You’re gonna think I was unkempt and irresponsible and just plain mean from what I did next. And that’s fine, ’cause maybe I was. But maybe I had a right to be, after so many years spent keeping it together.
The day didn’t start as nothing more than another day in the sun but by the time we made it to late afternoon, I was already onto my fourth swig of Tori’s uncle’s moonshine, watching the world go fuzzy in a blanket of heat.
Luck and Lion were on their second hour of building themselves a boat out of palm fronds and branches and someone’s stray flip-flops they’d found in a bush.
I kept my eyes on them even in my drunken daze, I swear.
Lord, I loved them kids more than I ever could’ve imagined. It was a love I didn’t know how to describe to none of the pregnant Girls who came along asking, not till Jayden sent Emory to me and I described it like this: Loving them kids was like holding my breath. At first it almost hurt but now it was simply how air moved through me, held in place while they was sleepin’ or screamin’ or slippin’ in the bath bucket.
And then there was times when they knocked the wind outta me, when a sizzling laugh or a sticky kiss or a lopsided jump could plow right through me and unleash breath, and that release was enough to sustain through the continuous tight clench. They changed the very way I sustained life, right down to the brilliant gnaw of breath.
That’s how I knew I couldn’t have this other baby. ’Cause I loved Luck and Lion with all the air in me and I didn’t have enough wind left for another child if I wanted to keep breathing myself.
Still, it wasn’t that easy.
I called Planned Parenthood in Tallahassee this morning. The lady on the other end of the phone asked me what I was calling for and I said, “Look, I’m pregnant and I need you to abort this fucker out of me as quick and cheap as you can.”
She didn’t laugh, but I think I heard her snort.
“You’re looking to have an abortion, ma’am? Do you happen to know when the first day of your last period was?”
I sighed. “If you wanna know when I got knocked up, it was August eighth at two p.m. and it was real muggy out that day. I counted and I know that means I’m what, four weeks and a couple days?”
“I appreciate all that information, ma’am, but we calculate based on your menstrual cycle.” She said menstrual with the u all drawn out and if I wasn’t nervous I prob’ly would’ve laughed.
“It was like the very end of July I think.”
“Oka-ay.” I could hear the lady clacking on her keyboard and next she rattled off a bunch of shit about laws and policies and procedures, but all I cared about was how much time did I have and what was it gonna cost.
“About six hundred dollars, ma’am. We can get you scheduled now—”
“Now? I don’t have six hundred dollars now.”
She started talking about access to financial assistance, said I could apply for it at my appointment, but I already knew there was no way I was driving three hours just for the chance that maybe these white folks would take pity on me and decide I needed the help without no tax return or paystubs to show for it. I’d figure it out myself.
“I just need some time,” I said. “How long do I have?”
She sighed apologetically. “You can get an abortion via medication up until eleven weeks after your last menstrual period, which would be a little under six weeks from now. After that, you have four weeks until you can no longer receive a legal abortion, surgically or otherwise, in the state of Florida. You’ll need to come for your initial appointment in person, wait at least twenty-four hours per Florida law, and then you can have another appointment where you’d be given the medication.”
Two appointments a day apart, three hours away, six hundred dollars. It would be nearly impossible, but those first months with the twins felt impossible to survive too and I still made it here.
“Ma’am? Would you like to schedule an appointment?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”
I’d do anything.
I hung up and knew I was already on the cliffside of this thing and I was liable to fall off any moment, only one month to make seven hundred dollars to cover all that gas too, and drive three hours to extract this thing from where I could already feel it burrowing inside me.
So that’s how I decided that before I started scrounging for money, I could have a day to unravel, go to the dune lake, and drink so much liquor I thought my hair whippin’ in front of my eyes was lightning.
The Girls fixed the stereo this morning, so it was blasting from the windows of the truck again, and when I tell you Megan Thee Stallion knows how to get me going just like Kelly Rowland, I mean I got my fingernails digging into the dirt and my ass throwin’ it back in a circle the way it was intended, and all the Girls was cheerin’ and every once in a while one of the toddlers would start bobbing and bouncing to the music and we’d chant, “Go Cece, go Cece!”
I was catching my breath, sitting in the shallows of the lake, tying branches together with swamp lily stems for Luck while Lion painted the flip-flops in muscadine grape juice, when Emory arrived. Trailing behind her, the salad girl from McDonald’s kept her eyes on her feet, like she was checking for dog shit before each step. Jamilah turned the music down and everybody paused, eyes on the salad girl.
