“So my mother was best friends with the nurse?” She prompted.
“Oh yeah. Your momma was always trying to get her help, too. That trifling woman started getting too much suspicion on her, so I guess she did what she had to in order to get it off her; she put it on your mother.”
“Oh…” Juicy shook her head.
“So, yeah, she got escorted out by the police. You know, she could have told on that nurse, but she didn’t. We all offered to back her but she said she wouldn’t have to because her friend would come through for her. Your Momma had been very naive.”
“But why would that lady set up her own friend? She could have set someone else up.” Mr. Joe was shaking his head.
“Nah, we keep our stuff locked up. She only had access to your Momma’s locker. Anything not in a locker would be considered a common area and no one person could be responsible for it. If she was going to pin the drugs on someone she had to make it look like a specific person had been responsible or she would have been under the same suspicion as anyone else.”
Juicy had lost her appetite but took a bite of her burger since Mr. Joe had used his tickets to buy it. “What ever happened to the nurse?” She asked after she fought to get the hunk of food down her dry throat.
Mr. Joe told her the story and Juicy contemplated his words silently. “Mr. Joe. Will you tell the story to my mother? I think—this is the reason that she wanted to come here.”
“Sure I will. I always liked your mother. She was good people.” Juicy gave him a grim look. She had been good people, until a friend had screwed her over.
After lunch, Joe had to go back onto his floor and show his face, but he promised to visit right after. Juicy returned to her mother’s room and placed her hand over mother’s unmoving one. Jassmina opened her eye and gave her daughter a crooked smile. This was the only time that she ever gave a real smile; when Juicy was present.
“Ma, I found a friend of yours that used to work here when you did. Do you remember a guy name Joe?” Her mother didn’t respond but somehow Juicy could look in her eye and see that she did. Maybe her mother thought she was talking. Regardless, Juicy understood her unspoken response.
“Well, he remembered that white devil. He says he will come by and tell you about her. Maybe you two can shoot the breeze about the good ol’ days…” Her mother got a distant look in her eyes. Maybe they weren’t such good days after-all.
Joe arrived shortly after and he had flowers; big ones. He winked at Momma. “Hi beautiful. Remember me?” Momma smiled, but it wasn’t the real one. Juicy took the flowers and held them close enough for her Momma to smell if she wanted—she didn’t. She placed them on the sill where the other flowers were. Joe pulled up a chair and chatted with her, and Juicy could tell that she wanted him to shut up with his chatter and to get to the point.
“Mr. Joe…I think my Mom is about ready for a nap. But before she goes to sleep, can you tell her about that white devil, please?”
“Oh, yeah. Well that gal got fired about two years after you did. After you left, she got real bad. Nobody had her back the way you did and her work got sloppy as hell.” Mr. Joe looked up into the air thoughtfully. “Well, it wasn’t all her fault that her work got sloppy. We got her ass whenever we could. She was trying to transfer out when she got hipped to what we were doing. But she got fired before that ever happened. Whether it was for drugs or sloppy work, no one knows for sure, but she was out.”
Jassmina’s face relaxed. She looked very peaceful.
“Well after she was fired, we heard that she got blackballed; couldn’t work at a hospital even if she wanted to work for free. Several years later she was working as a manager at a fast food restaurant. That’s the last I heard of her. But I can tell you this, Beautiful. What that woman did to you, she has paid for tenfold. She looked like a woman beat down by life even when she worked here.”
Jassmina closed her eyes and Juicy placed her hand on Mr. Joe’s shoulder. He looked up and nodded, promising to look in on her later. When Mr. Joe was gone Juicy sat in the chair and placed her hand on her mother’s. Tears had trailed down each side of Jassmina’s face.
Jassmina Robinson died several days later after suffering from a massive heart attack. Juicy went to school the very next day because her mother had struggled for nearly five minutes to form the last words that she’d ever spoken to Juicy; which was to finish school.
CHAPTER 12
It had been one week since Troy had walked out. Four days since she'd bothered to listen to any of his messages. Seven days of being in a fucked-up depressed state. And she wasn’t even sure how long it had been since she’d last contacted her shop.
He had lied when he said he’d call her the next day. He hadn’t. By then she had been ready to talk to him. She was lonely, afraid and she missed him even though she was pissed as hell at him for being in Connecticut. But he didn’t call. She got calls from doctors asking questions about him, she had even gotten a call from some old lady that said she was his mother. She had sounded as flaky as him and Juicy had only listened to her recorded message without ever speaking to her. After all, what could she say when asked how was she doing when all she would want to tell her is that her son was a deadbeat, asshole? Days later, when he started leaving messages for her again, Juicy had lost interest and had allowed his messages to pile up in the voicemail system unheard. What was the point of listening to messages from a man that was there and not here?
She did little more then take her prenatal vitamins, take her two aspirins a day, and sleep. It was bed rest, but not because the doctor wanted her in bed, but because she could not do much more then sleep. Though she understood that it wasn't her pre-eclampsia that caused her to fall into bed for hours on end, it was depression. Her worries about why she should not accept money from a mentally ill person had all come to fruition...because they will flake out on you…because they will do to you what they did to Momma; stab you in your back…
When she wasn’t sleeping, Juicy lay in bed and reflected on things that she had tried hard not to think about. Mostly she thought about her mother and her disappointing existence. It made her sad to think that a person’s happiness could be determined by the thoughtlessness of one person. Yet, she understood, on a new level, just how easy it was to begin to hate someone that had betrayed you—and not just hate them, but everyone like them. But she was not going to turn her child into a replica of herself. Even though she was currently filled with hurt and betrayal she vowed that her child would not grow up hearing a list of her disappointments. She wasn’t sure if it was Troy’s intent to return and to be a part of her child’s life, but at the moment she was wasn’t even sure if she wanted him to return. She did know that she certainly had no intentions of ever opening herself up to him again.
