When Grace opened the office at eight the next morning, the window was open and the little girl was gone, along with the cigar box of petty cash from the pried-open top drawer.
“Burt!” she screamed.
• • • •
KATRINA STIRRED HER coffee around and around, sitting across from Zelda at the rear of the empty veggie burger cafe a few blocks from their office. “What’re you going to do?”
“I asked myself that a million times in the past couple days. Like I have lots of choices?”
Katrina leaned forward. “You do.”
“Wish I saw them. Put up with the Parents. Let them take it. Find my life again.”
“You won’t. You’re never the same.” She waited until the waitress refilled their coffee before continuing, “You think it’s over but it’s not. The baby’s always inside. You’re always reminded. You see families with children and you remember. All the bullshit they teach, finding your inner mother, it doesn’t last. I hated the girls they gave me as pretend children.”
“I wonder if we had the same ones? Pigtails.”
Katrina laughed. “They all have pigtails. No. You’re forever changed, Zelda. That’s why I’m a bitch.”
Zelda figured a little job security demanded she protest, even half-assed. “Who isn’t?”
Katrina shifted her chair closer. “I took that other choice.”
She felt a little queasy, which kept her big mouth shut for once.
“I never carried to term, Zelda. I would’ve killed myself. I was all alone, no family, the guy went screaming when I told him. I’d just started out my career and you know, for all the talk about no discrimination against unwed mothers, it’s there. The looks, shame, what’s wrong with you, can’t you do your part, don’t you know we’re surrounded.” Katrina shook her head. “A friend of mine knew a doctor who knew a doctor. I went in the afternoon, called in sick the next day, and was fine.”
Zelda really wished she had some pie. Any flavor. “They just…”
“Yes. As easy as getting pregnant without the fun.”
She’d only had fun with half of them. Three actually. What percentage was three sevenths? She thought of Diego, blinking back tears. “How’d you explain?”
Katrina pursed her lips. “An accident. It’s easier than you think. They really don’t want to prosecute women. It’s a big bluff.”
Zelda thought of all the street posters of pregnant women surrounded by adoring men and women. “But it’s murder. Treason.”
“And making you carry a baby which they’re taking away is cruelty, torture. If Grandma loves us, why make us suffer? It’s not like we used birth control. That would be treason. But we got pregnant. We let that happen and then they take away our child because we don’t have a partner. There are no words for that.”
Katrina edged closer; they could’ve been two lovers stealing a moment. “You say you fell. Then they file a report. You’re watched for a while, for what, I don’t know. Maybe that you’re going to convince other women maybe.”
“Aren’t you doing that now?” Zelda asked quietly.
“No,” Katrina touched her hand. “I’m helping a friend.”
• • • •
MAISE CHU KEPT sighing as she stuck needles into his shoulder and back. Puppy tried relaxing, but he was scared and couldn’t stop tapping his toes and drumming his fingers; finally she squished the back of his neck into the examining table. He lay still for a moment, concentrating on the flickering candles, but he got a headache. He tried calling out to Frecklie in the waiting room, but great-grandma’s wrinkled steel fingers crushed his lips together. Silence was an enemy because it allowed him to think.
The numbness in his right fingers provided brief elation from the pricking pricking pricking until he realized he hadn’t experienced numbness before and this time it wasn’t going away.
He wiggled his fingers, swimming away from the panic. “I can’t feel. Numb.”
Maise smiled the blissfulness of someone who knows better.
“Frecklie,” he shouted and the boy popped his head in the doorway, alarmed. “I can’t feel my fingers.”
Frecklie pointed to Puppy’s fingers and his great-grandmother shrugged and jabbed another needle into his lower back, chattering away with a wistful air.
“What’d she say?”
“I don’t speak Chinese.”
“Does she gesture?”
The teen sighed helplessly. “She’s really old. I think before there was gesturing and shorthand. Or maybe language.”
Puppy laid his forehead on the examining table. Now his entire right arm went numb, which he explained to Frecklie in a calmly hysterical tone, which the boy related to Maise by dropping his arm lifelessly.
The old woman nodded sagely and left the room.
Frecklie held his hand until she returned and pulled out the needles. Feeling returned to his arm, buoying his spirits. Puppy spun his right arm in an arc; no pain. Wondrous wide movement. Curveball, sliders, sinking fast ball, bring it on.
“Thank you, Great-Grandma.” Frecklie picked up on his relief. Puppy also bowed.
Great-Grandma made a sad face and shook her head.
“What’s wrong with her?” Puppy asked him.
“I don’t know.” Frecklie held his palms up questioningly.
Great-Grandma stuck her thumb down.
“Is this some Chinese shorthand?” Puppy asked.
“I told you I don’t speak Chinese.”
“She’s not talking, Frecklie.”
Puppy took Maise’s gnarled hands. “Ma’am, is my shoulder okay?”
Maise touched his shoulder and stuck her thumb down again, pursing her lips sadly.
“I think that’s a no,” Frecklie said.
“Oh, I didn’t pick up on that.”
Puppy mimed throwing, still no pain, and gave a thumb’s up, grinning as if his sheer hopeful joy would make everything better. Maise twisted his thumb downward, eyes glistening. She kept shaking her head over and over.
Just to make sure they understood, Maise also twisted Frecklie’s thumb downward.
• • • •
DALE NUDGED HIM with her yellow painted big toe.
“Are you going to read all night?”
“Just until we have sex again.” Frecklie turned the page of the Hall of Fame book.
“So you’re just screwing me in between reading the baseball book?”
Frecklie nodded, violating rule number one of Loving Dale: Never Ignore Her. Dale jabbed her sharp
