Freedom

III. EVENING: We are alone among joy.

The store is a lonely marriage tonight. Some nights the store is a useful and loving life with Woodrow, sometimes just a store with things that need doing, occasionally a lonely marriage. It wasn't really Woodrow's fault. Not really anyone's fault. Products and shelves so quiet and still all around her in dusty orange sunlight.  Effie whispers, "I could use a good dose of God," and sighs as she reaches under the counter to get the things she needs to do inventory.

When she feels lonely like this she sometimes falls back into her old timid self, like she's making a fuss for no reason. She has always been timid and thinks she knows at least partly why. She was the youngest of three by nine years and knows she was a mistake. "Nobody wanted you!" her sister told her once to be mean, and it lodged inside Effie as a little girl and into adulthood. So she tried not to be a bother to anyone. Or maybe her mother didn't show her much love for other reasons. Life brings all kinds of reasons that people turn out the way they do. "Quit being so damn gentle, Effie," Woodrow used to say when they argued, and it just made her get more gentle. But over time her shyness came to feel like a secret power. She could make her opinions known without loudness. So looking back, especially now that Woodrow is gone and the store is hers alone, she has in fact become a stronger woman, despite what her timid self would say. The secret power evolved into quiet authority. Woodrow came to see this in his thick-headed way. He assigned it value and gradually began to respect her opinions more. Effie became the one who dealt with distributors and city officials. They did not mess with her, her gentleness was hard to confront, and she saved the store a couple of times when tax problems came up. Effie and Woodrow tried but had no children, running the store full-time as a couple for thirty-nine years and now two with Effie alone. She does not miss Woodrow so much anymore after two years but for the burden of so much added work and the touch of his hand on her shoulder. She still loves him as if his kinder self stands nearby, and she still gets irritated about his pigheadedness. Woodrow just smiles and lets her go on about it.

The low sun behind the buildings across the street throws shafts of gold light into the store,  making it difficult to see the small labels on the shelves even with the lights on. The scanner's still broken, something Woodrow used to fix, so she shifts her glasses around to try to read the little numbers that are hard to make out to begin with. "Sugar! Can't see a darned thing," Effie cusses in her mild way, always respectful of God. Luckily she knows some of the numbers by heart, definitely this one in front of her, only one box left. She'll need to order more. The kids love Cap'n Crunch, and the moms use it to get some peace sometimes. Munchin' means no moving around, one of the mothers likes to say. Evelyn, it's Evelyn who says that. Such a pretty name, so much prettier than hers. Effie likes it when the mothers come in and talk about their troubles and joys.

Tonight's inventory list is short -- business is down, Effie is tired. She checks a few more critical items -- milk, baby formula, beer, bread -- and walks back to the counter through the bracketed sunlight and puts her notepad next to the phone to call the distributor tomorrow. She straightens a few items on the counter but doesn't clean up much anywhere else, grabs her tote and locks up and leaves. On the sidewalk she doesn't look back at the window display to critique it as she usually does. It will do just fine as it is for tomorrow.

The sidewalk is empty and fading sunlight washes over everything. No one is out walking or sitting on their porch in the muggy heat, and Effie has the street to herself, feeling old and tired.  Her feet ache as they always do at day's end and she's already sweating on her face and under her saggy arms, dampening her dress and bra, but she decides to take the long way home anyway, past the arts school and down Jerusalem Street under the interstate as a cut-through. A slow walk home is a good emptiness sometimes. And so she begins, her chubby body purposeful. A slight breeze stirs with her movement, fluffing her flowered dress and cooling her sweat just a little. The old neighborhood feels like a slow glide, past their church, past the arts school, alongside the brick apartments where her and Woodrow started out, the whole way still no one else on the street.

