Cass felt as if she had suddenly been tied to a railroad track with a train hurtling toward her. She wanted to hide. But in another minute there was rapid-fire knocking at the door, one-two-three-four-five, and what was she going to do—not answer? Keep switching bowls for the next six or seven hours till Scott got home?
When she turned the knob, Laurel pushed the door open and ran in as if she owned the place, right to the TV area. “Oh, no! Not the . . .” She turned to Cass. “This is a Giuseppe Giordano—I had to special order it from Italy! You couldn’t have moved it?”
Cass stared at her, dumbfounded. Because, really, was she supposed to answer?
“Never mind,” Laurel muttered. “Where’s the water main?”
“The . . . ?”
“The water main! Where is it?”
“I don’t even know what that is.” Cass started to switch the bowls, now deeply regretting the call to Laurel. For the life of her she couldn’t remember why that had seemed like a good idea. Laurel grabbed one end of the couch and angled it out of the way of the falling water. “How can you not know what a water main is, for goodness’ sake?”
Cass set the bowl down hard on the floor under the leak. “Because I only ever lived in apartments before, okay?”
Laurel blinked distractedly, digesting this. “It’s in the basement somewhere. Come help me find it.”
Cass followed her to the basement and looked around at the stuff there. Scott’s weight lifting set and treadmill. A bunch of boxes. A half bathroom with a really small sink. Did a water main have a sign or a label of some kind? Because even if it was staring right at her, that was pretty much the only way she was going to find it.
“Here it is!” called Laurel from a small room in back. She stuck her head out the door. “Well, come here so I can show you, in case this happens again.”
There was a long handle with a yellow rubber coating sticking out sideways from a pipe. Laurel raised it to parallel with the pipe, then pulled it down again. “Okay, now you do it.”
Cass gave her a dead-eyed glare. “But you just did it.”
“Yes, but what if this happens again? You have to do it yourself and know how it feels, so you’ll remember. That’s how you learn.”
As smart and accomplished as Cass had felt completing her course assignment, she felt the exact degree of stupidity grabbing that handle and twisting it upward as Laurel watched.
They went back upstairs and Cass was counting the seconds until Laurel left. But Laurel did not leave. She stayed and helped sop up the puddles on the couch, then took the cushions off and stood them on end to air, saying, “He’s lucky you were here. In another hour the leather on that couch would have been completely compromised.”
Well, we sure wouldn’t want our leather compromised, thought Cass snidely, though she was grudgingly grateful for Laurel’s help, and for the number of the plumber she wrote down.
“Tell him you’re my neighbor,” said Laurel, “and that I strongly recommended you contact him.” She wrote down the name of a carpenter to repair the ceiling, too.
“Thanks,” said Cass.
Turning to go, Laurel flicked her hand, as if to say It’s nothing; I would’ve done it for anyone. Even you.
* * *
THAT night, Cass perched on one of the stools at the kitchen island, strategically positioned between the door to the garage and the TV area. She wanted to prepare Scott before he saw the ceiling and flipped out. Possibly his flight was delayed. Possibly the little jalapeño inside her had soaked all her energy into its own tiny form, as it often did, and her head had sunk lower and lower until it rested on the open pages of her book.
Somewhere above the watery surface of a dream, she heard noises, but they were not loud or strange enough to make her swim back up. Then she felt a presence near her—warmth, breath—and her head bobbed up fast.
“Ow!” Scott had his hand to his mouth, where the side of her head had hit it.
“What are you doing, hovering around like that?” she snapped, rubbing her scalp.
“Trying to figure out why you passed out in my kitchen, is what!”
“You were sniffing me?”
“Yeah, I was sniffing you. How else am I supposed to—” His gaze shifted suddenly behind her, upward. “What the . . . ?”
Cass started talking fast. “There was a pinhole leak in a pipe from your bathroom, and it soaked the ceiling, but we turned off the water main, and then the plumber came and fixed it, and the carpenter’s coming on Friday to patch up the ceiling.”
Scott glared at the hole, then took in the stripped-down couch and the cushions leaning upright against the wall.
“It leaked onto the couch,” Cass explained. “We didn’t want the leather compromised.”
He squinted at her uncomprehendingly. “Okay. . . . Wait, who’s ‘we’?”
She told him about Laurel. “You have a day game Friday, so I’ll deal with the carpenter.”
Scott nodded and seemed to relax with the knowledge that his house would soon be in order again. He studied the ceiling. “Good thing you were here.”
“That’s what Laurel said. After she threw a hissy fit about the couch.”
“Yeah, she’s wound pretty tight, but she’s wicked efficient.”
And she hates me. “Well, she found the water main.”
“Yeah?” he said. “Where is it?”
Cass smiled, vindicated. “I’ll show you tomorrow.”
* * *
CASS had a list of seven apartments to see in Boston. Scott crossed off three right away. “Those are bad neighborhoods,” he said.
“No worse than where I was living with Ben.”
“Yeah, no better, either. You’re going to have a kid, Cass. You want to carry a baby around those streets?”
“I’m trying to find something affordable—I already ran up my bill with you.”
He was quiet for a while, driving through Newton toward Boston. “Don’t worry about the money,” he said finally. “Just don’t take a place near a bar.”
Everything’s near a bar, for godsake. You think that would matter? Like I couldn’t find booze anywhere? Cass bit her tongue.
