Zandra
“Cute outfit,” the manager of Mynt said as he looked me up and down. “Nice legs. It’s good to see you don’t mind putting them on display.” Wearing a short black leather skirt with a white button-down top, I had tied my shirt in a knot in front to show off my belly button piercing. I was the epitome of hot nightclub waitresses everywhere.
“Yeah. I’ve been doing this waitress thing since I turned eighteen. I’ve pretty much got it down pat now.” I pulled the long braid I’d put my hair in over my shoulder, stroking it as I looked into Rob’s gray eyes. His pupils got big, telling me he liked what he saw.
By now, I was used to having my body raked over by men’s eyes, and it didn’t bother me to be the center of attention. As long as the scrutiny came with a paycheck, I could suck it up.
Rob trailed his long fingers along one of my shoulders. His dark hair was parted low on the left side. Some type of product made it shiny, helping him keep it slicked back. He wasn’t my type at all. He was the kind of guy most people would call a guido—maybe not to his face, though.
“And how many years have you been doing this now?” he asked.
“Eight years.” Placing my hand on my hip, I defied him to say something about my age. Though I was still young and as fit as any one of the younger waitresses, I knew a lot of managers liked to stick to the under-twenty-five crowd when it came to their waitresses.
“Twenty-six,” he mused as his eyes met mine. His lips pulled up to one side. “Your body might not give it away, but you can see it in your eyes, Zandy.”
“Well, it’s a good thing no one will be looking at my eyes, then, isn’t it?” Sashaying my ass, I walked away from him, earning a wolf-whistle. The sound made me smile. That whistle meant money, and money was all I cared about.
“Does that mean she’s got the job, Rob?” Taylor chimed in.
I turned around to look at him as he answered. “If she can start tonight, she does.”
“I can.” Hurrying back to them, I found myself grabbed up by Taylor, and the two of us jumped up and down in our sky-high heels. “Yes!”
Now I had a nice apartment with a bedroom all to myself and a job that Taylor promised would make me lots of money. More money than what I’d been making in Chicago.
On the drive back to the apartment, the two of us chatted away excitedly about being able to work together again. Taylor stopped at a light then screamed, “Yes! Together again! We’re gonna rock Charleston, Zandy!”
“We rocked Chicago,” I agreed. “I know we can rock this place too.”
Looking to my left, I thought I recognized a guy from high school. That had been so long ago, it seemed. He looked right at me, gave me a wink, and then Taylor took off so fast that I didn’t get the chance to even wink back or see if he recognized me.
I was pretty sure he hadn’t. I no longer looked like the bookish, shy girl I’d been back then. Nearly eleven years had passed since I’d been in town, since I’d been that person. I didn’t expect anyone to recognize me.
And I prayed that one man, in particular, wouldn’t. If he was even still in the around—which I highly doubted.
The blue streaks in my hair would offer me a bit of protection, should I happen to encounter someone from my old life here. This hair choice was something I never would’ve done when I was a teenager. And I wore a lot of makeup now, too. It was what waitresses did. I didn’t make the rules; I just followed them.
Revealing clothes, too much makeup, hair that stood out—I was dressing for the job I wanted. And I was pretty certain not one of the people I’d known back then would come to the club I’d be working at. Even if they did, no one would ever think the sexy woman who waited on them was the same mousy junior from high school who’d left town without saying a word to anyone.
“Did it piss you off when Rob said he could see your age in your eyes, Zandy?” Taylor asked me as she drove too fast down the street.
“No.” I pulled a pair of dark sunglasses out of my purse and put them on. “I can see it too. There aren’t many ladies in my age group who still do this sort of thing. Being twenty-six, many women my age have already hung up their heels. And have replaced their Mustangs with minivans, yuck!” We laughed uproariously at my little joke, which wasn’t too much of a joke at all.
Taylor zoomed around a corner, making us both lean to one side, laughing like hell all the way. “So why haven’t you settled down, Zandy? I mean, you haven’t even dated any guy seriously. What’s up with you?”
Where to start?
