Chapter Three
Whoever came up with the idea of group projects, may he die a slow and torturous death.
It was hard enough balancing two jobs with my classes, and now the one night I wasn’t waiting tables, I had to spend with five of my “peers”. Never mind that I was older than all of them, albeit by only a few years. Never mind that their spoiled rich-kid attitudes rubbed me wrong. Never mind they couldn’t remember my name: one called me Todd, the other called me Hey you—what was so hard about Trey?
The cold, hard truth was my grade now depended on five fuckwits. I wasn’t about to let them ruin my GPA.
On some level I’d known it was a mistake, bringing them to Emilio’s. I’d managed to talk them out of the first place they named—a tapas and wine bar that would have cost a fortune and left me hungry. The food at Emilio’s was good and inexpensive, and the Fierros had always treated my Gram and me like family. The fact that the fuckwits had now apparently pissed off that family was like a rotten cherry on top of an already bad day. I could still feel Vinnie’s piercing gaze on the back of my head.
I’d been trying to corral the rest of them into actually working for half an hour, to no avail. The two girls were too busy talking about the latest episode of American Idol, and the guys were too busy trying to impress the girls. I was about to ask for at least the third time if any of them had started their parts of the project yet, but one of the girls—Kat—cut me off.
“Did you guys register for fall semester yet?”
“I did,” Ken said. “I got it down perfect. Nothing before noon, and no classes on Fridays.”
“I don’t mind morning classes,” Kat replied. “It’s the evening labs I hate. Don’t they know we have lives?”
“I’m only taking twelve credits.” Misty smiled at us as if she was giving us the answer to the meaning of life. “Any more than that is just too hard.”
“Twelve is a lot if you have to work full-time too,” I said, trying to be sympathetic.
She blinked at me, wrinkling her nose in confusion. She flicked her earring with a perfectly manicured nail, and I realized the absurdity of my assumption. She didn’t work. Certainly she didn’t work full-time.
“I registered for twenty-five credits.” That was Aiden. He had the role of Entitled Youth down pat.
“Twenty-five?” I asked. “How can you do so much?”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m not going to keep them all. I sent the confirmation off to my dad. Now I just have to wait for the check. After I cash it, I’ll drop most of them.”
“Aiden, that’s awful!” Kat laughed.
He shrugged. “As long as I keep one class, I’m good. I’ll tell him I failed out, or that they interfered with my work schedule.”
I looked down at my lap to hide my expression. It wouldn’t do to have them see how much I hated them. How much I resented them all, cashing their daddies’ checks, living in apartments they didn’t have to pay for, not even bothering to appreciate what they had. I worked over fifty hours most weeks. Thirty-four at the restaurant, the most they’d give me, because even one more would require them to give me benefits, and they were too cheap for that. Thirty-four hours of screaming chefs and bitchy patrons, all for the lousy tips that would pay the bills and Gram’s second mortgage. Then I worked another fifteen hours at the coffee shop, rising at 4:40 so I could be there when they opened at 5:00, burning my hands on steamed milk and skinny half-cafs just so I could afford one class a semester. If I was lucky, I’d earn my degree in another year and a half. That was if my mother didn’t go on another spending binge or Gram didn’t break her hip. If there were no household problems, like the broken pipe that flooded our small basement and stole my class from me three semesters ago.
They paused in their exchange of Tales of Beating the System, and I did my best to reroute them back to the task at hand. For better or for worse, forty-five minutes later we stopped working—Aiden was bored, Kat didn’t have enough money in her meter and Misty had a headache. Of course they all promised to get their part done the very next day, but I’d learned long ago exactly how much a promise meant: absolutely fucking nothing.
It was just as well that we wrapped things up though because I wanted to check in with Gram before I headed off to The Rose for my shift. I owed her that, and a whole lot more.
My dad died shortly after my second birthday. He was shot during what should have been a routine traffic stop. I didn’t even have a memory of him to console me. So many times, I’d pored over the photos of us at our old house in Oak Park, my dad pushing me on a baby swing, or laughing while I stood wearing his badge, his police cap hanging down over my eyes. I’d tried to convince myself that I remembered him, but I was old enough now to admit the truth. He was nothing more than a shadow in my mind where happiness should have been.
Two years after his death, we’d come to live with his parents. I hadn’t understood why. Back then, I’d loved Gram’s narrow brownstone on Loomis: my grandfather had still been alive, and I’d come home from school to see him fussing with our tiny spec of yard in an eternal battle with the shade trees before his shift at the plant, or touching up the paint on the rail. The neighborhood had been full of kids, many of them Fierros, and our house was warm with laughter and love.
Now our section of the block was more than a little rundown, and Gram’s brownstone wasn’t helping anything. Even if any of us had time to touch up the paint on the railing, we wouldn’t waste money on it. The steps had finally become so rickety we’d had to deal with them, but that had amounted to me clumsily nailing thicker boards over the top of the broken ones and hoping no inspector came by to tell me I was breaking city code. The yard was a weedy, barren mess. The neighborhood mostly housed college students. There were no packs of kids running the streets. No kickball games. No Kick the Can. And as for our house—well, I loved my Gram and my mom, but the laughter had stopped long ago.
“Gram,” I called when I came in the front door. “I’m home. Did you need me to go to the store for anything before I go to work?”
It wasn’t Gram who answered though. It was my mom’s voice that drifted in from the kitchen.
“I already went to the store. I’m making your favorite: goulash.”
Goulash hadn’t been my favorite since I’d hit puberty and learned to distinguish Chef Boyardee from dog food. “I won’t be here for dinner. I have to work tonight.”
My mom came out of the kitchen with her paring knife still clutched in her right hand. She wore jeans and T-shirt, and she even had on a bit of makeup. She looked better than she had in a long time, though she did have a needy look about her that set off the old alarm bells. “But, honey, I was all set to make you dinner then take you to a movie.”
Why exactly she’d decided out of the blue to try to turn the evening into a mother/son date was anyone’s guess. “I can’t. Not tonight.”
“But, Trey—”
“I have to work, Ma. What do you want me to do? Call in sick?”
Even suggesting such a thing was a mistake. “You could. Then we could go—”
“I was kidding.”
Her smile disappeared. Her shoulders drooped. She sighed, a big dramatic gesture full of self-pity, because although it was me working two jobs while trying to go to school, in her mind she was the one who was really being inconvenienced. “I get so lonely. You’re never here, and Gram isn’t much company. I don’t know anybody—”
“We’ve lived here for more than twenty years. You know everybody.”
“But I don’t have any friends.”
We’d been over this, more times than I could count. They say misery loves company, but the truth is, misery gets lonely pretty damn fast. “Mom, I don’t have time for this right now.”
“You never have time. You work too hard. You should be home—”
I turned away, heading up the stairs to change into my work clothes. What could I say to her? Yes, I was young. Yes, life was unfair. I would have loved to be one of the college boys who could show up to a few classes and spend the rest of my time getting high. But the fact of the matter was, somebody had to pay the mortgage.
It wasn’t going to be Mom.
“Don’t wait up,” I said. I didn’t bother to acknowledge the disappointment on her face. God knew she’d never bothered to acknowledge mine.