“Nah, you don’t need to do all that,” he protested.
But I was already shuffling out the door.
I headed down the corridor dragging my IV pole behind me. My titties were leaking milk all over the front of my hospital gown and my hair was standing up like I’d just put my finger in an electric socket.
Derrick was two steps behind me when I turned the corner to the elevators, so I saw the girl standing in the hallway before he did. She was leaning up against the wall dressed in a matching denim skirt-and-jacket set decorated with pink and purple rhinestones. When Derrick came around the corner behind me, she gave him a little wave, smiling at him like I wasn’t even there.
Maybe it was the baby hormones messing with me, but seeing that girl looking so put together when I felt so busted was like a donkey kick to the stomach. I turned to face Derrick. “Who the hell is that?”
“Don’t start trippin’.”
“Who is she?”
He paused. “That’s Celeste.”
I looked from Derrick to Celeste. She looked at me and back at him.
“We just friends,” Derrick said. “That’s it.” By the expression on her face, this was news to Celeste. I didn’t believe him, either.
Suddenly I could feel hot tears flooding my eyeballs, but there was no way I was gonna let Derrick see me cry. “Fuck you,” I said. I grabbed my IV pole and headed back to my room. “You nothing but a dirty dog.”
I bawled like a baby that night. I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid, caught up in a fantasy of all the nice things I wanted for my baby when really I didn’t have shit. In a few days I’d be taking Ashley home to Mama’s nasty efficiency with the dirty cast-off sofas, no hot water, and the foam mattress on the floor. I didn’t have diapers or formula, blankets or clothes. I didn’t have little girl dresses or pink bows for her hair. I didn’t have a single baby bottle or wipes or a clean washcloth. I didn’t even have Derrick.
That’s when it really hit me. I was gonna have to figure this shit out all by myself.
Early the next morning, before the sun came out, I got to work. I snuck out of my hospital bed and made my way down the hallway to the metal supply rack I’d noticed sitting beside the nurses’ station. When I was sure nobody was looking, I grabbed a stack of diapers and five baby T-shirts and shoved them under my gown. Back in my room, I hid them in my covers. Then I went back for more.
It turns out nurses are almost as easy to steal from as drunks. They get distracted by every little thing—some juicy gossip, a doctor bossing them around, a patient hemorrhaging down the hall—that’s when I’d make my move. I swiped stuff out of an unlocked supply closet, from the counter at the nurses’ station, and from the carts the nurses wheeled into my room When they discharged me from the hospital, I left with two trash bags stuffed with dozens of bottles of pre-made Enfamil, baby clothes, and diapers. I thought I’d be okay for a while. But Ashley was only three weeks old when the diapers ran out.
“What am I supposed to put the baby in?” I asked Mama, holding up my half-naked daughter. “The Pampers is all finished.”
“Girl, use your damn head,” Mama said. She took Ashley from my arms and showed me how to use an old T-shirt for a diaper, pinning it closed with a safety pin. “See? Granma’s baby is good as new.”
Mama got thirty-four dollars a month extra on her welfare for having a new baby in the house. She gave it to me to buy baby formula. But the money was never enough. When Ashley was hungry and wouldn’t stop crying, I went to the Vine City corner store and slipped two containers of Enfamil down the front of my shirt. When the Enfamil was finished, I gave Ashley watered-down Carnation Evaporated Milk. When I ran out of that, Mama said, “The baby’s old enough for table food.” So I took a bite of my ketchup sandwich, chewed it up, spit it into my hand and fed it to my baby like she was a little bird. She was three months old.
One day Ashley was crying her head off. Mama told me to go to the pay phone on the corner and call Derrick. “That piece of shit you had a baby by is supposed to be helping you,” she said. “Tell him to bring you some Pampers and milk.”
I dialed the number for Fish Supreme and could hear Derrick’s coworker telling him he had a call: “Brotha, it’s your baby mama on the phone. . . . C’mon, man, how the hell am I supposed to know ‘which one’?”
Derrick promised he’d come by with some money, but he never showed up. Instead, when I opened the front door later that afternoon, there was Celeste, holding two Kmart shopping bags filled with diapers and baby clothes.
“Derrick told me to bring these,” she said, handing me the bags. I couldn’t believe he’d sent her. I was even more pissed off that she had the nerve to show up at my door dressed in a cute purple skirt and vest set when I had on a stretched-out T-shirt decorated with baby puke.
“I don’t want this shit,” I said, grabbing the bags out of her hands and throwing them past her, into the air. Little baby dresses and diapers flew out of the shopping bags, landing all over the dusty yard. Celeste just shook her head: “Girl, you better pick that stuff up. You know you need it.”
“You don’t know what I need!” I yelled. “What you need is to get the fuck outta here!” I slammed the door in her face and waited inside, my back pressed to the door, until I thought she was gone. Then I went to the yard and started gathering up the diapers, booties, socks, and little pink dresses. My eye caught on a pink bow fixed to a elastic headband. It looked just like the kind of baby bow I’d imagined Ashley wearing all those times I daydreamed at Carson’s. I bent down to pick it up. When I looked up I noticed Celeste sitting behind the wheel of her Camaro, watching me on my hands and knees picking baby clothes out of the dirt.
On a cool afternoon, when Ashley was almost six months old, Miss Munroe came by to check on me. We sat on Mama’s stoop and she took my hand in hers. “I’m concerned,” she said, her face serious. “How are you managing?”
“I’m good,” I replied.
She squeezed my hand. “Really, Patricia? Are you?”
Suddenly I was sobbing, with tears and snot rolling down my face. I told her Sweetie’s daughter LaDontay cried all night, and Ashley and I couldn’t get any sleep. I told her that Mama wasn’t helping me and Derrick wasn’t around. “I’m trying,” I cried. “But I keep running out of everything.”