When Emory made it to the truck, she stopped and turned to grab the girl’s hand like she was claiming her, and Em looked around at us and nodded proudly, like bringing some girl clearly not from here and without no baby was some kind of gift for us.
“Y’all, meet Adela. She’s new.”
Nobody else said nothing, all of us just staring at her. April offered herself up first, taking a sip of her beer and bouncing her son on her knees. “I’m April. This is Jamilah.” She nodded to Jamilah beside her and the salad girl—Adela—smiled like she was shy even though I could tell she wasn’t and waved once with her free hand.
Tori and Crystal said, “Hey,” and returned to their game of cards in the truck bed, letting each of their kids take a few cards for themselves, even though Cece, Crystal’s daughter, just stuck them in her mouth and sucked.
That left me. Emory pulled Adela toward the shore of the lake where me and the twins was and paused in front of us, Emory’s eyebrows raised.
“What, girl?” I asked. “Can a bitch get some personal space, damn.”
Adela stepped back, but Emory tugged on her wrist and stayed put. “Be nice, Simone,” Em scolded. “Jay always said you had an attitude when you were jealous.”
“Jealous?” I handed Luck the panel of branches tied together and stood in the water so they could see I was taller than them, older than them, that I wasn’t nobody Emory wanted to fuck with. “You only allowed here ’cause of me, Em. Watch what you say.”
Emory sucked her cheeks in and I knew she was about to cry, and part of me felt like I should hug her or say I was sorry, but I didn’t want this girl, Adela, thinking I was soft, so I kept my chin raised and turned toward the girl.
“Look, Em’s like my sister, so if she cool witchu, I’ll be cool witchu. But if you fuck with my babies or my Girls, then we finna have a problem.” Adela nodded once, her eyes a bleary vent for her fear. “You want a beer?”
Emory wiped her eyes even though I didn’t see no tears and nodded. “C’mon, Adela, I’ll get you one.”
But apparently, the salad girl didn’t drink ’cause I watched her on and off for the next three hours and she didn’t take one sip of that beer, not when the rest of us was whining our hips and taking turns reciting verses of “Get Ur Freak On,” not when Luck and Lion insisted everyone try gettin’ on their boat and goin’ on a pirate quest, not when we all shrieked and toppled from the boat when it inevitably sunk and sent us face-first into the dune lake.
The sun retreated from our sight and pulled all light with it. We constructed a fire, brought out the camp stove, and I cooked up some rice while Crystal fished with her spear like her momma taught her till she caught a big old bass, and then she scaled it and I cooked it up too. After all the kids was fed, we laid them down in blankets in the truck and wrangled them to sleep.
Then the rest of us Girls sat and drank in a circle by the fire except Adela, who just looked at her beer can, and as I took my eighth—or maybe ninth—swig of moonshine, Emory called from across the circle, “You sure you should be drinking like that, Simone?”
I looked at her. She had her head in Adela’s lap and Kai still strapped to her chest. I remembered wishin’ I could carry my babies like that, but it wasn’t so easy with two. Before I had them, I wanted to exclusively breastfeed and sleep train and never feed them no preservatives, but it wasn’t like I had a choice when suddenly I was raising two babies in nothing but my kind-of-boyfriend’s old truck and selling my breast milk was the only way we could make any extra cash.
I didn’t have no choice but to co-sleep beyond a year or two or three, since we was sleeping together in a truck bed anyway, and I fed ’em whatever we could afford with my money and Tooth’s EBT while it lasted and whatever else he gave me when he was feeling nice. Emory got to do it just like she wanted and here she was judging me.
“Mind your own business,” I spit. I knew she was talking about the pregnancy test. She’d found me after I took it, out by the water, saw each line, and gaped at me like, Look what you did, Simone, look what you’ve become. We ain’t talked about it since, but now Emory was tryna bring it up in front of all them, make a scene just for the salad girl to watch.
I stared off as April waded into the lake. She cupped her hands, splashing some water on her face and waving Jamilah over to kneel in front of her so she could wash her baby locs for the first time this month. The dune lake was the only place you could really wash all that salt water from the Gulf off you if you didn’t wanna fight with your brothers over the shower, and Jamilah’s brothers was always showering.
“Why can’t she drink?” Jamilah called as she closed her eyes and waited for the cool water to spill down her face.
