Everyday People by Stewart O’Nan Page A

she’d done something to her. Why did it always have to be like this?
    â€œMaybe,” she said.
    â€œSuit yourself,” her mother said, and went to change.
    Vanessa sat there chewing, staring at the sampler on the wall.
Bless this house.
What was she supposed to say to Chris? After Rashaan, he hardly came around. He still loved her, he said, but the way he said it made it clear he hadn’t planned on being a real father, that he thought it was a trap. It was a mistake, and she would have to pay for it, simply because she was a woman. How many times had her mother warned her. “You are not going to be like those Coleman girls dropping babies when they’re sixteen and living sorry lives. You’re not from that kind of people.” Vanessa never brought up her father, the fact that he left when she was just a baby, went off to Grenada and got killed, one of onlythree Americans. The odds were ridiculous. A stray bullet, a ricochet. The Marines called, and the Pentagon. Her mother kept his picture on her dresser, and one Veterans Day took her to plant a little flag at the cemetery. She wanted Vanessa to have what she’d lost—a man to help raise her baby, a real family, college, a chance to get ahead. It seemed she’d thrown everything away by keeping Rashaan. Like her mother said, it was too late to put him back now.
    Her mother returned in a powder-blue housedress and slippers, the belt knotted floppily at the waist. “Don’t you have homework?”
    â€œJust some reading.”
    â€œYou need me to watch him?”
    â€œIt’s all right.”
    â€œBecause I will. I’m just going to be watching TV.”
    â€œThat’s all right.”
    â€œOkay, baby. Don’t stay up too late.”
    â€œI won’t.”
    Her mother said this every night, even though she knew Rashaan wouldn’t be down till eleven. Half the time he was up again at two, needing to be rocked. She didn’t even have to turn the light on anymore, knew the exact number of steps to his crib, already had a clean spitcloth draped over the arm of the rocker. Sometimes that was the best time, there in the dark with the streetlight in the window, his lips tugging at her little finger, and sometimes it was the worst. She’d think of Chris alone in his room, stretched on the bed where they made love those cold mornings, cutting school, and she’d picture his legs beneaththe sheets, growing thinner, the muscle leaving him. “My pearl,” he used to sing after they made love, “my precious little girl,” coming on just too smooth so she’d laugh at him. It was good then, what he’d bring out in her. And then she’d think of Bean and of Miss Fisk not even crying at the funeral, how she didn’t let anyone help her back to the limo, slapping at Mr. Spinks the director’s hands when he tried to take her arm. All of that was history.
    Rashaan grabbed one of her string beans and crammed it in his mouth.
    â€œWhy you little crumbsnatcher,” she said, and swooped in and kissed him on the ear so he giggled.
    She finished her plate and rinsed it in the sink, the water calling her mother out of her room. “You do your homework and don’t worry about this mess,” she said, and Vanessa knew better than to argue, just thanked her again and unzipped her backpack.
    She’d found the Du Bois used at the campus store, a yellow sticker on the spine accusing her of being cheap, announcing it to the world. It was a cracked softback copy from the sixties.
The Souls of Black Folk: A Negro Classic,
the cover said. She gave Rashaan his blocks and opened her notebook on the kitchen table, but when she turned to the introduction she saw the pages were covered with highlighter, whole paragraphs double-underlined, the margins busy with scribble. Beside one line, the previous owner had written:
Bourgeois elitist garbage.
It looked like a woman’s writing,