The End Plays Itself Out
Every driver—including my cousin Chup-boy here—is in a panic. Two five-gallon, white paint buckets rolling in the left lane on Knollwood exploded out every way like ink blot central. Clearly fell off some dope’s flatbed, and onwards he went with a Jesus-loves-me smile smacked across his face. Chup-boy slams his brakes to assess at the exact second the fuckwad tailgating us accelerates, so instead of sweetly easing around that white paint, Chup-boy’s Corolla gets slammed straight into the center of it, and hopping out, we’re slogging straight through glossy slicks of whiteness, picking up a thick layer of paint on the soles of our shoes, tracking that shit everywhere along the asphalt as we check the damage and wait for the cops, wait for the tow truck, wait for the fuckwad to yell himself calm. Let’s hope someone’s got quality insurance. All the while Chup-boy rubs his neck and googles whiplash, googles concussion, googles billboard lawyers, wanting his get-rich-quick.
It’s butt-crack hot because it’s July, butt-crack humid because it’s North Carolina, and I’m like, is this my car with the crunched bumper and accordion-fold trunk? Is this my boyfriend? No, and no. I hate being a bailer, but I am and always have been. He knows that, expects it even. It’s okay. I say, “I’m going to that McDonald’s.”
Chup-boy lifts one of his feet, stares at the bottom of his once-beautiful Jordan Retros. “Where?”
I point across the street. “Text if you need me,” I say, but my meaning’s clear: don’t. I’m going, I’m out of this mess, but I think I’m the asshole. What we need is a top-notch, real-deal, mom-type mom who knows what to say to a kid already hypochondriac-ing into a concussion, and I’m not that mom, or any mom, but watch me channel a mom’s imaginary goodwill and love and not entirely be the asshole. I tack on: “It’ll all be okay.”
He half-nods, noting the effort. “Thanks, Snooozy-Q.”
Not our real names. Who knows now where they came from because, like I said, we’re cousins, born a week apart, and we’ve known each other since forever ago. Destiny. Our moms are sisters who started out best friends but who stopped talking to each other three months ago, after Gramps died, sticking them with funeral bills and a house with a leaky roof and rotted floors. No one picked up his ashes, that’s how pissed those two are.
“Bring me something,” Chup-boy says. “Fries.” I leave a trail of white footprints, and I wave back at Chup-boy like he’s saying something important, but mostly I’m eyeing my footprints. Here they are right now, a damn fine “you are here,” but how long—weeks? months? days?—before my tiny animal tracks fade, along with that sprawl of white paint, punished by rain and pounding sun and bored car tires rolling over?
Anyway, the A/C’s blasting cold and steady like a gale inside this McDonald’s, and I do one of those cringe-dad sighs, like “AHHH” as it hits, and the man mopping the floor says, “Been getting that all day long.” He’s one of those old men beloved by the fast-food industry for showing up for work when the schedule says to, those old guys who’d one hundred percent know better not slam the brakes when you see a shitload of spilled paint. They’re always chatty, these fast-food geezers, and painful, claiming to their friends they “love” their jobs and working with so many “interesting” people—when really it’s all paycheck, like the rest of us.
“Yeah, sure is hot out there,” I say. I’m always nice to those guys. Not pity, but something harder, maybe liking how they call me “young lady.”
“Chili today, hot tamale.” The geezer cracks himself up. His laugh’s more of a bellow, taking up a whole lot of space. Makes me certain his wife left him when he retired, certain now he lives alone in some dingy, divorced-man apartment with a half dozen lonely moths circling a porch light that’s on even during the day. It’s my gift, Chup-boy says, how I see straight inside people. Like the whole damn depressing world is my fucking picture window. “More like a curse,” I tell Chup-boy, and could be that’s why I bail, so when everything swings sad, I’m not there having to see it. What if Chup-boy’s right, and it’s my gift? “We can’t know till the end plays itself out,” is something that Chup-boy says all the time, sounding smart.
Sure, there are other employees—counter guy, two women in the back, a disembodied drive-through voice thanking someone—but basically this sad geezer is latched onto me, like he’s mine or something. This kind of destiny happens to me so much. It’s why I’m always with Chup-boy, why I don’t say no when Chup-boy texts on his day off that we should go be bored in Winston-Salem, which at least is a bigger town to be bored in.
The old guy says, “I can take your order. Or I know young people like the kiosks.” He points at the screen set up for ordering.
I definitely like kaleidoscoping through the pictures, but I say, “I don’t need a screen. I can talk human-to-human. Isn’t that what separates us from the apes, our ability to communicate?” A teacher used to say that when he didn’t want to answer the question someone asked. Weird, right?
“Oh, sure,” the old guy says. “Among other things.”