The newborn's screams have grown faint, as if giving up. Effie sees Sammy's house up ahead, a life she has mostly forgotten until the sight of the house jostles a few details. Sammy was a cocky kid who wasn't really cocky at all, just a show he put on. Kept his hair short and cropped, or his daddy kept it that way for him. He used to buy Swedish Fish all the time, and one time when no one else was in the store he just started crying in front of the candy shelves. Effie walked over and held him and hummed low without any tune. Neither one of them said anything, she remembers, and she wondered then and wonders now if she should have. There was a little girl who came in the store always for Slurpees who had a crush on Sammy. She was cute, long-legged and skinny and shy like Effie except with more pain in it. She used to show Effie her latest dance moves. What was her name. Effie can't remember. She stops in front of Sammy's old house so that her steps don't make a sound and stares straight down to listen. There is something or someone inside, she is almost certain. Her timid self instructs her to go call for help but she rejects it. The sound is not an addict or a drunk and whatever it is needs her help. She has been so tired in her recent life but now muscles and blood awaken. She turns and charges with chunky steps through tall weeds and trash to the back of Sammy's house, looking up at the boarded windows as she goes as if they held the sound.

In the back she can hear better, pauses and becomes very still, a high-pitched suffering, a puppy or a baby, someone's little child, and Effie rushes up the steps with her stiffness and into the house, through the terrible kitchen to the source of the faint cry, walking desperately, carefully, into the main room. There is the baby, on the filthy floor, this sight before her, alone on its back in this filth. Effie cannot breathe fast enough. Worry overwhelms her but she moves quickly toward the child anyway. She can barely see, a shaft of late sunlight, walks closer and standing just above him sees his little thing, he's a little boy. He barely moves, just his mouth having stopped crying. His moan hurts and twists Effie inside as she bends toward him. Oh, who are you, little one. Who left you all alone in this horrible place. She kneels down onto one chubby knee and scoops her hands under him to save him from the filth and hold him. She wipes him clean with the bottom of her dress and he tries to suckle the fabric when she cleans his mouth and she lets him for a second or two, then holds him to her bosom and his moaning turns slowly to cooing, felt more than heard. He moves his mouth in the air. He has trouble with his breath and his little mouth coughs and spits and she pats his back just barely and his breathing calms and he burps a little. He is burning up to her touch, and Effie blows cool breaths on his face and can only feel love and worry. She talks to him softly with her lips touching his head.

"I'll get you to a doctor tomorrow, little one, and I'll help you get better until then. The little clinic down from the store isn't open at night, so we'll wait 'til the morning. We'll go back to the store for now, just me and you, and get better. What about that. What do you think about that. I know what Woodrow would say, in his voice that always made me feel like a child myself: Call 911. We've got to turn this baby over, Effie, get him to a hospital. Like the last word was always his. No. Not this time, Woodrow. I don't know what the doctor's going to say, anyway, some old woman with a little just-born baby, and they'll take him, you know they will, and he sure doesn't need to be passed around among government people, do you, little one. We'll just have to get to that when it comes. I'm taking you to the store right now and I hope no one sees us. Try to get some formula in you. Got one box left I can mix up for you. I was going to order more tomorrow, and ain't that something, little one. I'd never think I'd need it for my own baby, would you have?"

Outside, still no one on the street. A universe of two in a floral dress. Effie cradles the boy in the cleanest thing she could find in the abandoned house, a kitchen towel still folded in a drawer, and walks slowly and evenly on the cracked sidewalk with the breathing baby under her chin. A cop goes by in his car and Effie knows him a little and makes a sudden decision and waves like nothing is wrong while her heart races. "I am not turning you over to the police," she whispers to the child. The officer's name is something Jones. He stops and rolls down his window and calls out, "Everything okay, m'am?" and she smiles and nods. "Just needed a walk. Finally cooled down a bit, but I'm still sweating like a pig. This towel's not helping much." The cop laughs and says something about the heat she can't quite hear and then tells her "Have a good night," and Effie answers, "I will."

The officer drives away and she takes a deep breath and strength wells up in her like someone who just escaped. This baby is hers to love.

Inside the store, he is given a name. Charles, for her father, Woodrow, for it is his baby too, Freedom, because Effie said so. She wants to make him epic, like the kids always say in the store. She whispers to Charles, now bathed and fed and wrapped in a clean blanket on the old sofa in the back room. Effie sits next to him, her hand on his shoulder.

"You're my third baby, Charles, forty years later. Ain't that something? The first one was named Woodrow Charles, your name flipped. We didn't name the second one until we knew what was going to happen. Better that way, I guess, looking back. It was the saddest time I've known. But I got through it. Me and Woodrow both got through it." She looked into his little green eyes. "You have a special last name, don't you. That was me. I gave you that last name. Not ours. Ours is cursed maybe, I think."

She wants never to leave this moment.