The Last Jeskey - Chapter 21

 

The Last Jeskey

By Karen Singer

 

Chapter 21

 

(Day 4 – Sunday)

 

Freaky

 

I didn’t start at the top of my head, but with Shantel sitting next to me, I grabbed a wad of my hair from my lap and pulled it into three sections.  It was kind of awkward, but I was very used to playing with my hair.  I just wasn’t used to playing with it when it didn’t have all the knots in it that it had always had.  Very carefully, I began trying to bring one section over the middle section, back and forth from each side.  “It’s working!” I said delightedly.  “It’s a braid!”

“Of course,” Shantel told me.

I kept at it, making the braid I was creating grow longer and longer.  “I like this!” I said excitedly.

“Baby Doll,” Shantel said, “I love doing it too.  You’ve just got a bit more hair to braid than anyone I’ve ever done it to.”

“You’ve got a braid going,” Lisa said as she walked up.  She had been off getting counseled for a while.

“Look!” I said excitedly, holding my braid up that I was creating.  “I’m braiding.”

“I see that,” Lisa said.

I happily went back to what I was doing.

“How’d it go?” Shantel asked Lisa.

“Miss Kriss found a job for me.”

“A job!  Oh Leese, that’s wonderful.”

“It’s only part time, and they have to see how I’ll work out, but I start tomorrow.”

Shantel got up from her seat and hugged Lisa.  “That’s wonderful,” she told her.  “What kind of job is it?” Shantel asked as she sat down again.

“It’s just working in a store.  I’ll just be doing things like stocking the shelves and stuff for now.  But if they think I’m going to work out alright, they’ll have me doing other things, including with the customers.  I just have to prove that I’m going to be able to do it.”

“You can do it!” Shantel told her happily.  “And you know it!”

I saw Lisa smile.  “Yeah.  I think I can.”

“I don’t understand?” I said.  “A job?”

“Yeah.  So she can earn money for herself.”

I really didn’t understand now.  “But money is men’s business.  Girls don’t need to know anything about money.”

“Honey Pie,” Shantel said.  “That is nothing but a load of malarky.  Everybody needs to know about money, and everybody needs money!  It’s the most important thing in the world.”

I didn’t have a clue what malarky was, but I ignored that.  “What do you mean, a job?” I asked.  “I know what my job is supposed to be at home.  My job is to take care of the guys, but…what does it mean when you’re not at home?”

“Let’s see,” Shantel said.  “How can we explain it so that you can actually understand?”

Lisa leaned toward me.  “Freaky,” she said.  “When you do something, like…I don’t know, clean a room, or cook dinner, or…anything you have to work at.  Each of those things is like a job.  Things are kind of the same right here.  We all have a job to do to clean this place up every day.  We take turns doing the job of making food for everyone to eat.  Every little thing we do can be thought of like a job.”

“Oh,” I said.  “Okay, that makes sense.  So you’re going to have another job along with doing all that here.”

“Yes,” she replied.  “Exactly.  But unlike the few things I actually do around here, I’m going to have a number of different things to do at the store they’re sending me to.  All those different little things I do there can be thought of as one job that I’ll be doing for the store.”

I had to think about that while my fingers still worked on creating a braid.  “So it’s just like my job at home, what I do around the house for the guys?  I cook, and I clean, and I do everything I can to take care of them.  That’s my job, and you’ll have a job like that at the store.”

“Right!” Shantel told me.

I nodded.  “I’ve always known it was my job to take care of the guys, and it’s their job to take care of me.  That’s just men’s business and women’s business using different words.  It’s just that, I’ve never seen a store before.  I’ve heard the guys talk about it all the time, but I’ve never been off the farm.  I don’t know what you’ll be doing there.  Cooking?  Cleaning?  What?”

“I’m sure I’ll be doing plenty of cleaning,” Lisa told me.  “But I seriously doubt I’ll be doing any cooking at all.”

“Will you tell me all about what the store is like when you’re done?”

“You bet!” Lisa said.  “I’ll be happy to.”

