Side Work
“I Heart You” by Lisa Wright
Kaya leaves her house, as if she were going to school. At the bus stop, the bartender meets her in his burgundy sedan that slithers low on the street.
“I can’t stay with you. I have too much to do today,” he says as soon as she opens the door. She steps in and slams it shut over his muttered sorry.
She wonders if the back seat, farther from his scowl and cigarette smoke, would have been a wiser choice. Why not make the drive as impersonal as he’s trying to pretend it is? Like he didn’t spend the past two months standing around the side-work station at the diner while she rolled napkins and refilled ketchup bottles, surrounding her with his cologne and commentary about people he served in the adjoining bar.
On her first night he’d told her, “A guy asked for a glass of milk with his scotch. For his ulcer.” He laughed and his eyes disappeared under folds of skin. He made her feel grown up.
Like he didn’t sneak Seagram’s Seven in her cokes when she went to the bar for lime slices. Or to pick up cranberry juice for women at her tables who touched their bellies when explaining they didn’t drink cocktails or soda. She is two and a half years away from serving actual drinks.
“We’re separated,” he said about the wife who called when he worked later than ten.
“She moved out,” he said.
“I had fun with you tonight,” he said into her neck after he parked behind a swimming pool supplies store on the way home from a bar where his friend worked, where she didn’t need an ID.
She leaned into the tickle of his voice. He guided her into a reclining position across the width of the sedan. He climbed on top. It was over in less than ten minutes. Despite his age, it was no different than with high school boys.
The next day at work he showed up with a blonde child. An older waitress named Dorie asked the boy about school.
“We’re studying birds,” he said. “I can name fifty different kinds.”
“I didn’t know you had a son,” Kaya said.
“Yeah,” the bartender said. “He’s nine.”
Dorie watched Kaya watch the bartender.
“Hard to tell which of those two are more mature,” she said. Kaya laughed. She assumed Dorie was joking.
Her parents came in to eat and met the bartender. He stood at their table and talked about his plans to run for local office. When she got home, Kaya’s mom spoke of him the way she did film stars. “He’s going to leave a mark on this place,” she said. Kaya wondered what place.
When her period was late, he drove her to Planned Parenthood where a nurse practitioner confirmed she was pregnant.
She purposely bumped into tables at work trying to loosen the thing lodged inside her.
This morning, after the bartender meets her at the bus stop, they return to Planned Parenthood. He pulls up to the curb instead of entering the parking lot. He doesn’t turn the engine off.
“Call me when you’re finished. I’ll pick you up,” he says.
In the waiting room she sits across from an older woman with hair in a ponytail meant to hide tangles.
“Terminating?” the woman asks.
Kaya nods.
“I used a sponge. I already have two kids.” She looks like she’s going to cry.
Kaya’s afraid to admit she hadn’t used anything. It was stupid. The bartender insisted he would pull out, insisted he couldn’t feel anything with a condom. She feels in the clinic the way she does in the diner, like the people around her are somehow more real than her parents, who come from a different era and are trying to carry it forward instead of moving themselves forward.
When it’s her turn, she’s led into a smaller room. Her paper gown crinkles as she walks. She lies back on an already warm cushioned table and puts her feet in stirrups. The doctor looks down at her through glasses on the tip of his nose. He explains the extraction, saying it’s like a vacuum. She stares at the beige ceiling tiles as the machine gurgles near her feet. It’s mostly painless and lasts about as long as the bartender did.
She’s finished by one o’clock. She’ll get home at her normal time, as if she attended school before work. Her parents will never know. Their pride in her good grades and college aspirations will remain intact.
The bartender shows up at the curb, his son in the backseat. Kaya’s too surprised to speak. She holds onto the door handle to keep from sliding on the shiny leather each time the car turns, to allow the cool metal to distract her from nausea and anger. She wonders if he would have prioritized the baby he made with her the same way. She makes him stop at a drug store so she can buy thick pads. The one from the clinic is already sticky and saturated.
She refills salt shakers at the start of her shift. Her nausea intensifies as the heat lamp diffuses the smell of waiting sandwiches and french fries across the side work station. When she can’t stand it any longer she sits at the counter with a cola.
“I’m sorry,” Kaya says when Dorie approaches. “I have really bad cramps.”
She feels pretty sure Dorie knows days like this: disappointed by selfishness, by her body and its leaks and machinations. But Dorie doesn’t show it.
“We all get cramps,” Dorie says. “Five minutes, then back to work.”
Kaya’s forehead is wet. Her pad is soaked again. As she stands to go to the bathroom she leaves a wet smear on the vinyl, the mark her mother predicted the bartender would leave.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lori Barrett (she/her) lives and writes in Chicago. Her work has appeared in Salon, The Wall Street Journal, Barrelhouse, Citron Review, BULL, and Middle House Review, where she was nominated for Best Small
Fictions 2020. She serves as an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel.
About the artist
Lisa Wright is a freelance writer, book reviewer, and (very) amateur photographer. In her free time she enjoys reading, baking, cooking, watching U.K. dramas and panel shows, and baseball (Go Phils!) Though she is usually a spectator rather than a participant on social media, you can sometimes find her on Twitter and Instagram @dolphy_jane.