All She Can Take

T H I R T E E N

The bus pushed musty air into Sid's face causing the bangs she flat ironed into submission this morning to fly up over her head. She flattened them back down with her hands as she boarded the rumbling machine. She squeezed her hips into a seat between an older woman and a young man and nervously pawed her bangs over her forehead again. Turning up looking like a disheveled mess and was the last thing she wanted. Specifically, because she was going to see Aiden. He'd already won in her eyes on so many levels. It seemed the least she could do to reclaim some dignity was to look presentable. If not quite presentable, at least not look defeated. 

She smoothed her hands over her jean skirt that she'd picked because it made her feel younger. Not younger, she was young. It made her feel like a young twenty-something instead of like a mom. This jean skirt reminded her of the fourteen-year-old girl who switched her much smaller hips through her neighborhood with reckless abandon. Commanding stares from men who had no business looking, expertly pumping her legs through endless double dutch matches, and riding her bike like the wind. All the things she did before she watched her dad disappear and die.

She often felt decades older from a life filled with things her eyes weren't ready to see, hurts she never thought she'd endure, and a lot of trying. Exhaustive trying. Sitting on the bus, Sid allowed her eyes to close for a moment. Allowed being so damn exhausted to finally catch up to her. The bus rocked and she tried to stay awake but it wasn't long before she was drifting off. 

In her dream, spring had begun to relent itself completely to summer. Humidity was nestled around everyone on the train platform that day but her Dad still wore a long sleeve work shirt the color of the clear blue sky over dark blue jeans and his Fedora hat. The one with the vibrant feathers fastened to the side. As they sometimes did, her dreams skipped time. One minute she was beside him. The next she was walking down the platform closing in on the man who looked so out of place now. Then the thud and after that, she was watching his hat, no longer on his head, but floating above the crowd until it settled on the hard concrete. 

The scream pierced through her reverie and she awakened back on the bus trying to catch her breath and push the cries back into a place. Running her hands over her jean skirt again. Yeah, it made her feel young but no matter what time in her childhood she tried to escape to, she was cruelly aware that her youth was always hurtling toward that day. No piece of clothing could change that. Everything after that until she went off to college was her staking out a killer at the chicken joint or spending hours in her room mapping out bus routes to get her across the borough.

Sidney finally stepped off the bus over an hour later. She cursed as she primped herself as best she could during the short walk over to Aiden's. She shouldn't care this much. I don't care. She chanted to herself. She just didn't want to look like she'd been unemployed for a week. The phone calls from bill collectors had already started. Her voicemail was perpetually full but there was nothing she could do about it. She barely had the money before and had less than nothing now. 

But she knew better than anyone that as long as you looked put together, presented a full and complete person when you stepped outside, people would not inquire about what was really going on backstage. The hope that her costume held up at least for the next twenty minutes. She took a deep breath as she ascended the porch stairs of a quaint colonial home. Sid pressed the doorbell and waited.

Aiden answered the door with excitement that oversold the moment. "Hi!" he shoved the greeting at her. They never knew how to be around one another anymore. They'd been knocked out of their groove and had no idea how to fit themselves into a new one.

"Issues?" Sid pointed to the red handprint on Aiden's white button-up that looked just the size of AJ's hand.

"Yeah, he's not eating." Aiden dropped the act and let his shoulders shrink with frustration.