Pain. Anguish. Guilt. Along with a healthy side of resentment and regret.
I’d never told anyone about my unexpected pregnancy, or any of the life-altering events that followed. Maybe it was time I did. Maybe talking about it would help me begin to heal from it. If anyone could truly heal from a thing like that.
Even though I wasn’t sure how Taylor would take it, I decided to spill my guts to her. “Dating would mean giving someone a chance to get close to me and taking a chance of falling in love. And when two people fall in love, they eventually decide to procreate. And I’ve done that already. It ended badly. And I don’t want to do it again.”
“You had a miscarriage?” she asked as she took another hard left.
The Nissan Altima felt like it had tilted onto only two wheels, making me scream with a mix of terror and excitement. “No! Shit, girl. You’re a crazy driver!”
“So I’ve been told.” She laughed menacingly, making me smile. I loved living dangerously. Why not live that way? What did I have to live for anyway? “So, no miscarriage. Did you lose the baby after it was born?” I could hear the sympathy in her voice, mixed with caution. Taylor knew me well enough to know that revealing so much about myself wasn’t easy for me.
“Kind of.” I grabbed the dash as she made an abrupt stop at a stop sign that seemed to have crept up on her.
“Kind of?” She narrowed her pale blue eyes at me. Her tiny nose was pointy and turned up at the end. Taylor really did remind me of Tinkerbell. Only, her short blonde locks were pulled into spikes, and each one was dyed a different color on the ends. “How is that an appropriate answer, Zandy?”
“I had a baby. And my parents made me give him up for adoption,” I clarified my answer.
“Made you?” she asked, then hit the gas hard enough to make a jackrabbit take off.
Clutching the bar above my head, the one I called an “oh-shit bar,” I went on, “At barely sixteen I lost my V-card to the boy I’d had a crush on since I was about twelve. He had dirty blond hair, all-American good looks, and eventually, a killer body. The first hint of attention he gave me made me putty in his hands.”
Zipping up to the parking space in front of the apartment we shared, she stopped right next to my red Mustang. Her head swiveled to look at me. “So, you gave it up to this guy who you weren’t dating but you’d been crushing on for years, and you ended up preggo? On the first go?”
“Precisely.” Getting out of the car, we made our way to the front door.
The whole complex was made up of ground-floor apartments, another thing that made me like this place better than the place I’d been living for the last eight years. No stairs to climb and no one living overhead, making noise all the time. The apartment was perfect.
Taking a seat on the expensive leather sofa and loveseat, Taylor asked, “Your crush didn’t want to do the right thing by you, Zandy?”
Shaking my head, I said, “I never told him about it. I never told anyone about it. My mother was totally up in my personal business. She kept track of her periods on this calendar that she called the “menstruation keeper.” When I got my period when I was around thirteen, she began adding mine to it. She said she did it so I would know right when I was about to start so I’d never be unprepared.”
“So you’d put some tamps in your purse then, stock up on Midol,” she said with a knowing grin.
“Most of the time, yeah.” Chewing on my lip, I thought back to that time when my period hadn’t come. “Well, anyways, suddenly, one month, my period didn’t start.”
“And when it didn’t show up, what did you do?” Taylor asked with wide eyes. “I mean, I’ve never had a pregnancy scare at all. My mother trotted my ass down to the clinic right after my first period when I was fifteen. She made me start getting the shot as soon as I could, and I’ve been on it ever since.”
“I tried to hide the fact that it hadn’t started.” I remembered how hysterical I felt when I was late. “I lied to my mother about having it, telling her it was right on schedule. Only I didn’t think about one important thing.”
Nodding, she said, “You forgot to plant evidence, didn’t you?”
“Yep.” My chest rose and fell with a heavy sigh.
She shook her head sadly. “Rookie mistake, Zandy.”
Shrugging my shoulders, I said, “I was a rookie. And I wasn’t ready to handle anything, never mind what would happen when my parents found out. I figured I’d have at least a few months to figure something out and eventually talk to the guy about it. I had no idea if he wanted anything to do with me after we’d slept together. We didn’t do a hell of a lot of talking before we got naked together.”
