Keep Me Posted by Lisa Beazley

Author:Lisa Beazley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-02-11T15:37:52+00:00

Feeling tired and a tiny bit guilty about my dalliances the night before, I wasn’t in the mood to make good on my promise to go visit our old neighbor Rachel and her two-year-old daughter, Brooke. They used to live on the fourth floor of our building before they moved across the river to Hoboken when Rachel was pregnant. But we had canceled and rescheduled four times already, so I figured it was best to get it over with.

The boys and I spent a rare morning indoors, and walked outside around eleven a.m. and into a wall of stink and humidity.

The PATH station was five blocks away, on Christopher Street, and then we had an eight-block walk to Rachel’s place in Hoboken. Quinn helped me push the empty stroller while Joey skipped ahead. Within minutes, he’d stepped right into a big mushy pile of dog shit. I wrestled both of their already sticky and sweaty bodies into the stroller, promising chocolate milk for cooperation, took off Joey’s shoe, tied it up in a plastic bag and tossed it in the bottom of the stroller.

Since it had opened six months ago, taking the place of our favorite corner bar, I had managed to avoid the Starbucks at West Tenth Street on principle. But it was too hot to go out of our way today, and I knew they had those boxes of organic chocolate milk. Plus, I’d seen many double strollers make it through those doors, so today it was a no-brainer.

They were out of chocolate milk, so I negotiated strawberry milks, and then changed one to vanilla milk, which I didn’t even know existed until Joey asked for one, and then forgot to say “iced” when I ordered my chai tea latte. The stroller rocked back and forth as the boys wrestled, bonking each other on the head with beanbags shaped like bananas, screeching and yelping and not even hearing my hissed entreaties to stop it. The whole thing was pretty typical, but still my heart raced and my jaw clenched as I felt the line behind me growing longer. When Joey discovered that his milk box was missing a straw, he started sobbing as if he’d just watched a beloved relative savagely murdered. I asked for a new milk box as calmly as I could when the guy behind me in line exhaled loudly and muttered under his breath, “You gotta be kidding me.”

Something inside of me snapped, and I spun on my heel so that my whole body was facing this guy, who was about my height and wearing a wool stocking hat in one-hundred-degree heat, and said, “Oh, fuck you.” It was out of my mouth before I even realized what had happened, and I immediately felt shaky but powerful and a smidge relieved that I had finally done what I’d envisioned myself doing so many times and that I’d lived. An older, well-dressed woman with her five-dollar bill in hand, ready to order, was standing behind him and pretending not to notice me.

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