The first place was actually pretty nice. Second floor, sunny, no obvious bug or rodent problem. The landlord took one look at Scott’s car and the rent was suddenly two hundred dollars higher than advertised.
On the way to the second place, Scott’s cell phone jingled. He looked at the caller ID. “Ah, ffff-frig.” He turned to Cass. “What’s the date?”
“June twenty-seventh.”
He answered the phone. “Happy birthday, Ma. . . . No, I didn’t. . . . I remembered. . . . No . . . No . . . You just beat me to it.” The fingers of his free hand tapped agitatedly against the steering wheel. “I’m sorry to hear that. . . . I’ll call the condo manager. . . . So what’s up for your big day?” He listened for another moment and then put the phone down onto the console between their seats.
After a minute he picked it up again. “Uh-huh . . . Sounds nice. . . . Did you get my flowers? . . . It’s still early out there, they just haven’t delivered them yet.” He rolled his eyes. “I’m pretty sure they don’t make the rounds at seven in the morning, Ma, that would just piss people off, don’t you think?” A tiny muscle bulged in his jaw as he ground his molars. “Okay, I’m at Fenway now, I gotta go. . . . I’m not lying. . . . You’re right, I don’t have a game today, but they’re calling a special practice. . . . There’s Rogie, I gotta go, he’s waiting for me. . . . Yeah, you too.”
He stabbed his thumb at the end button as if he were squishing a bug and dropped the phone onto the console. Cass could feel his irritation pulsing around the car, trying to find a way out. Trying and failing.
At the next stoplight he picked up the phone again and scrolled through the contacts. “Yeah, hi, I need a dozen roses delivered today. . . . Gilda McGreavy, 257 Aloha Boulevard, Unit 12 C, Honolulu. . . . Just put Happy Birthday, Scott. . . . I really could care less what kind of vase. . . .” He rattled off his credit card number and expiration date.
Cass waited until his breathing evened out a little before asking, “She lives in Hawaii?”
“Yeah, I got her a condo a couple of years ago.”
“That was nice of you.”
“Not really. She wanted Florida.”
“That would be a lot closer.”
“Exactly.”
* * *
THE next apartment they looked at was above a pawnshop, the whole front window crammed with a display of guns and ammo belts. The one after that was two doors down from a big discount liquor store.
The last place was on a side street a couple of blocks from a T station. The landlady seemed nice, though suspicious of Scott and his car. The apartment was listed as a studio but had a separate room the size of a walk-in closet that could eventually be used as the baby’s room. It was shabby and inexpertly patched in places, but it was fairly clean and the price was reasonable.
“I’ll leave you two to consider,” the landlady said and stepped outside.
Scott and Cass stood in the room and looked around. It reminded Cass of any one of a number of places that she and Ben had lived in. Actually it was better than most of them, and the neighborhood seemed far quieter.
But for some reason Cass felt tears pinching behind her eyes when she envisioned a life here with her child. In the vast unknowable scheme of the world, this was what she got. This was what she deserved. It was actually better than she deserved, since she couldn’t even pay the rent yet. Scotty would be taking care of that until she found work.
And when the baby came, what then? Would she keep struggling along, fending off the dark whisper in her head telling her how much easier it would all be with a drink or ten?
This place is not so bad, she chided herself. It was about as nice and almost as big as the apartment she’d grown up in. And suddenly a wave of missing her mother washed over her so hard that she thought she might weep. Mom, she called silently. Mom, where are you?
Gone. And would Cass turn into her mother, grinding along every day just to stay a step ahead of poverty, the only contentment to be found at the bottom of a wineglass, until it was finally over?
The enormity of the task she had taken on, having this baby alone, with no money and no real job skills, fighting to stay sober every hour—it felt like cinder blocks on her shoulders. And it occurred to her in the abyss of that moment that it would be so much easier . . . so much simpler . . . if there was no baby . . . if there was no her . . .
“I don’t think so,” said Scott.
“What?”
“I don’t like it.”
“Scotty, this is the last place.”
“There’ll be others.” He put his hand on her back, and it seemed that his fingers spanned the entirety of it, from shoulder to shoulder. He nudged her forward and out the door. “Thanks anyway,” he said to the landlady waiting in the hall and continued to guide Cass to the car.
“You hungry?” he said as he threaded the SUV down narrow side streets out to the main boulevard. “Let’s stop and get a bite.”
“Scotty,” she murmured to hide the quavering in her throat. “I have to find a place.”
“No hurry.”
“What do you mean, no hurry? I’ve got no—”
He cut her off. “You could stay a little longer. I been thinking about that leak. Would’ve been a whole lot worse if you hadn’t been there. And you’re cleaning the house now. It’ll take a while to find a replacement as good as Helen. Without the stealing, I mean.”
A temporary reprieve.
The tears pressing behind her eyes broke free, and she couldn’t speak for a moment. She felt Scott glance over, then quickly turn back to the road. She wanted to thank him, to give some expression of gratitude, a promise that he wouldn’t regret his kindness, but her vocal cords refused to cooperate, so she reached over and squeezed his forearm. She felt his muscle tighten under her hand, and in another moment she released him and put her hand back in her lap.
“Pizza or burgers,” he said. “What’s it gonna be?”