Emory sat up and looked at me like I’d betrayed her. “You didn’t tell them?”
“What, you pregnant?” Tori laughed.
I shrugged. “Guess so.”
“Oh shit,” Crystal said, downing the last gulp of her Gatorade.
“Wait, then why are you drinking?” Adela asked, running her hand through her hair like white girls do, even though her hair barely budged, and I wondered if she even knew what she looked like.
I held a hand up and everyone hushed. “What I drink’s not nobody’s business but mines.”
“Yours and your baby’s,” Adela said, her voice an entirely different texture than it had been the past few hours, when she’d sounded like a wheezing balloon. Now she sounded so sure, her voice blowing the fire’s smoke in the opposite direction, and I was just about ready to slap her.
“And Tooth’s,” Tori said.
Crystal shrugged. “I hear a drink or two don’t really matter much.”
“But ten of ’em does,” Emory said.
Adela leaned toward Emory and asked, “Who’s Tooth?”
“He’s my children’s wack-ass daddy,” I called across the circle, the smoke veering from its path and soaring toward Adela, making her hazy. “And we’re not together so he doesn’t get to say nothing ’bout what I do or don’t do. Goddamn, all y’all really gotta stop.”
Everyone quieted again and all I could hear was the sound of water dripping from Jamilah’s head back into the water as April washed out the shampoo. Then that salad girl just had to butt in and make things worse.
“It’s really not okay to drink, especially in the first trimester. It could mess up the baby.”
I glared at her shape through the blur. “Luckily, I’m not keeping the baby.”
“You serious?” Emory asked.
They all looked at me now like I’d been looked at so many times, like the wrong kind of mother. This was how one mother looked at another when pride made us tender and all we wanted was to be good. Right. What I’d learned, though, is I’d always be the wrong kind of mother, and this look waltzing across the other mothers’ faces was by nature always gonna be for me, but I refused to let it be mine. The Girls never gave me that look all at once, and I didn’t think they was like that, but also sometimes when we looked at each other, all we could see was ourselves.
“If I can get the money for it, yeah,” I said. “Unless you don’t want me to, ’cause I really be tryna make sure you happy first, Em,” I sneered.
Emory frowned at me, but then she looked down at Kai and when her head tilted back up, her face had broken open and she nodded. “You should do what you wanna do. Let me know if you need help.”
“Wait,” Adela blurted again. “If you’re not completely sure, if you don’t even have the money yet, then you shouldn’t be drinking. Besides, there’s always adoption if you don’t want to keep it. That baby could make someone else really happy.”
This time, we all turned to glare at her, everyone except Emory at least, and Tori was the one to speak this time. “This isn’t Juno. Nobody wants no high school dropout black girl’s baby, especially no one who’s got the kinda money it takes to adopt.”
I added, “And before you say there’s always foster care, you better think about what you saying. This not some Annie situation you’re signing that child up for, and I can’t be having that kinda shit on my conscience.”
Adela shrugged. “I still don’t think you should be drinking. It just confirms what everyone else already thinks about you.”
Even as drunk as I was, the moment she said it, my eyes sobered and my lips, chapped and split, quivered, teeth growing sharp. I stood up and stumbled toward her. As I lunged, half of me was thinking about how I didn’t want Luck and Lion to wake up and see me beating this bitch up, but the other half of me was flooded by the gaudy heat of rage, and next thing I knew I was ripping a clump of hair from this salad girl’s head and my nails tore along her neck and came up filled with bloody cells.
I know you prob’ly see me as just another black girl gone off the rails, but really, I reacted with the sour spit of any woman who was tired of being scrutinized like a pit bull lured into a fight.
Next thing I knew, Tori was prying me off the girl and Emory was holding Adela to her side and pulling her away from the lake, away from the clearing, away from the truck, and I was on the ground, sobbing till my braids was sticking to my cheeks and Crystal was holding me and telling me it was gonna be alright and I wanted to call Momma and Pops and Jayden and go somewhere where someone would wrap me up in the crackle of a soft voice and cook me something sweet and tell me it wasn’t my fault, none of it was, that I was doing everything I knew how to do and everything I didn’t.
But instead, I fell asleep in the sand by the dune lake and woke up with water licking at my toes and my babies asking me again if they could build another boat to ride out on Luck and Lion Lake. And still I smiled, held my breath taut in my lungs, and said yes. For them, always yes.