaotic for him.

Marge sat in it now, exhausted from dragging Garrett all the way back home. She listened as her daughter crunched the gravel beneath her feet, making her way up the front wooden steps. She heard the screen door whine open.

“Hello,” Marge called, and Whitney appeared in her doorway.

“Hey,” her daughter said. She took in this small-framed child, the once dreaded feeling of letting her walk home from school dulled from exhaustion and a mind that was constantly focused on someone else. Marge felt so guilty for that and wondered what life would have been like with just the two of them. And she felt guilty for that too.

“How was school?” 

“School’s school,” Whitney said, as she often did. She sat at the end of the bed looking like all the other kids these days. Marge couldn’t remember looking so ridiculous growing up. Her daughter’s hair was drenched in hairspray within an inch of its life. Her jeans were slightly oversized and ripped with holes, and Marge tried to pin down their heinous color or “wash” as Whitney had corrected her before. And that jacket. It was record heat in the city, and her daughter was wearing an oversized men's blazer with the sleeves rolled up and covered in an array of buttons. The smiley face one seemed like it was challenging Marge.

“Fine,” Marge said, drawing out the syllable and reaching her eyes to the ceiling to hide her annoyance. “How’s Stacey? She hear from her Dad?”

“No. And some lady left her card in the screen door yesterday. Did you catch a glimpse of her?” Marge nodded, remembering “Ms. Fawcett,” a pinched young blonde woman in a cheap polyester jacket and skirt. She had “business” written all over her, even in the way she had piled her hair on top of her head with a toothy clip. Marge particularly remembered her because she had shown up in a dark green bug, and she recalled thinking how she’d never be caught dead in such a silly-looking car. Then she remembered her transmission was dead and that she didn’t have the option of sitting in any vehicle at the moment.

“What’d you say to her?”

“Nilch. I was corralling his majesty after he took his grievances out on that new box of crayons the social worker gave him.” Anna really was a peach. Some of those workers Marge knew were on some sort of crusade to satisfy their savior complex, but Anna was a young girl who didn’t flinch when she saw their trailer. Marge expected it was because she’d probably been raised in a few herself. But Ms. Fawcett looked like a whole other sort. Poor Stacey.

Whitney went quiet. If she were a turtle, she’d be curled inside her shell. Marge wanted to hold her daughter and close her eyes to the water stains and ripped carpet and think about something different. There was this moment that lingered in the past at the bakery, the “before” hovering in the back of her brain. If she looked at it too hard, sometimes she would be taken to a different present, one where it’s her, Whitney, and Walt—the second-best guy she ever met after Lenny (for all his faults and aggravating ways)—and they’d be in a different universe altogether. Maybe in one where God didn’t hate her so much.

“I did something.” They both took a breath and then all sound disappeared. “I’m pregnant,” Whitney said.

Marge wanted to look at the ceiling again, but she was afraid she’d catch God’s eye.