I set the burger on the trailer’s little stove top. I rest my hand on her knee, wanting to do more but not sure what she wants me to do.
“How are you feeling?” I ask.
Emily looks at me, her face long, and says, “Scared.”
“Don’t be. I’ll take good care of you.”
“I think I need to leave the carnival.”
“I think we need to leave it. But not before the season finishes. If we screw the carnival, there ain’t no way Papa Smurf would welcome us back. Besides, that gives us a month to figure out what the fuck we’re doing.”
Wind of Change (Emily)
It’s the end of October, and we left the carnival last weekend at a small town in the northwest corner of Mississippi. We gave Papa Smurf back the trailer, and headed straight over the Tennessee border to Memphis. We’re just over the border anyway, and Steel wanted to take me to Graceland.
They’re heading back south for a couple more dates in Louisiana, and Papa Smurf said he didn’t mind us leaving at all, given the circumstances.
Now we’ve been here three nights, and we’re sitting on the bed in our cheap motel figuring out our next move.
I figure I’m over two months now, and I still haven’t seen a doctor. Papa Smurf paid decent money, but he certainly didn’t provide any insurance benefits.
“Where do you want to live?” Steel asks.
We’d put our heads in the sand and avoided this question for the past month. Or maybe we’re each just trying to figure things out in our own heads.
“As far as I’m concerned, we should go where you can get a job you want,” I say.
“Well as far as I’m concerned, we should go where is best for you and the baby. You don’t need to worry about me finding work. I don’t want you to be somewhere all alone during the day. What if something happened?”
This is new, he’s never raised that point before.
“What are you saying? All my family is around Colmar. We don’t want to go there, trust me.”
“Not there, but somewhere not too far away. Close enough where you friends or your mom or someone could come help you out or come in an emergency.”
“My mom?”
I haven’t even told my mom yet. I’ve been avoiding it, but maybe it’s time to tell her, regardless if we move back to North Carolina or not.
“Yes, my baby’s grandmother.”
“But she was so rude to you.”
“She can treat me however she wants, all I care about it how she treats my child, and you.”
“But…”
Steel interrupts me, and says, “Family is important to me. I never had one, and I’ve been thinking a lot about it. I want the baby to know what I never did. I never knew anything my father. My mother ran away to Niagara Falls when she was pregnant, so I never met my grandparents. Hell, I don’t even know if I had any aunts or uncles. I don’t want that for my child.”
His words break my heart. I move close to Steel, and sit alongside him, pressing my body into him. He’s never told me any of this before, no matter how much I’ve tried to get him to open up about his past.
“You didn’t know your family?” I say, my voice low.
He doesn’t say anything.
“Why did your mother run away?”
“She never told me.”
I don’t know how else to ask this, I take a deep breath and blurt, “Is she still alive?”
“Don’t know. Don’t fucking care, either.”
“Don’t you want the baby to know her? After what you just said about family and all.”
“It’s different.”
“How? You ran away from your mom, I ran away from my parents.”
“I didn’t run away from her, I ran from my foster parents.”
“Oh, sorry, of course.” I feel like an idiot. I knew that, it just came out. His mother mustn’t have been a part of his life if he lived with foster parents.
“Did you live with your foster parents long?”
“Long enough to know I wanted out of there. Couple months.”
“I don’t want to go back to my parents.”
“We wouldn’t. We can live in Woburn or somewhere like that. We’d have our own place. That’s not going back to them.”
“But they were jerks.”
“You haven’t even spoken to them in over six months. How do you know what they’d be like now? They might’ve gotten over everything and are waiting for you to call.”
“Why are you defending them when they were so rude to you?”
“Because they might be a bit crazy, but they ain’t bad people.”
“What are you talking about?”