"Shhh! Shhh! Come on, baby, shut up." I was holding the squabbling, crying Ian in my arms. It was one in the morning, Freddie just got home an hour ago from the late shift on the plant and I was tired as hell from busing tables all day for minimum wage just to get fired at the end of the day.
"I don't think he'll respond to 'shut up'" Freddie noted while sitting at the rickety table, bills spread out in front of him.
"Shut up Freddie," I said, still rocking the baby. He went back to the finances. I didn't know what gave me a worse headache, dealing with a screaming baby or dealing with the very little money and very big bills.
A bang on the door added to that headache. "Shut that baby up! God!" We have such good neighbors (not).
"I'm trying!" I yelled at Mrs. Megally but that caused Ian to scream louder.
"Come on baby. Shhh." I tried to soothe him but he was a stubborn one. Finally, Freddie decided he had enough and got up.
"Give him to me," he said with his arms out.
"No. I'm determined to calm him."
"Give him to me, Sam," he said. He had gotten braver since Ian was born. I didn't know if I liked that or not.
More banging. "Shut that damned kid up!"
I sighed and handed him over. After a few moments of hushing in his ear, Ian was fast asleep! Freddie is the only one who could get him to sleep. I would try for hours and he could get his eyelids closed within a minute or less. I'm his mother. I should be the one to get him to sleep.
He gave Ian back to me and I gently put him into his crib. I turned around and Freddie was looking at me with tired, baggy eyes.
"What?" I snapped in a whisper.
"We're screwed," he whispered back.
I exhaled slowly. "Let's go to bed."
"Why'd you get fired?" he asked, his back now turned to me as he straightened out the bed sheets on our tiny bed in our tiny one-room apartment building.
"That scumbag Mr. Simmons apparently warned me twice before about stealing the other girls' tips. I mean, come on, most of the girls are just saving up for makeup or a new car or something. None of them have a baby to take care of!"
"Shhh…" Freddie warned me with his index finger on his lips and his eyes on the crib just a few feet away. "I don't know what we're going to do. The landlord said if we don't pay him all the rent we owe him by the end of the month, he's going to evict us."
"Well… I don't know what to do. It's not like jobs are just falling from the sky."
Freddie sighed, "I don't think we're going to be able to stay in Seattle anymore."
"But where are we supposed to go? And you can't leave your job, then we'll both be out of work!" I said, getting into the bed.
There was a long silence. Freddie turned off the light (which had a tendency of blinking a lot) and got into bed with me. The only light shining now was from the streetlight across the street. I could see his silhouette but he stayed so still and so quiet that I thought he had fallen asleep.
He finally spoke, which startled me a little bit (only a little bit I swear). But what he said startled me a whole lot more. "We could move in with my mother."
"What?" I shot up from bed and immediately regretted what I said because the baby started crying again.
Freddie got up because he knew if I tried to put the baby back to sleep again it wouldn't get done until Ian fainted from exhaustion and the neighbors pounded holes into our door.
"We can't move in with that crazy lady!" I insisted in a whisper while Freddie rocked the baby and hummed in his ears. "I will not subject my baby to any more minutes than absolutely necessary with that woman!"
Freddie ignored me and continued to hum in the baby's ear. I stood there, trying to think about other options that we had other than asking his mother for help. But Carly was in her first semester of college and she was living in the dorms, Spencer had a wife and his own kid to take care of, my mom kicked me out the minute she found out about my pregnancy...
I couldn't move in with Freddie's mother! She hated me. She thinks I conned her son into teenage fatherhood. As if it had been my plan to get pregnant and ruin his life!
Once Ian was asleep again, Freddie finally spoke to me. "We have no other choice. What do you want to do? Be homeless?"
"I'd rather be on the street than live with your mother! And she might not allow me to move in! She might reject us!"
"That won't happen. It's either she lets all of us stay with her or…"
"Or what?"
"Or… we'll take her grandchild to the homeless shelter with us…" he sighed. "And she would die before she let that happen."
"I can't believe we are even considering this."
"What else do we have to consider? I'm not letting my child be on the streets."
And I did what I thought I would never do. I caved. I caved into Freddie's request.
"Fine," I said sourly.
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