I went back to creating my braid.  It was really getting long now.  And then that woman with the baby walked into the room, and the baby began to cry.  I looked up from my braid to watch her carrying the baby to a seat where she could see that TV thing.  I tried to concentrate on making my braid, but I couldn’t seem to help myself.  I had to keep looking at her…and her baby.

“Do you want to see the baby?” Shantel asked me.

I looked back and forth between Shantel and Lisa.  “Do you think she’d mind?”

“Honey Pie, knowing Bess, she not only won’t mind, but she’d love for you to hold it for her.”

“Really?” I said.  I considered that.  “But…should I?  It looks so…I don’t know.  Helpless maybe?  I don’t want to hurt it.”

Shantel grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet.  I immediately worried about the braid that I had been making falling apart, but I soon forgot about that.  The three of us walked over to where that woman was watching TV while trying to get her baby to stop crying.  She looked up at us as soon as we got close.

“Sorry,” she said.  “He never stops crying.  I’m trying to get him to, but he just keeps doing it.”

“Bess,” Lisa said.  “Freaky here has never held a baby before.  Would you mind much if she holds him?”

Bess practically jumped out of her chair at me.  She held the baby out toward me.  “Here!” she said.  “Take him.”

I didn’t know what to do, but Lisa showed me.  Softly she said, “Hold your arms out so that she can lay his head in the crook of your arm.  Little by little, she talked me through having the baby transferred into my arms.  It felt like when I accidentally touched a bad part of an electrical cord, and I shocked myself.  My whole body felt that electric jolt.

“Sit down with him,” Shantel suggested and helped to guide me into a seat.

I couldn’t take my eyes off that tiny person in my arms.  He was so soft.  So…different.  I just wanted to hold him and look at him.  I chanced squeezing him in my arms just a bit, and he started to stop crying.  I held him a bit tighter, and his crying stopped completely.

“He likes you,” Lisa said softly.

I looked up at her.  “It’s a baby,” I said.  “I’ve never even seen a baby before.  I saw some baby bears a few times.  Ben called them cubs.  I’ve seen lots of baby chickens, and I’ve seen lots of baby pigs, but I’ve never seen a baby person before.”

“Where the hell did you come from, Mars?” Bess said.

“No.  The farm,” I replied as I went back to looking into the face of the baby.  So soft, and he smelled weird, but nice too.

And then Shantel did something that really surprised me.  Very softly, she started singing.  I had heard the guys sing a little bit every once in a while, but it was just a tiny bit here and there.  I had heard music coming from their cellphones once in a while too, but I had never actually heard a person sing something that sounded so nice.  And she was doing it right in front of me.  Girls are supposed to stay quiet and out of sight.  Singing is not staying quiet.  Despite that, I couldn’t stop listening to it.

I had no idea what song she was singing.  Something about rocking a baby up in the top of a tree or something, and then the wind rocking it.  Something like that.  I only knew that it sounded amazingly nice, and holding the baby in my arms was amazingly nice.  When the song ended, I was wishing she would sing it again.

I looked back down at the baby.  He was sound asleep.

“Can you hold him a bit more?” Lisa asked me.

I could hold him in my arms like that forever.  “I’m good,” I replied.

“Keep holding him for a while then and give Bess a rest.  Let’s just watch some TV.”

Watch TV?  I didn’t understand the TV.  What I wanted was to sit there and hold the baby, and listen to Shantel sing again.  That had been…wonderful!

And then it all got ruined!

“There you are Freaky,” Mrs. Moore said as she walked up to us.  “Look what I found for you.”

She held up a pair of shoes.  White shoes.  Shoes that were unlike anything I had ever seen before.

“Sneakers!” Lisa exclaimed.  “Freaky, you’re going to love them.”

I looked at them in Mrs. Moore’s hand, and I could just imagine walking around the farm in them.  The mud and dirt would probably destroy them in about a day.  I wasn’t given much of a choice though.  While I sat there holding the baby, Lisa and Shantel pulled my boots off my feet, and stuck those sneakers on.

Mrs. Moore took my boots and said, “I’ll just put these somewhere else…like maybe the trash.  She walked away with my boots.  Now what was I going to do?