Gypsy Davey by Chris Lynch Page B

don’t what they say or what they think or whatever about how maybe Jo does or can or doesn’t or can’t take care of the baby Dennis but it’s all just stupid as hell because I can take care of the baby Dennis and that’s that.
    They said that maybe ’cause Jo isn’t there at the house all the time and because her old man like she calls him isn’t there at all and because the baby Dennis spent too much time with nobody stopping him from standing up in his little cracked painted crib that was mine a long time ago that Ma said Jo stole but if it was mine I say he can have it so never mind Ma and Jo and all their stuff. Staring out the window chewing enoughof the paint off the side of the crib and some more off the windowsills when he goes there to stare some more that now he has to go to children’s hospital every week and let them look at his blood and he has to take some medicine they think that’s the reason that maybe he should get taken away.
    But who doesn’t stare out the window is what I say. If I had a nickel for every hour I spent staring out the window at maybe a cloud that looks like my mother’s ice-white pretty face or at the rain that looks like the drops grow and grow into blobby clear water balloons as they get closer to the ground because I have eyes good enough that I can zero in on one single one from all that far away. Or at a star in the purple at night. For a million hours I could do that. Well if I had a nickel for all the times I did that I’d just have a lot of money is what I’d have.
    And I make him take his medicine anyway. All the time just like he’s supposed to I make him swallow it even though he hates it and he gets crazy and he hates me for giving it to him and he slaps me and scratches me and kicks me and there is nothing nothing that can hurt me like my baby Dennis trying to hurt me. I used to come just some days but now I come practically every day because Jo isn’t so serious as maybe she ought to be about giving the baby Dennis his medicine and once she found out that I was very serious about it I think that just maybe she forgot a couple of times on purpose just to make sure I’dcome and boom she could get out of the apartment like on a rocket ship. And giving me two glasses of wine now because she’s so happy to be going and I’m so happy to be staying.
    But some of the things she does like they say because the law makes her like she does take him to children’s hospital all the time. I tell her maybe I should go with her sometimes so that I can understand things more and so she doesn’t maybe forget or not care enough about something the doctor might be telling her to do. She tells me to forget it and that once the doctors get a load of me they’ll take the baby Dennis and they’ll take me and they’ll throw her Joanne into jail for conducting experiments at home so I should shut up and drink my grape and leave the fucking mothering to her is the end of what she tells me.
    And when they told her she had to move out of that old house because it wasn’t safe for the baby Dennis she did but she moved to another house that had the same unsafe stuff in it because she found out about this thing where you don’t have to pay any rent if the landlord doesn’t take care of the problems so she does that not paying rent for a few months until she gets chased out and can find another unsafe place. So you keep the goddamn baby away from the goddamn windowsills Davey is what she says about it and is that so hard that it shouldn’t be a decent trade all that rent money that can go to food that will fill the baby up and he won’t wantto be eating no windowsills like he does. Only I haven’t seen hundreds of bucks of new food going into the baby Dennis since all this started.
    But all the bad stuff was when I wasn’t here when I didn’t know but now I am and now I do so they