Crooked Branch (9781101615072) by Cummins Jeanine

Author:Cummins, Jeanine [Cummins, Jeanine]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin USA
Published: 2013-02-17T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

NEW YORK, NOW

Salamander’s is always pretty crowded on Friday afternoons, and by the time we arrive, all the good, stroller-friendly couches are already taken. The only seats left are a couple of the tiny café tables, barely big enough to hold two mugs of coffee. Jade’s double-wide really is enormous. She bumps every single seat on our way to the counter. We stand in line, and she looks around nervously.

“This isn’t gonna work,” she says, biting a nail while she surveys the layout. “I only ever sit outside when I come here. The stroller won’t fit. Is it too cold out?”

“No,” I say, “we can sit outside—I don’t mind.”

“Yeah, okay,” she says, and I wonder if she was actually just looking for an excuse to jet.

She orders two espressos and a vegan cookie. I ask for a decaf, and then we find a table on the sidewalk where it’s easy to park the strollers.

“Hey, could you keep an eye on them while I run to the ladies’ room?” she asks.

“Sure!” I answer without even thinking, and then, an instant later, I am alone at a sidewalk café with three babies.

Please stay asleep please stay asleep please stay asleep, and they all do. Emma stirs but does not open her eyes. I pull back the hood on Jade’s stroller, and watch her babies sleep for a few minutes. Then I become worried that she’ll return to find me gazing at her babies and think I’m creepy, so I push the hood across, and sip at my decaf.

And that’s when I begin to worry that Jade is never coming back. I mean, what kind of mother leaves her two babies alone on the streets of Queens with some woman she just met? I’ll tell you what kind of mother: a mother who does not want those babies anymore. A mother who has probably skipped out the back kitchen door, and is catching the Q55 bus down Myrtle Avenue at this very moment, from where she will hop on the L train with all the Williamsburg hipsters, never to be seen again. Does she even remember my name? My God, I would never leave Emma with a stranger!

Oh, here she comes. Never mind.

“Sorry I took so long.”

“It’s cool,” I lie.

She is scraping her heavy metal chair back from the table. She doesn’t even glance into the stroller, to make sure her twins are still safe inside. The waiter has delivered her espressos, and she knocks one of them back like it’s a shot of Jack Daniel’s.

“I need all the caffeine I can get,” she says, biting into her vegan cookie. I almost say, Oh, are you not breast-feeding? but catch myself in the nick of time, and settle on “I hear ya,” instead.

Salamander’s is on one corner of a pinwheel intersection on Myrtle Avenue, across from a McDonald’s, a great old-timey Queens bakery that’s been owned by the same Italian family for eighty-six years, and a famous German restaurant with a Tudor-style facade that is often featured on television shows on the Food Network.

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