Twelve days later after a lot of trouble, which included Darius getting really drunk again and falling down in the yard and puking on the stairs (which I cleaned up) and him missing work due to a massive hangover, Darius got fired from Captain Stabby’s.
During that same time, Maggie Corrigan began to show a little more in the baby-belly department. If you didn’t know the what-what, you might not be able to tell, but I could. Maggie definitely could tell. Throughout the school day, she’d just burst into tears at the drop of a hat. (Really, if someone dropped their hat on the floor, she would get so sad that she’d cry.) Maggie wouldn’t let me hug her or anything. Not even when we were alone in the hallway. When I asked her if she still thought we were in love, she said, “Yes, we’re in love. I just hate you right now, but not forever.” So I had to guess our plan was still in place.
Here’s some more bad news: I had to go to musical practice three times during those couple of weeks, and that meant my nights at Nussbaum’s went very late. The musical practices themselves were great though. The other munchkins and I sang our nuts off, and we got our first taste of walking around on our knees to look super tiny, which was hilarious.
The really good news was that I loved being at Nussbaum’s. Chatting up the clients? Making coffee and running down to Pancho’s for sandwiches? Boom. Good times. I even figured out how Mallory intended to organize the majesty of the law folders and papers, although it was pretty clear that she hadn’t been filing squatch since long before she got the babe in her maker.
Dingus, I found unfiled case documents going back like eighteen months. Eighteen months! No lady carries her baby goods for that amount of time. The doctors would come after her with a knife because the baby would have been the size of a full-grown pit bull. Mallory seemed like maybe she was just a sucky worker.
When I figured out that the files were ordered by client’s last name and then by month and year—bing bang boom. I filed like a kingpin. It was pretty easy work, but Mr. Nussbaum kept saying what an astonishingly good job I was doing.
After I fulfilled my no-money civic duty, I’d walk home in the cold, feeling like all the world made sense—that is, if you just paid attention, put the right paper in the right folder, and slid it in the right drawer. But then I’d get home and find sad, broken Darius or super drunk Darius like I did one time.
I yelled at him that he was an asshole for drinking again, but he didn’t care. He slurred, “I’ve got no reason for nothing.”
Drunk, drunk, drunk.
On the eleventh day, two days after I asked Mr. Nussbaum if Darius needed to hire a lawyer and Mr. Nussbaum laughed and said, “Your brother is so obviously guilty in every facet of his situation. Witnesses and blood tests verify all counts against him. All you’d be doing is adding to the total of this great financial disaster,” Darius got the letter from the county clerk telling him what he had to look forward to in the coming year.
Here’s the what-what:
1. A $1,100 fine.
2. A twenty-four-month driver’s license suspension, minimum. (He’d have to do a bunch of alcohol assessments and driving courses or it would be longer.)
3. A five-week stint (FIVE WEEKS) in the county jail, which would begin on January 2.
4. And then there was the real kick in the salami. He had to pay $22,549.30 in restitution to the local company that franchised the KFC/Taco Bell. That’s how much damage my brother did to their drive-through window when he fell asleep and drove his stupid car into the side of the building.
Darius, who was already tender in his man parts, both physical and emotional, fell on the floor, sobbing. I tried to comfort him. He told me to shut up with my sunny crap and go the f-bomb away. So I went back to the master suite. I could still hear him wailing.
Two hours later, he knocked on the door and said, “Taco, I have an alcohol problem. I want to drink right now because I don’t know what else to do. I got loaded the other day because I got in a fight with Dad about money. I don’t have enough money to buy shoes, and there are holes in mine where the water comes through. But he seriously won’t help us anymore.”
“Because of Miz?” I asked. “He needs money for her?”
“No, because he’s Dad,” Darius said. “That’s why he won’t help. Without Mom, Dad is a bad man.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I’m a drunk. I don’t have money. And I can’t make money because I’m going to jail. And that means I can’t take care of you the way Mom wanted me to. Things are bad right now. We have to pay rent and utilities and…” Darius’s face got all red and splotchy, and his eyes watered. “Man, I hate saying this so much, Taco. I’m such a failure.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Please, I’m sorry, Mom, but Taco has to get a job or we’re going to all starve and die in the snow.” Then he looked back at me. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
“No,” I said. “Don’t be sorry. I can handle this.” I rolled out of bed. Darius had helped me so much. I could help him and me…and Maggie too. I wasn’t scared at all. I was so serious. “I will be a man.”
“Oh shit,” Darius said. “You have no idea about life.”
“I’m totally great with life. I can do this, Darius.”
Darius shook his head and closed his eyes. “You’re just so full of shit, dude. You kind of make me sick.”
“What?” I asked.
Darius deflated. He spoke really quietly. “Seriously. I really don’t want to talk to you for a few days, okay? Just stay away from me.” He left my room.
I had to tell myself, like, ten thousand times, “Today is the best day I’ve ever had,” because I’ll tell you, after that weird display, I had fear in my heart for sure.
When Dad went up north to the mine, it wasn’t so he could marry some puffy-coat-wearing lady. It was so he could earn extra money to keep me floating until I was adult enough to float my own boat.
And the reason Darius stopped going to tech school and took a full-time job driving a Pepsi truck and then working full-time at Captain Stabby’s was so he could keep me afloat until I could float my own boat.
But Dad floated into Miz’s hot sack, and Darius sunk himself all the way to the bottom of the ocean. And Dad wouldn’t call me back, and Darius told me to stay away from him. There was no one to float my boat but me, and I didn’t even have a boat because, according to Darius, I was full of shit and also I was in high school and I had homework and musical rehearsals and I had to work for Nussbaum for free and… Holy balls, dingus. I had a baby in my girlfriend.
“Today is the best day I’ve ever had? So is tomorrow?”
How could I believe it?
Whatever. I kept repeating it to myself.
“Tomorrow will be even better than today.”
And it worked. That night I dreamt that my mom was watching out for me like a big, bald Tibetan baby-head sun rising over the grocery store.
The next day was my seventeenth birthday.