Juicy created a new routine, which now consisted of eat, sleep, and doctor’s visit. Soon it was time to go back to the doctor. He had stopped acting scared of her and she had stopped acting mad at him and they now got along fairly well. He smiled at her with pleasure after reading her vitals. "Blood pressure is better. We'll do an ultrasound today. Then you can see your baby."
That should have made her happy. Instead Juicy felt tears in the back of her eyes. Why wasn’t someone here with her? Because everyone that mattered to her was dead or had just chosen to walk away. She took a deep breath and the doctor gave her a soft look. She was nodding. "Okay. Let's do this."
***
“Okay, Mom, this will be cold.” Juicy looked at the little Asian woman and blinked. Mom…Then she felt the cold gel on her stomach and she lurched slightly, catching her breath.
The woman gave her a practiced smile; one she had probably used a thousand times in her career. Juicy smiled back. At least she had made the effort. The woman held a wand and pressed it firmly to the mound of Juicy’s belly. She kept moving it, and watching the monitor. She then gave Juicy an apologetic look.
“It sometimes has a hard time picking up sound if the mother has a lot of fat layers.” Juicy ignored her comment and stared at the monitor. And then suddenly came a loud woosh woosh sound.
“Oh! That’s a loud baby you have there.” The nurse reached over and adjusted the volume.
“That’s my baby?”
“Yes, that’s the heartbeat.” The technician was staring at a screen and Juicy looked over at it too. The image of a baby could be seen. It lay curled into a ball with arms and legs crisscrossed over themselves.
Juicy’s mouth hung open as she stared. The technician rolled the wand over her belly, taking measurements and pictures. Juicy had seen ultra sounds before; of babies that looked like deep sea creatures. But this was her baby…
Tears streamed down the sides of her face, pooling on the paper cover until they formed little salty puddles beside both of her ears. She was both alarmed and horrified that she was crying in front of someone, yet there was nothing that she could do to stop her tears as she watched the little being sleeping comfortably in her belly.
“Do you want to know the sex, Mom?”
Juicy gave her a surprised look. She didn’t trust her voice. She knew that she was only one word from a full out crying jag so she just nodded; head bobbing up and down.
“You have a girl.”
She stared so long at the monitor; at her daughter…a daughter. The nurse finally turned off the machine and Juicy almost protested before she was handed several pictures, a bright smile on the technician’s pretty face as she handed them to her.
“Your daughter’s first baby pictures.” Juicy sat up, it wasn’t easy, and the petite woman used both hands to help pull her up into a sitting position. Embarrassed, Juicy quickly dried her eyes and left the office. She couldn’t wait to get to her car so that she could examine every line, every detail of her daughter.
CHAPTER 13
Troy hung up the phone, staring at it for a full five minutes before he pulled himself around. It had been nearly two weeks now and Juicy hadn’t answered the phone in days.
He knew that meant that she was pretty peeved. So he made sure that his messages listed every single thing that he did. He would ramble on until the voice mail shut off and the busy tone was all that he could hear.
He rubbed his tired eyes and lay across the single bed that had been his so many years before. It wasn’t even night yet, but the medication didn’t follow the same timeline that the rest of the world followed. When he got tired he slept and that could be even two hours after he’d risen for the day.
Troy’s eyes drooped and he was soon sleeping deeply and dreaming of the same thing; Juicy.
***
The day that Troy had left their apartment, he had seen the hurt in Juicy’s eyes, but all that he could think of is how piss poor of a father he would make. Troy knew the facts, and that fact is that a child of his would likely have the same disorders that he had.
His life had been hell because of his illness. And now he’d passed that fate on to someone else! This child was going to hate him. Hadn’t he hated his parents, just a little bit for having him? The hatred had been compounded by the fact that they’d given birth to two perfect children before him.
And even if the kid didn’t hate him…he would hate himself when he’d have to watch his own child struggling with the issues that he’d had to.
With anguish he had paced in the living room of the apartment as Juicy sat in the kitchen forlornly because he hadn’t been the man that she deserved; someone who could give her a healthy baby. Then it dawned on him. Even if he couldn’t make a child that would be free of mental illness, he knew that he could show a child how to live with it!
And that’s when he’d had known what he had to do. He had to stop being selfish, and fix the things that were wrong about him so that he could be the father that he needed to be. He’d told her something and had hurried out of the apartment and bounded down the stairs, sprinting toward town. In his mind he kept chanting, ‘I have to get right.’
It was the middle of the night. And though he knew that there wasn’t much that he could do, he couldn’t just do nothing. So he bought a train ticket and without so much as a backpack, he made plans to return home; his first home, Connecticut. His family had told him not to forget about them and he never had; speaking to his parent’s on a regular basis and Bob and Lorie once or twice over the last few months. And now he hoped that they would be able to help him complete a task that he had not wanted to do before; but for his child, he would.
Dad’s stark white hair stood up on his head as he opened the door at five am in the morning. He wore pajamas and a t-shirt covered with a hastily pulled on robe. Mom peeked behind him and Troy felt guilty when he saw that she had pulled on her own robe and it was inside out.
He’d considered getting a room at a hotel; it wasn’t the money that had stopped him; he just needed to be at home. He had to talk to them about this. And now, as he watched them, having obviously pulled themselves up out of their sleep, he knew that the decision had been selfish and that he should have at least waited until the crack of dawn before ringing the doorbell.
“Troy!” His Dad ushered him into the house.
“Is something wrong, son?” Mom looked worried and he knew that she would probably always be more worried than anything else where he was concerned.