Free Breakfast with Neruda by Laura Moe

Bob.”
    The waiter brings our lunches. A big pie-shaped yellow slab of eggs inside a crust with some fruit on the side. He refills my iced tea and Shelly’s water glass. We bite into our meals. I don’t know what to expect. The thing on my plate looks weird, but when I take a bite, my taste buds go into overdrive.
    “Wow, this is really good,” I say.
    “Told ya.” Shelly takes a sip of her wine.
    I want to devour it all at once, yet also take my time savoring the eggs and cheese and whatever else is in this quiche thing.
    “So what happened to Bob?” Shelly asks.
    I take a big bite and swallow. “He and my mom were saving to buy a house, so Bob started working a second job a couple nights a week. He tended bar at a place downtown.” I take a drink from my water, not wanting to tell this story. “Bob didn’t go in until nine or so, so he always read us stories before bed. Back then I went to bed around seven-thirty. He often read us tales from
The Arabian Nights
. He said those had been his favorite when he was a kid.”
    I chug some tea and wipe my mouth. “Anyway, one night he didn’t come home. When I got up the next morning my mom was in the kitchen sobbing her eyes out. Bob had been shot in a drive-by after work while walking to his car.”
    “Oh that’s terrible.”
    “Yeah. He got caught in the crossfire between gangs,” I say. “Things kind of headed downhill fast after that. Bob had only taught part-time, and didn’t have life insurance. We had to move out of the house since we couldn’t afford rent. Mom sold what she could and we ended up back in Rooster, where Mom came from. We lived with her mom for a while. But her mother threw us out.”
    “Why?”
    I grab Shelly’s wine and take a big swig. I set the glass back on the table, leaving my fingers around the base. “My mom, she was, well . . . she kind of went through a phase where she had a different guy every night.” I finish Shelly’s wine. “It may be how she made her living for a while.”
    “Oh.”
    “Yeah.” I can’t believe I’m telling her this. I don’t think anyone outside the family knows. “She finally found another husband, though. Tomas. We moved in with him in the townhouse where she lives now.”
    “So is your stepdad the reason you got tossed out?”
    “No. He’s been out of the picture for a while. Tomas was the total opposite of Bob. He drank, smoked pot, lived on welfare, and was an all-around asshole.”
    “Why did she marry him?”
    I shrug. “Who knows? Loneliness? Money? The bad thing is my mom drank with him, and the two of them just sat around the house drunk and stoned, so Jeff’s dad took him to live with him.”
    “How come he didn’t take you and Annie as well?”
    “He already had a whole family with his new wife.”
    “Oh.”
    “But Jeff has had it okay. His life is somewhat normal.”
    “So how bad was it for you and Annie?”
    “Kind of bad.” I suck down my tea until it’s just ice and set the glass down. “Tomas would take off for days, sometimes weeks at a time. Then he’d come back and act like it was normal for a husband to just disappear. If she yelled at him about it, he hit her.”
    “Did he ever abuse you or your sister?”
    “He came at me a couple of times, but I fought back. Tomas wasn’t a big guy, and by then I could almost kick his ass, especially when he was loaded.”
    “How long was he in the picture?”
    “He moved out at the end of my eighth-grade year.”
    It was shortly after that I started noticing the accumulation of things. The house had always been a mess, but things got worse. Piles of crap just grew. There were days my mom didn’t leave the house, but I am never telling Shelly this part of my story.
    “Eventually Tomas left for good,” I say. “He could be dead for all we know.”
    “Wow,” she says.
    “Yeah. I’ve had kind of a shaky history with dads, none of whom was my own.”
    The waiter fills my tea and sets a chocolate cupcake in