By the time the boys woke up the next morning, their mother was gone. It was as if she’d never even been there. There was a five dollar bill on the kitchen table, however, so Isaac knew she’d gotten home that night. He sat there for awhile, looking at the money. He wished he had his own money, and didn’t have to rely on his mother’s grudging handouts. They needed to eat, though. He had five dollars he’d lifted out of Kathleen’s purse the other day, and some loose change he’d been collecting in the pocket of his coat. “Come on you guys,” he said to Taylor and Zac, who had sprawled in their pajamas in front of the TV. Well, actually Zac had sprawled. Taylor was standing next to the TV and messing with the antenna on top. You had to do that if you wanted to get any kind of reception at all. Even then the picture was kind of blurry.
“Go a little that way,” Zac directed. “A little the other way. . . not that much. Yeah. And a little to the front. And over that way a little tiny bit more. . .”
Taylor leaned around the side of the TV set and scrutinized the picture quality. “You think that’s as good as we’re going to get it?”
Zac sighed. “Probably. It’s better than yesterday.”
“Ike can do it better,” Taylor observed.
“Yeah,” Zac agreed. “I mean, not like you don’t do it good.”
“We have to go get groceries,” Isaac said. “You both have to get dressed.”
Zac shook his head. “I don’t want to get dressed.
“Can we wear our pajamas to the store?” Taylor asked.
Isaac shook his head. “No, you’ll be too cold. It’s snowing out there.”
“I won’t be cold!” Zac piped.
“Yes you will,” Isaac assured him. “You’ll be too cold and you’ll start crying and whining and complaining, and you’ll want to go back home.”
“No we won’t,” Taylor promised, his blue eyes sincere. “If we get cold we won’t even tell you.”
“You won’t even have to hear about it,” Zac concurred.
“No!” Isaac went into their bedroom and started pulling various articles of clothing out of the laundry basket that sat on the floor. “You guys will wear pajamas, and you’ll catch pneumonia and die.”
“I won’t die!” Zac promised.
“Well, I don’t want you to get sick.” Isaac threw a pair of overalls at his younger brother. “Put these on.”
“The last time I got ammonia, we went to live with Dan and Nora,” Taylor pointed out.
Isaac was quiet for a second. “Well, you would just go to the hospital this time. And they’ll give you a bunch of shots, and it’ll hurt. And you’ll cry.”
Taylor paused for a moment, frowning. Then, resignedly, he lifted his shirt and pulled it over his head. Zac unsnapped the top panel of his sleeper and unzipped it. He liked his pajamas. They were green and had a picture of Oscar the Grouch on the front of them. They used to be Isaac’s, and then they were Taylor’s. And then Taylor had gotten to big for them, so now they were Zac’s. A long time ago, before Zac could remember, the pajamas had had feet on them, but they didn’t have feet any more. Zac liked his pajamas. They were comfortable.
“What are we getting at the grocery store?” Taylor wanted to know.
“Probably cereal.” Isaac scratched the back of his neck. “And milk and stuff.”
“I like cereal,” Zac supplied.
“Me too,” Taylor agreed.
“Well, yeah, we’ll get cereal, then.” Isaac consented. He snapped Zac’s overalls for him. “But we can’t get that much stuff. We only have ten dollars.”
“Is that a lot?” Taylor asked.
Isaac shook his head. “Not really.”
Taylor sighed. “I wish we had a million dollars,” he said.
“If you have a million dollars, you have to pay a lot of taxes,” Isaac pointed out. Dan had told him that, once.
The Safeway was five blocks away, next to the highway overpass. It had been built on an abandoned lot and the land around it still had the scrubby, dusty look of unclaimed urban land. The building rose from the ground like a boxy Mecca, surrounded by deserted shopping carts and sad-looking cars.
“It’s the ghetto superstore,” Isaac observed, drily. It was an old joke.
Zac reached for his brother’s hand. “You always get lost in here.”
“You’re the one who gets lost!” Isaac protested.
“No, you’re the one,” Zac insisted. “I always know where I am, but I don’t always know where you are.”
“Should we get a shopping cart?” Taylor asked. “Or just a basket.”
“A basket,” Isaac decided. “We can’t afford that much stuff.”
Taylor lifted a basket from the stack just inside the automatic door. “Cereal,” he said. “And we have to get milk, to go with it.”
“At the ghetto superstore,” Zac sang.
“Could we get the chocolate kind of milk?” Taylor asked, as they passed in front of the dairy section.
“What kind of milk?” Isaac inquired, pretending to be absorbed in a container of half & half.
“The chocolate kind,” Taylor smiled, pointing it out. “That kind.”
Isaac raised an eyebrow, repulsed. “Tay, that’s not chocolate.”
