—
This time last year, Edie was sleeping on a cot at her mother’s bedside during the daylight hours—catching naps between nurse’s visits and her mother’s scattered moments of lucidity—and bartending each night from seven to three. The cancer’s attack had been swift and ruthless: one day her mother was finishing another ten-hour shift at the industrial laundry facility where she worked, suffering from nothing more than low energy that she had understandably attributed to working long hours and getting older; a month later, she was bed-bound and guzzling bag after bag of “blood product,” as the nurses always called it, the disease a web of secret insults in her middle—breast, lungs, lymph nodes, bones. Her insurance didn’t cover generated tissue transplants, which were still deemed “experimental.” So she lay in a hospital bed and suffered. “Don’t let me die,” she told Edie some days. “Take me home,” she said on others. Edie, in a fog of exhaustion and grief, didn’t know which version of her mother to trust. So she blinked as the doctors explained options to her, nodded along, approved each suggested procedure. Thinking: I’ve got to give the universe time to fix this. Thinking: Every day I get with her is better than nothing. Thinking: I can’t be the one to finish things. That can’t be on me.
At last, when the doctors assured Edie that everything had been tried and the only things keeping her mother alive were transfusions and blood pressure medication—Edie had pictured one of those car lot air-sock people, the kind that reached and waved when the fan was on and collapsed the second it was shut off—she had agreed to take her off life support. Thinking: So this is what life support is. She hadn’t known, had pictured some anonymous machine, a throbbing robot heart. Thinking: Maybe I can finally get some sleep tonight before my shift starts.
But it had taken another six hours after that, the dying. Six more hours, the space between breaths speeding up at first, maddeningly, her mother grimacing and moving her tongue around in her mouth, as if tasting something foul, then jerking up her chin, then parting her lips for air, the gestures so determined that Edie allowed herself to wonder if the doctors were wrong, if her mother’s will to live transcended the cancer that had seemed to be decimating her. But this, too, didn’t last. The breaths slowed. The grimaces stopped. The nurse came in to tell Edie that her mother’s heart rate had dropped to fifty, and it wouldn’t be long now. Edie called in at work. Stefano told her OK, do what you got to do. She watched her mother and thought self-torturing thoughts, like: These are the hands that rubbed my back when I was sick and were always so smooth and cool, and this is the mouth that sung over the dishes each night in that clear pretty alto, and here are the brown eyes, behind closed lids, that will never again see me. Like that. And the nurse was right, not long after that she was gone.
She kissed her mother’s forehead. She didn’t say anything—her voice was hoarse from the six hours of plaintive whispering she’d done into her mother’s ear—and drifted out of the hospital, drove across town, walked into O’Henry’s, and tied a green apron around her waist.
“You sure you want to be here?” Stefano asked. It wasn’t a tender question, but a practical one.
“I need the money,” she said, and he nodded.
It was eleven, the clientele rowdy. She went to the computer to punch in an order and unbuttoned a couple of buttons on her blouse, feeling like a cliché, not even wearing one of her good bras. These guys didn’t care, though. What she needed tonight was to not go back to the apartment she and her mother had shared until her hospitalization six weeks ago. What she needed tonight was to not see the “Happy Halloween!” wreath her mother had hung on the door, or the Our Lady of Guadalupe candle she kept on the dresser next to her rosary, or the stack of paperback romance novels by her recliner, books with titles like Sultry Savannah Summer and A Lovers’ Pact. So when a man hit on her who met her three criteria for the night—not too old, not too disgusting, not too dodgy—she flirted back. And checked into a hotel room with him as soon as her shift ended.
This was her life for a while. This was how, a couple of months later, she brought home Jesse Haggard for the first time.
Edie owned only the most basic tablet, which operated at low speed and didn’t sync with most wall monitors and speaker systems, and her life, even before her mother’s illness, had been a slog of work and broken sleep. So she wasn’t very current on popular culture, had only the vaguest notion of who Jesse Haggard was, and recognized him not at all that first night, even after they’d exchanged names. He was dressed like the men at O’Henry’s always dressed—flannel shirt, jeans, lace-up work boots—and so she had no reason to guess that he rated thirty-seventh on the Atlantic Zone’s list of Deep Pocketz, or that the webshow he served as a judge on, Pop Sensation, was such a phenomenon that Jesse had renegotiated his contract to the record-breaking tune of five hundred thousand credits an episode. She’d just found him cute and charming. When another bartender, Inez, had cornered her at work the next night to quiz her about what had happened—“Oh my God,” she’d asked, “did you boink Jesse Haggard?”—and Edie had subsequently assembled the basic facts about his fame, her first impulse had actually been to not see him again, though he had scrawled his tablet’s quick-code on an O’Henry’s bar napkin, along with the message: I had a great time. Let’s have another. Her grief was an all-consuming thing right now, a thing that couldn’t accommodate the complications of keeping a pop-star lover, and she discovered that she did not much like his music, which Inez had proceeded to play on a loop throughout that night’s shift, until Stefano threatened to throw her tablet into the trash compactor.
I’ve got this feeling and I don’t want to hide it
This magic mission and I won’t be denied, oh, no no
Not tonight is what you’re trying to tell me
But this burnin’ yearnin’ make me go a little crazy
If this hunger’s bad I don’t wanna be good
’Cause it’s the right night—the right night—for you
It was kind of a disturbing song, if you really listened to the words.