Page 42 of It's Me They Follow
“Finally, the real you has arrived. You’re not a sunny day; you’re a hailstorm,” The Shopkeeper said to her sister, clapping.
“I have to pee!” her sister hollered over the milieu. “Don’t follow me.” She jumped up to get out of the booth, and a flood of water and emotion splashed to the ground from between her legs. Her sister had lost control. The Shopkeeper stood there, wet-faced and shocked. She was happy to have won the argument but sad at what it had just cost them both. She could not cry. Or speak. She was numb and dumb—stupefied. Her heart raced. “I deserve sweet...” she tried to tell herself. “I d-deserve s-sweet...” but her words stuttered and slurred. She slumped and burped. She couldn’t lie, especially to herself. It was the moonshine. She deserved what she’d gotten, an ice-cold bitter splash in her face.
“You deserve to be slapped.” Elle waddled her way back to the bathroom.
“‘Spare the rod, spoil the child,’” The Shopkeeper mocked. It was all those years of being slapped and choked that had landed them here in the first place.
“Another moonshine?” the wide-hipped woman asked The Shopkeeper, handing her a napkin and another drink. “And a mop?”
The Shopkeeper pointed at the small puddle and trail Elle had left behind on the floor. “Yeah. And maybe anambulance.” She lay on her side in a fetal position, holding the table as her world spun with guilt. She drowned in a swamp of denial; she dozed off to sleep, dreaming water was running down her legs.It was the moonshine, she thought.
Chapter 24
EVEN LATER THAT EVENING
9:33 P.M.
Two big, burly EMT workers rushed to the back of the shack with their gurney. “Excuse me, ma’am,” one yelled at The Shopkeeper, who lay sleeping. “Excuse ME!” He almost touched her.
“ME?!” She startled out of her dream. In the dream, he was reaching for her, and she was just about to give him her hand when a shot of adrenaline in the form of a screaming EMT worker shocked her awake and sobered her up. “Yes,” she yelled, half dreaming.
“Someone said your water broke.” He softened.
Just then, Elle came waddling out of the bathroom toward them in her silk muumuu. “May I help you?” she said to the big, burly guys with her hands on her hips. She barely came to their shoulders.
“No, it’s the other way around.” He laughed at Elle. “Our job is to help you.”
“Thank you, but NO thank you.” She would not be helped.She was not heading to a hospital. She did not want them to check her vitals. She was having a home birth—at home with her grandmother! She would let the chips fall where they may. She’d had her first contraction. It hadn’t been so bad. She let them know that. “Unless I’m being arrested, with all due respect, please help me by kindly getting out of my way.”
Neither The Shopkeeper nor the EMTs could force anyone, especially Elle, to stay in the middle of nowhere to have a baby. Nor could The Shopkeeper let Elle drive the rest of the way home alone. Elle handed the shorter EMT some rolled-up money. “Consider this payment to leave us alone.”
He looked at the money in his hand. Put it into his pocket without hesitation and stepped out of their way.
Her sister waddled past the ambulance, toward the parking lot. The Shopkeeper followed. “If you’re getting in”—she looked at The Shopkeeper as she got into the car—“let’s go.” Suddenly The Shopkeeper was an accomplice to Elle’s getaway. This trip was a setup, just like she’d thought.
At night, the road along the route turned black. Lights were fewer and farther between. There were trees, animals, rivers, and breeze, but you couldn’t see. Radio silence played between the sisters, loud and clear, on repeat. The smell of night air snapped The Shopkeeper back to reality.It reminded her to keep her feet on the ground and her head out of the clouds.Just breathe, she told herself.You’re gonna be someone’s auntie soon. If you can teach the baby anything, teach them that. Just breathe.
“Thirty minutes,” Elle said, knowing what The Shopkeeper would ask. “They’ve been coming thirty minutes apart since my water broke.”
“We’ll just breathe,” The Shopkeeper told her sister, trying to relax them both. “We have three hours to go,” she rambled, as if Elle didn’t know. “That’s if we don’t stop anymore, and you probably have quite a few more centimeters to go. The answer, when you have no other answer, is just breathe.” The Shopkeeper wanted to be excited, but she was also aware of all the things that could happen along the way. “Let’s sing ‘Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It’ to get us through,” she suggested.
“Us?” Elle questioned. “This isn’t affecting us. It’s me.”
“It’s us now,” The Shopkeeper disagreed.
They could sing their way through anything when they were younger. It wasn’t until the third contraction—the one when the convertible was swerving while they were trying to shoulder shimmy, with people honking and giving them the middle finger—that they both began to question the viability of their plan to forge ahead. On the last swerve, they hit a pothole, and The Shopkeeper felt her stomach drop between her toes. “Pull over.” She couldn’ttake it. The soul food would be coming back up if she wasn’t careful. “Please.”
“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” her sister eked out in pain. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” The convertible was parked in a middle lane of a four-lane highway. Her sister held her head back, her hands choking the steering wheel’s throat. Her body stiff. Her legs extended and fully forced down flat on the brake and the clutch. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”
The Shopkeeper flipped on the hazard lights. “Okay,” she said in her softest customer-service voice. She was finding out she worked well under pressure. “We are gonna get through this together.” And as she said it, she believed. “Just breathe.”
Her sister nodded her head in an alarming and intense yes.
“Stars?” The Shopkeeper asked for a promise.
“Stars,” Elle agreed.
“This contraction is NOT gonna last forever. If you can breathe, that’s all you need.” They inhaled and exhaled in sync, the way The Shopkeeper had learned in class.
