Counting

Illustration by Kat Morgan

I was clean three years and three months when Renee showed up with a toddler on her hip. It’d been almost as long since I last saw her and she looked skinny and washed out in a man’s flannel and blue sweats. Her roots were showing. The baby had blonde hair, my hair, and blue eyes with a little stripe of brown in the left one.

You gained weight, Renee said, looking me up and down. One of her eyelids drooped. 

I just stared. Renee. I’d pictured this before, but I forgot what I’d wanted to say. So I just stepped back and let her in. She looked around, and it was like I could see the room for the first time, too. I wished I’d vacuumed because Freckles was a shedder. I wished I’d painted the water stain on the ceiling. I wished I had some baby toys, and I wished I hadn’t stacked the new TV on the old dead one. 

This, Renee said, hiking the boy higher up on her hip. This’s Talon. 

I took him from her and said, Hi Buddy. It’d been a long time since I held a baby. He was smiley in a fleece onesie that made him look like a penguin. 

Talon, I said. Like bird feet?

Not the feet mom. Just the claws.

I said, Ahh I get it. But I didn’t. Freckles barked from the bedroom where I put him if anybody knocked. 

 I got myself a doggie, I said, my voice pitching in and out of baby talk. A little dog-a-log. 

Renee asked for the bathroom and she went where I pointed, leaving me with this little guy. I looked him over. Chubby and quiet and clean. Half-her, so a quarter me. He gave me a feeling I couldn’t name. I said, I’m your grammy. You can call me Grammy. He squirmed to get down. The toilet flushed, pipes rattled. Renee came out and said she’d get their stuff from the landing.

First thing, I caught her up on the gossip in town, thinking I’d start somewhere we’d both agree. Then I tried to pry about where she was coming from, what her plans were. But she said, Please I can’t even think about it right this minute. So we watched the TV for a bit. Both of us full of words we wouldn’t swap. Where do you even start? Three years is a lot of days. I gave her and Talon my room. 

The couch was too short for me, even though, at forty-six, I was already shrinking because of my discs. I’d tussle and Freckles would wake up, then I’d feel his dog breath on me in the dark. It would be Tuesday. Suboxone Day. Two weeks’ dose at once. I liked the girls in the clinic, and they liked me. They got me a card on Christmas and a gingerbread candle. Finally I said hell with