The Cut by C. J. Dotson

Author:C. J. Dotson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Unpleasant Reverie

“Is the apartment going to be cleaned before the next lease?” Sadie asked, stepping a little ahead of the landlord turned tour guide. Her gaze moved from the nicotine-stained walls and ceiling to the windowsill with a layer of dust and a scattering of dead bugs. She turned the light on in the bathroom and eyed the spotty mirror and the visible ring running around the bathtub. She tried to imagine letting Izzy splash in this tub, bathing the new baby here.

“The maid service left this morning,” the landlord said, and Sadie could’ve sworn he was being sarcastic. She gave him a sharp look and he smiled, but her gaze moved past him immediately.

“What are you looking at, Iz?”

“Chock-yet,” Izzy said.

“Chocolate? Wait.” Izzy reached for something on the floor. “Wait, Isabelle!” Sadie lunged across the room in time to stop her daughter from scooping up a pile of tiny mouse droppings in the corner. “I’ll give you real chocolate later, that’s yucky stuff,” she said, lifting her daughter. Izzy fussed for a moment, whining wordlessly and kicking, but Sadie repeated the promise of chocolate later in a low voice until her daughter settled.

The places she could afford were simply not the places she wanted to have children in. The thought of the new baby looking past a crib mobile at dirty yellow walls made her grimace, and the thought of Izzy getting her hands on something diseased made her stomach clench.

An undercurrent to these fears ran swift and cold—a kind of self-recrimination that rushed through her too fast to catch and examine in any detail. The complexity of the feeling drained and left her with the bare surface of the discomfort: Plenty of parents raised children in places so much worse than the apartment she’d seen today—what made her special?

Nothing. She wasn’t special, but she was lucky. A dubious kind of luck, anyway. She at least had options to weigh. She could settle on a place like this, dirty and infested and as much a trap as Sadie had ever seen, but she’d never have to walk L’Arpin’s chilly, dim corridors again, never gaze out her window at the power plant spearing smokestacks into the sky. Or she and Izzy could stay at L’Arpin for free a little longer, and Sadie could measure the large but short-term risk of running afoul of whatever bad business occupied Mr. Drye and Beth and maybe Lewis or even Joe, too, against the long-term benefit of scraping together just enough in savings to get a safe and clean apartment.

“Thanks for your time,” Sadie said to the landlord, and left without looking any further.

This had been their fourth tour of a totally unsuitable apartment. Even going with only two bedrooms hadn’t made enough of a difference yet, and for a moment, while Sadie buckled Izzy into her car seat, she pictured living with a toddler and an infant in a studio apartment.

She’d lose her mind.

Car naps were Izzy’s only naps these days, and she fell asleep within the first five minutes of the twenty-minute drive back to L’Arpin.

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