As I look over at her, she’s still wearing my sweater even though it’s like a dress but she folds her arms over her chest. “I mean, five,” I joke with her, and she rolls her eyes.
“Sorry,” she says. “Five, you have five cars.” She shakes her head. “You see, right?”
I look in the rearview mirror and see that Dylan is slowly losing the battle to stay awake. “I’m not sure what you’re asking me right now.”
“I’m saying that we are literally night and day,” she says, but I interrupt her.
“We are two people who met and like each other. What does it matter how many cars I have?”
“You having all those cars is not the issue,” she says.
“So why are we still talking about this?” I wink at her. “If I had zero cars, would you like me more?”
“Well, no,” she says, and I laugh.
“That’s a step in the right direction.” I glance over at her, and she looks confused. “You admitted you like me.”
“That’s what you got from that?” she asks, then lowers her voice and checks to see that Dylan is now sleeping with his head to the side. “Out of everything I said, that is what you focus on?”
“Yup,” I say. When I hear her huff, I reach over and take her hand in mine. “Shh, you’ll wake him,” I say as I link my fingers with hers. I take in that she let me, and I also take in that she holds my hand back while she just looks outside for the rest of the drive.
When we pull up to her apartment complex, she shows me where to go, and I park in her parking spot. “You grab the food. I’m going to grab Dylan,” I say before she gets out. It looks like she is going to argue with me, but she doesn’t. She gets the food, and I slowly unbuckle Dylan and carry him in, following her. “He’s out cold.”
She opens the door and walks in and puts the bag of food on the table and then rushes into the bedroom. The house is literally a sauna. “I’m going to open the windows and get a breeze going,” she says, opening the windows, and I notice there is no breeze even when she does that.
I lay him on the bed, and he curls into the fetal position, but I take off his shoes and socks. “Will he be okay?” I ask, and she nods her head and takes off my sweater that she is wearing.
“Yeah, he’ll probably be out until tomorrow,” she whispers, and I walk out of the room, and she follows me.
“Do you want something to drink?” she asks me, and I nod my head. She goes to the fridge and opens the freezer to get some ice cubes out.
I turn to sit on the futon and wait for her. She walks back into the room holding two glasses and hands one to me. “Here you are.”
“Thank you,” I say and take a sip and then wait for her to sit down. “Tonight was fun.” I start the conversation, and I watch her as I talk. “I don’t know what the deal is with your parents or your siblings, and I didn’t want to ask about them in front of Dylan, but I want to know everything.”
“There really isn’t much to say,” she says, taking a gulp of water and then looking down at the glass that is already forming condensation on the outside. “My parents were …” she says and then corrects herself. “They are religious people, and they didn’t like the fact that their only daughter got knocked up at seventeen.” My heart sinks for her. “So when I told them I was pregnant, they gave me two options. One, give the baby up for adoption, which I was never going to do, or two, move out.”
“But …” I start to say, but when she shakes her head, I want to pull her to me.
“I refused to give him away. I wasn’t even two months pregnant, and I loved him with everything I had,” she says softly. “So I packed my stuff and moved in with Andrew and his family. His parents were not much more understanding, but he was eighteen. They weren’t going to have their grandson living on the street, so they took me in. He was the star quarterback, and his name was on everyone’s lips as the next big thing. He got a scholarship, and I followed him here. The only way for us to have housing was for us to be married, so one day, we went to city hall and made it official. It was my happy ending,” she says, and her eyes then look down.
“But then I gave birth to Dylan, and he started to spend more and more time away from home. He would complain that he couldn’t focus with Dylan crying all the time. I was with a newborn who had colic and only slept two hours a night. A day would turn two and then close to the end, he would be gone for a whole week. I just didn’t get it. Dylan was such a beautiful baby, and every single time he smiled, it just made me love him more.” She smiles now, and I notice every time she talks abut him, there is this look she gets in her eyes. The look that I see every single time I look in my mother’s eyes or my father’s.
“I just tried to be understanding. He had all this stress on him, so the least I could do was take care of Dylan. When he was home, he was angry and stressed. He used to get pissed off that there were too many toys around, and he was constantly stepping on them.” She wipes away a tear. “Of course I would go to some games, but even then, I felt like I was intruding in his life. He had this whole other life without us in it. I suspected that he wasn’t faithful to me, and when I found out the first time, he promised me it was a mistake. Promised me it wouldn’t happen again. I knew it was stupid to believe him. Maybe that was my clue to get out, but I wanted Dylan to have a family. I wanted him to have a mother and father together. But then it came knocking on my door again at two in the morning looking for him. It was the day before Dylan turned two years old. I had these little gifts wrapped for him when he got up, and Andrew got so pissed when I asked who she was that he threw one of them at the wall, smashing the gift.” She takes a deep breath, and I want to go to her and hold her while she tells this story. I want to give her the strength from inside me.
“Junior year, he got sacked so hard he tore his ACL.” I look down at my own hands that are now folded into fists, the rage coming out of me, and right then, I think about when I was drafted first overall. It was a dream come true. “Well, he was put on painkillers after his surgery, and he somehow got addicted,” she says softly and now wipes another tear off her cheek. “You have to know that I had no idea. Not even one that he was so addicted.” She looks at me, and I want her to stop telling me all this.
“It was not your fault,” I say. My hand goes to her cheek, and my thumb catches the tear that escapes her eyes.
“When I found out he was addicted, I went to his parents,” she says. Her voice makes my stomach start to burn, and my heart speeds up faster and faster, and my neck suddenly becomes hotter. “They actually blamed me.” She laughs bitterly, but it comes out more like a sob. “Said I pushed him in that direction, and that if it wasn’t for me and Dylan, he would be okay. That having a child put extra strain on him.” The sobs rip out of her, and I pull her to me. She cries in my chest, her tears soaking straight through my shirt. “I never once put pressure on him.”
“It was not your fault,” I say, hugging her, and I kiss her head.
“When I found out that he had wasted all his scholarship money, I …” She gets up now and starts to pace in front of me. “I was so pissed and angry, and to top it all off, we got kicked out of the house.” I sit here now and rage tears through my body, making my legs start to move up and down. “He promised me everything would be okay. We moved into a one-bedroom studio that was horrible. There were roaches everywhere, and I was afraid that I’d wake up, and they’d be all over Dylan. He didn’t pay rent, and one day I caught him fucking the landlady on our couch. I got tested right after that, and I never touched him again.”