“Oh, sure,” I say back. Honestly, I never gave it much or any thought. There’re likely many, many things that separate us from apes. For example: eyesight, diet, fur, muscle groups, chromosomes, sense of smell. And don’t they mate for life?
“Slow day,” the old guy says like I’d asked. “Time’s refusing to move.”
“And then somehow it’s all gone anyway.” I suddenly sound smart, for me. We both nod, and pause, and I’m thinking how people like him think I’m some entitled smartass buried in my iPhone, saving the planet with my vegan diet. Is anyone really that person? “I vote,” I say, because he can’t know I haven’t registered yet.
His gaze takes a dramatic swoop wide round the room, and he leans in and whispers, “There’s a baby in the ladies’ room.”
Right then my phone buzzes with a text from Chup-boy: <soooo bored> and a panda emoji.
“What?” I say to my geezer. “What did you say?”
He points to the creepy hallway like every creepy hallway where fast-food designers stick bathrooms. “There’s a baby. No one knows but me. I went in to mop.”
Another buzz: four pandas… dot-dot-dot… purple devil smile… birthday cake… saxophone. Does any of this mean anything? Does random texting mean a concussion? He knows burger and fries emojis.
“What’d you say?” I ask again. I could just order. I’m a customer, right? My cousin’s texting pandas. All I need is an order of fries, six ketchups, and an Oreo McFlurry. How is there a baby in a bathroom in McDonald’s?
The old guy stares at his shoes, so I stare at my shoes and the ghostly footprints I’ve left on the tile. He should mop fast before the paint dries.
He says, “I don’t know what to do. What should we do? What would you do?”
It’s easy, right? Tell the boss, or call the cops, or at least get the baby out here, onto a table without germs blowing around from hand dryers. Rule one is make a baby feel safe and loved, and a McDonald’s table’s a safer and more loving space than a McDonald’s bathroom. A bathroom is secrets and bodily functions, mirrors and shame, and things you don’t want to happen happening. But tables are for gathering, like Thanksgiving.
“Who forgets a baby?” I say.
“No one,” he says. “No one forgets.”
We sigh in unison. Something deep’s settling in, something almost impossible.
I know what my geezer’s thinking since I think it too: rescue the baby and name it something excellent like Willow or Luna or Mateo or Wyatt. When it grows up, it’ll sleep on Disney sheets from Target. It’ll understand fractions and know state capitals. It will like sharks and Shark Week. It will want pancakes for dinner as a treat. Its sandals will be tiny and cute. It will be kind. It will love me the most.
Also—and I know it’s a lot—we want this baby to make us believe in something—either again if maybe you’re an old, tired guy mopping a McDonald’s floor—or believe in something for the first time, like if maybe you’re almost twenty and not sure of lots of things, like who you are in the core of your core, and why you’re afraid to try for college or another city and a real life in a fucked-up world, if maybe you’re someone who’s way too okay being the person who bails.
Forget those who failed us: moms who couldn’t give up smoking when they were pregnant, knocked up by someone else’s boyfriend, at some party, in the bathroom or a car or a blanket on the ground or just the ground, moms who were proud not to believe in abortion, not for them, not for anyone, so now they have to believe in endless lives of penance and retribution, in working too hard for two bucks over minimum. The dull technicality of dads. Teachers too tired to care. Best friends who ODed. Anyone whispering, I love you. The people to vote for. Guys who spill paint then drive off.
Where do things begin? What if it’s when something goes away after one phone call and an appointment that Chup-boy drives you to, not even asking who the guy was? It’s okay. “It’s not bailing,” he said as he drove me back home. “I know,” I said. If I didn’t want that, what can I want?
My phone’s buzzing with a column of pandas and two target emojis, and outside is a howling siren as cops close in to manage it all, to make things disappear: the accident, this abandoned baby left in limbo, the line of rubber-necking traffic, all that spilled white paint. Maybe they’ll even get me and Chup-boy safely back home, though then there’s tomorrow and the next day.
I know I’m just remembering some line out of some dumb movie, but how do you miss something you never actually had? I should ask the geezer that. His pale eyes flicker, glisten.
“My little grandson died last week,” he says. “Why’s everything too late? And always wrong?”
I shake my head. He knows I don’t know why. But I’m still here, if only that could mean something more.
Leslie Pietrzyk’s (@lesliepwriter) collection of linked stories set in DC, Admit This to No One, was published in 2021 by Unnamed Press. Her first collection of stories, This Angel on My Chest, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Short fiction and essays have appeared in, among others, Ploughshares, Story Magazine, Hudson Review, Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, The Sun, Cincinnati Review, and The Washington Post Magazine. Awards include a Pushcart Prize in 2020.