“It isn’t?” Taylor drew in a breath. “What is it?”
“That’s contaminated milk,” Isaac shook his head. “That’s not chocolate. It has all kinds of dirt and junk in it. If you drank it, you’d probably die.”
“Then why do they sell it at the grocery store?” Taylor stammered.
“They just pretend it’s chocolate,” Isaac lied. “So some stupid people will buy it.”
“Maybe we should warn them,” Taylor proposed.
“No.” Isaac shook his head. “Let’em find out for themselves.”
“I don’t want to drink that kind of milk,” Zac decided. “That would be gross!”
“Aren’t you glad I know the secret?” Isaac asked.
“Yeah,” Zac agreed. “Really glad.”
In the checkout line, Isaac made a mental list of everything they’d gotten. A carton of milk, he thought, a box of cereal, a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jelly. It ended up coming to nine dollars and twenty-three cents. Isaac looked down at the three quarters and two pennies the cashier had handed him as change and sighed, dropping them into his pocket.
“Are we going to have breakfast when we get home?” Taylor asked.
“Lunch,” Isaac said. “It’s too late for breakfast now.” Despite the fact that he would have less than fifty cents to his name until his mother decided to leave some money lying around again, he felt pretty good. At school, you got free lunch and free breakfast. That meant they’d probably have three meals a day all week, if they had sandwiches for dinner.
Next week was winter break, though. Isaac wasn’t sure how they’d manage then. Money was always low at the end of the month.
Oh, well, he told himself. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Still, he was worried.
A local battered women’s shelter had opened a free clinic that operated on certain mornings during the week. Volunteer nurses provided nonemergency medical care, administered immunizations and tried their best to educate the community about basic medical hygiene. They visited schools to hand out toothbrushes and talk about the importance of brushing your teeth. They passed out information on AIDS prevention and encouraged pregnant women to receive prenatal care. They passed out birth control and advised women to use it.
Most controversial of all, however, was the needle exchange program they’d coordinated for drug addicts. Worried about AIDS and the many other diseases that could be spread through needle sharing, the clinic administrators had decided that, while they couldn’t cure drug addiction, they needed to protect addicts from the dangers of using communal needles. It also helped keep needles off the streets; people would turn in their old syringes so that they could receive new ones.
On Wednesday and Saturday mornings, long lines formed outside the clinic. Drug abusers carried their paraphernalia in plastic shopping bags, pockets or whatever else was handy. They counted them out and received new ones. Isaac tried not to look at them as he went past; there were too many people he recognized by sight. Usually he crossed the street and walked along the other side; this is what he and his brothers did today.
Zac tugged at Isaac’s sleeve. “Ike, that’s Mommy.”
“Where?” Isaac asked, startled. Bumping into his mother on the sidewalk could be a bad thing. She might want to know why they weren’t at home in the apartment.
“In that line across the street,” Zac told him.
“At the needle change,” Taylor agreed.
Isaac looked over; it was true. “How do you know that’s a needle exchange?” he asked Taylor.
“Mommy took me with her once.” Taylor ran his hand along the wall of the building they were passing, feeling the bumpy texture of the concrete beneath his fingers. “You were at school.”
“Well, don’t go there with her anymore,” Isaac told him. “The next time you stay home from school, I’ll stay, too.”
Back at the apartment, the three of them sat at the kitchen table eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, each one lost in his own thoughts. “Mommy’s worse than she ever was,” Taylor observed, out of the blue.
Zac fingered a bruise on the inside of his arm. He didn’t say anything.
“She’s pretty bad,” Isaac sighed, coughing. He was tired. He didn’t want to think about going to school tomorrow.
“Do you think she’ll ever get better?” Taylor asked.
Isaac shook his head. “No,” he said, with conviction.
“Me neither,” Taylor agreed.
“Me neither,” Zac whispered.
“Look,” Isaac promised, “I’ll do my best to make sure she doesn’t hit you guys anymore. I’ll really try.”
“You already do try,” Taylor pointed out. “You try as hard as you can, and she still does it. And she hits you more, too.”
“I’ll try harder,” Isaac vowed.
Taylor looked into his brother’s eyes. “Don’t get hurt.”
Isaac swallowed hard and stared down at the table top. “It’s better if I get hurt than if you guys do.”
“I won’t get hurt!” Zac vowed.
“Nobody’s getting hurt right now,” Isaac pointed out. “Let’s not even think about it. Or talk about it,” he added, when Taylor started to open his mouth.
Taylor sighed and rested his chin in his hand. Isaac already got hurt too much. They should just call Dan and Nora and ask if they could stay with them again, if Mommy wasn’t going to get any better. Something bad’s going to happen, Taylor thought. He didn’t know what it was yet, but he could sense it coming.