“He must’ve been so hot,” she mused. “’Cause you’re a really gorgeous girl, Zandy. You could have your pick of anyone.”
“I was plain back then, and my parents were really strict. I wasn’t allowed to wear any makeup at all. Everyone else was, but not me. And my mom cut my hair.” I cringed, remembering the horror that was my hair. “I had these straight, very short bags. The rest of my hair was one length that went down to the middle of my back. My clothes were all purchased by my mother, too. Needless to say, they would have looked very appropriate on a teenager in, say, 1950.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve got any pictures,” she said with a wry smile.
I threw a little pillow at her, smacking her in the face. “No, you jackass.”
“Thought as much.” She tossed the pillow back at me, and I caught it. “So, what happened next?”
“Mom took me to see our doctor. He told her I was pregnant. I was only a couple weeks along and already my parents were making decisions about the little baby I carried.” The tears sprang up on cue as his tiny face made a brief appearance in my head. No matter how many years passed, I knew without a doubt that I’d never forget the sight of his perfect little face.
Taylor got up and came to sit next to me. Her arm around my shoulders was meant to comfort, but it didn’t help at all. There was just no way to comfort someone who’d had their child taken away. “They made you give it up?”
Nodding my head, I let the tears flow freely. “We left that night to go stay with relatives in Chicago. Mom and Dad took me out of school. I had to finish high school online. Dad had a cell phone, but other than that we had no other phone because they didn’t want me to be able to talk to any of my friends—the few that I even had. When I was on the computer doing schoolwork, my parents would watch me, making sure I didn’t get a chance to contact anyone. They never wanted anyone to know the shame of what I’d done.”
“And the father of the baby never knew?” she asked as she patted my shoulder, trying to reassure me that everything would be okay. It wouldn’t ever be okay. I’d already accepted that fact.
“He doesn’t know a thing.” I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, seeing black smudges from my makeup. “He never will. The adoption agency arranged a closed adoption. My parents and I were never given the names of the people who adopted him. And the guy’s name wasn’t on anything—I never even told my parents his name. That was the one thing I refused to do. I didn’t want them saying anything to him or his family about it. It was all my fault, anyway. I was the stupid girl who, when he asked, told him he didn’t have to use a condom.”
“Wow.” Taylor sat back, looking stunned. “That was dumb.”
Nodding, I had to agree. “Yeah, it was.”
“All that happened a long time ago, Zandy. Why let it keep you from getting close to anyone now? Or let it stop you from having more kids when you want them?”
I rubbed my fingers over the black smudges on the back of my hand, trying to make them go away. “It wouldn’t be fair to that little boy if I had more kids. I gave him away. How could I ever expect him to understand that I had to give him up and then go on and keep any other kids? Like I just replaced him like he was nothing.”
“I doubt he’ll ever know you, Zandy.” She took me by the chin to make me look at her. “He will never know if you get married someday and have kids. Stop thinking that way.”
“I just … I can’t do.” I shook my head. “And there’s no way I could ever let a man into my heart anyway, Taylor. There’s an enormous hole there, where my little boy is supposed to be. My heart can’t hold a damn thing in it. I can’t keep anyone in my heart for long before they just leak out.”
“Therapy,” came her answer. “You need some help, honey. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”
Her calling me honey just made me mad. I got up and went to the kitchen, rubbing at my eyes one last time, making sure all the tears were gone. “I’m making celebratory margaritas. I’ve got a new job, a slamming apartment, and I get to work with you again. Life has never been sweeter.”
Taylor got up to follow me. I could feel her eyes staring a hole through me. “Zandra, seriously, you need to deal with this. It’s a big deal. I’m not even smart, and I know it’s a big deal.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “And it always will be. Whether I talk to a shrink or not, I will never get to see my son. I will never know if he’s okay or not. I will never, ever feel him in my arms. Mostly, I will never forgive my parents for what they made me do. Now, let’s get wasted, take a nap, and then get up and get ready to go to work tonight.”
It sounded like a solid plan at the time.