4-MAY
The next day, Rosalita returned to work. Returned to spray bottles and latex gloves and clear trash bags and empty toilet-paper rolls. To the concrete box in the belly of an office building and up into its arteries that were the empty, channeled hallways connecting the floors. It was the same thing she’d done for ten years. No one here knew what had happened in the last twenty-four hours and she sank into work because it was hers and because she needed to.
Beside Crystal, she checked off the boxes, office by office, while the night breathed around them.
At odd moments, she saw her young self in Crystal. Like when Crystal contorted her body to pick up a trash bin. Or when Crystal rolled her eyes at some conversation going on inside her head. Rosalita saw these things and worried that she was already becoming soft. Success did that to people and Rosalita had won and won big. With Salomon and against Truviv and, though she still showed up to work, already the difference was creeping in and it boiled down to this: Rosalita would not have to be here. Remove the “have to” and it changed everything.
As they worked together to wipe down the glass of a conference room, Rosalita asked for the first time, “When’s your baby due?” It was becoming painfully obvious that Crystal was pregnant to anyone with eyes.
Crystal didn’t respond right away. She stood on her toes and rubbed at the window. “August.” She lowered herself down to her heels. She swayed slightly and Rosalita resisted the urge to steady her. Crystal smiled, then, embarrassed. “My birthday’s in August, too, and I hope she’s born on my birthday. I think that’d be cool. I’m turning twenty. So we’d be exactly twenty years apart.” She smiled, a mouth full of crooked teeth. Rosalita had never noticed.
Rosalita aimed the Windex and sprayed. Twenty years old. “You’re having a girl?”
She returned to working. “Yeah. Doctor told me when I was about four months along.”
“You have everything all ready?” Rosalita asked. It was good Crystal had a steady job, but the foreman never would have hired her if he’d realized she was pregnant. She hoped that Crystal wouldn’t be fired once he paid attention enough to realize that she was. Things like that still happened down here occasionally.
“Kind of. Well, no. Not really. Her dad can’t decide whether he wants to be, you know, around after she’s born, so I’m going to wait to figure out where we’re gonna be.” She avoided looking at Rosalita when she said this. Rosalita remembered her own stomach getting bigger and the way she’d lifted her chin anytime someone had glanced—always so obviously—down at her ring finger. “Don’t worry. I knew I wanted her either way. I don’t have any family.” Crystal touched her stomach. “Now I do.”
Rosalita tossed a paper towel into the bag hanging from the back of the cart. “I raise my son by myself. It’s okay. You’ll be fine.” Though, of course, no one could know this for sure.
Crystal chewed the inside of her cheek. Rosalita had been there. Alone. Unsure. Most of the time angry.
Rosalita sighed. “Write down your address,” she said. “On the clipboard. I’ll bring over some of Salomon’s old baby things. I’ve got old bottles and onesies and a bouncer and toys. I have so much stuff, you won’t believe. Almost everything you need.” Rosalita had saved all of Salomon’s things thinking someday she might want another baby, but that time had come and gone.
Crystal shook her head and turned away. “No,” she said quickly. “No, I don’t need no handouts. I’m not a charity case.”
Rosalita stepped closer, so that their personal spaces bumped into one another’s uncomfortably but she stayed, unmoving. “Stop. You hear me? You stop that. When another woman offers to help you, you take it. You understand?”
Crystal looked at her out of the very corner of her eye. Rosalita raised an eyebrow, waiting, refusing to take a step back, until at last Crystal nodded.