“Did you get a new one?” she asked him, getting in her car.
Sam shook his head and yawned. He’d have to drop out of school and get a second job to pay child support anyway. Besides, the type of work he qualified for rarely required personal computing.
“Come by tomorrow,” she said, pulling him in for a hug. Her expression was unreadable.
At two thirty the next afternoon Sam took the bus over to Lorraine’s apartment, plugging in the pass code he knew by heart. When the gate rumbled open, he was notably relieved that not everything in the world had gone berserk.
She met him at the door, no makeup, hair up in a towel, barefoot in a pink-and-blue floral housedress. It was a punch in the gut. It was his private Lorraine. His favorite Lorraine. The Lorraine she was when it was just the two of them.
“You should’ve buzzed me,” she remarked irritably. She made him wait by the door, closing it partway so he couldn’t see in, and reappeared with a silver MacBook Air and a tangled power cord.
“Here,” she said, handing it over. The slender device struck Sam as strangely vulnerable. More expensive and aerodynamic than any computer he’d ever owned. Sam wondered if there was anything on it that he wasn’t supposed to see. Or better yet, something she’d deliberately left him to find.
“It’s wiped,” she said. “It’s got Final Cut Pro though. Photoshop, too, if you need that.”
This wasn’t what he’d expected. Not that he’d thought they’d leap back into bed if he came over, but this felt too close to charity. The worst part was that he wasn’t in a position to refuse it.
“It’ll only be for a few weeks,” he mumbled.
“I upgraded,” she said. “Keep it as long as you want.”
That was Lorraine’s other secret side. While she was all too happy to cadge free drinks off his dirtbag friends and split cheap slices of pizza, most of the time it was an act. Lorraine’s lifestyle was heavily subsidized by her parents. She moved out of Twombly after freshman year and her parents continued to pay her rent even when she landed a job. Her mother bought all of Lorraine’s clothes from Neiman Marcus with the help of a personal shopper. The first time he’d spent the night and took a shower at her house, Sam spotted the price sticker left on her shampoo—$38. He’d put it back and used soap on his head.
Keeping up while they were dating was out of the question, and Sam had no idea what was expected from him as the father of her child. Not only was there nowhere to put a crib in his room, but he didn’t even have a car. And the prospect of walking six miles each way with a Babybj?rn strapped to his chest made his testicles want to retreat into his body.
After he left Lorraine’s he walked home through Sixth Street to see if anyone was hiring. Calling his old friend Gunner about a barback gig would have been easy enough, but Sam didn’t want to explain his absence or his sudden need for cash.
Sweat slid down the back of Sam’s denim-clad legs. He would’ve loved to wear basketball shorts and flip-flops, resembling every carefree numbskull roaming the streets with status headphones, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Shrimping man-toes were an insult to nature.
Sam was tired. Lorraine’s laptop hit the base of his spine with every footfall.
The computer probably cost more than his life. Which made a kind of sense since it was decisively more capable than he’d ever been. The most money he’d ever made was eleven dollars an hour. He tried to enjoy the afternoon air and the meditative qualities of walking and failed.
Instead he considered the cost of diapers.
One time Liar sent him to the store to buy tampons and he was stunned by how expensive they were. Diapers had to cost about the same. Except that a period was a week a month, so you could space them out, but a baby needed diapers pretty much constantly for years.
Christ, he had to relax. Sam let his mind drift and panned out to orient himself on Planet Earth and reassure his brain that things were going to be fine.
His brain had other ideas.
Okay, so if Lorraine was pregnant, it could also mean . . .
SHE COULD HAVE HERPES. WHICH MEANS THAT EVEN IF SHE’S NOT PREGNANT SAM COULD STILL HAVE HERPES BECAUSE PAUL DEFINITELY HAD HERPES.
Thanks, brain.
He walked past the old Marriott, where his mom used to work. It consistently struck him as funny that his mother spent any time in the hospitality business. Brandi Rose Sidelow-Lange was a piece of work. She had what in the old days they’d called moxie. Sam inherited his smart mouth from his mother, and like a snake eating its own tail, it only served to drive her crazy.
Once upon a time, though Sam never knew it, Brandi Rose had been a different person. Infinitely less pissed off. This was evidenced by a photo in the living room. The frame was blue and white with a sunflower on the bottom corner and featured his mom at sixteen, grinning with a Texas Elite Princess Pageant sash draped over her shoulder. Her hair a shiny brown and wearing a knee-length navy dress, Brandi Rose waved. It was a beautiful photo made more so by how happy his mother appeared. Mostly, though, it was displayed in the front room as a trap. Anyone who mentioned it would get the same bitter rejoinder.
“Well, that sash ain’t first place,” she’d point out, ice cubes clinking in her Long Island Iced Tea. “Bitsy Sinclair won. Her daddy, Buck, owned nine car dealerships from here to El Paso.”
According to Brandi Rose, rich people got everything.
“Second place is just about as good as first loser,” she’d continue. “I only did it for the state scholarship anyway. Fat lot of good that did me.” Clink. Clink.
His mother’s response to Sam’s happy addition would be more of the same. Tirades about how shit rolled downhill and how she had to be the one to take care of everything. The accusations would then turn to his father, which led right back to her dissatisfaction with her son. The rejection stung on all counts. Sam was a carbon copy of his father. Though despite the evolutionary wisdom that babies resemble their dads so they’d stick around, Caden Becker was immune to the charms of his tiny doppelg?nger.
As much as it broke his heart, Sam knew his old man was a loser. Granted, he was handsome, tall, dark, with a gleam of wicked about the eyes and Sam had inherited his father’s ease around strangers and his rangy bearing, but that’s where he wanted the similarities to end.
The last time Sam saw his dad, the elder Becker was stumbling right in front of Tequila Six, looking alarmingly well preserved for his lifetime of hard partying. Rumor had it that he and the old bass player of his band had gotten an apartment in the rundown town houses off Mo-Pac favored by Austin’s newly divorced bachelors, but to Sam his father looked homeless. He was wearing a torn ThunderCloud Subs sweatshirt and appeared to be muttering at a couple of sorority girls, who swerved from him without interrupting the flow of their conversation. Sam walked briskly in the opposite direction. He hadn’t considered the inevitability of running into his old man if he got a second job at a bar. Sam knew he wouldn’t deny his father money if he asked for a loan he had no intention of paying back. If anything, Sam figured his dad was a step up from his mom, who stole it.