“Lois…” her mother said. Her voice was a low moan.
For a moment Lois was tempted to pretend she didn’t know her. She was mortified, and it felt like her skin was hot all the way from her head to her feet.
Clark glanced from Lois to Ellen, and to Lois’s chagrin, an expression of understanding passed over his face. He wasn’t carrying his messenger bag anymore. Instead he was wearing a blue fanny pack with the bag facing forward.
It should have looked stupid, like most of the fanny packs Lois had seen over the last couple of years, but he wore it like an electrician’s tool belt. He unzipped it and reached inside.
Stepping forward, he said, “Maybe this will help.”
In his hand was a pack of baby wipes. Lois stared at them for a moment as he held them out. Glancing back at her mother, she winced.
“Thanks,” she said. She took the wipes and walked back to her mother, who had fallen to her side. She helped her mother clean up as well as she could, cleaning her face and hands and what she could of her hair. Her mother’s breath smelled foul, and Lois wished she’d brought a breath mint.
There had been a time when she didn’t go anywhere without one, but since she’d moved in with her father, she’d thought all of this had been left behind. She glanced up at Clark, who was pulling bags out of the dumpster and piling them on his cart and purposefully not looking in their direction.
She gathered the dirty baby wipes and returned to Clark. “Are you done?”
He glanced inside the dumpster, and then nodded.
Lois threw the dirty wipes into the dumpster, and then carefully wiped her own hands with a clean wipe. It was only then that she returned the rest of the pack to Clark. “Thanks for this.”
He looked behind her, at her mother who was still sitting on the dirty alley floor. She was swaying.
“Are you going to need some help?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” Lois admitted. “I’m not sure she can walk. I’d bring my car around, but I’m afraid to leave her by herself.”
“Your car is out front?” Clark asked.
Lois nodded.
“Let me help you,” Clark said. He put the remaining baby wipes in his fanny pack, zipped it up and walked toward Ellen.
“Ms. Lane?” he said. “My name is Clark. I’m a friend of your daughter’s from school.”
Ellen squinted at him and shook her head. “Lois doesn’t know any boys.” She swayed; obviously shaking her head had been a mistake.
Lois grimaced. Just because she hadn’t introduced any of the boys from school to her mother didn’t mean she didn’t know any. It just meant that it was too much of a risk; sober Ellen was bad enough, but drunk Ellen was a nightmare.
He reached out and took her hand. He tugged, and she rose to her feet. She staggered and felt onto Clark, hugging him.
Lois winced. She wasn’t sure she’d gotten Ellen completely clean, given the dimness of the alley, and given the smell of her breath…she rushed forward.
Clark acted as though nothing had happened. “Can you walk?”
Ellen swayed, and as Lois reached her, she slid to her knees. Undoubtedly the skirt she was wearing was going to be ruined; somehow Lois suspected that she was going to be blamed for it in the morning. It wasn’t as though she could carry her mother.
Clark knelt and put one hand behind Ellen’s back and the other underneath her knees. He stood up effortlessly. Glancing back at Lois, he said, “I’ll get her to your car if you’ll grab my bike.”
Lois nodded uncertainly. Her mother wasn’t a small woman; she had to weigh a hundred and fifty pounds. There was no way he’d be able to carry her like this for very far, although she thought the effort was sweet.
She went back to his bike and kicked the kickstand into place. Pulling it, she was surprised at the weight the wagon added.
He nodded as she approached and turned.
“What do you have in here?” Lois asked, “Bricks?”
“Aluminum cans and glass bottles,” Clark said. “I’m saving the earth and all that.”
Lois couldn’t help the expression of disgust on her face. “You dig through the trash? I thought you already had a couple of jobs.”
“I can make forty bucks in a couple of hours easy,” Clark said. “Neither of my other jobs pay near that.”
“You make twenty bucks an hour digging through trash?” Lois’s voice echoed in the alley. Most of her friends were making three dollars an hour working in fast food or at the mall. She didn’t know many adults who made that kind of money, other than her father.
“On weekends,” Clark said. “Pickings aren’t as good on school nights so I don’t bother.”
“I still don’t understand how it can possibly pay that well,” Lois said. “Trash?”
“Aluminum prices are high,” Clark said, shrugging, which was impressive since he was still carrying her mother. “Eventually everybody will start doing it, and the prices will drop, but in the meantime every dollar I make is one step closer to college.”
Lois felt a flash of guilt; Clark had spent money helping her clean her car earlier and he hadn’t asked her to reimburse him. She should have insisted. She hadn’t realized that he was going to these kinds of extremes to make money.
It couldn’t be safe, digging through the trash at bars. Lois had heard of people being stabbed in these places. She’d been lucky never to have seen it for herself, but knowing it happened had increased her anxiety about her mother’s safety.
Ellen moaned and snuggled into Clark’s shoulder and Lois winced. There was no telling what his shirt was going to look like. He’d been crawling through garbage and he still smelled a lot better than her mother.
“I’m sorry about all this,” she said uncomfortably.
“I was going to the Laundromat after I finished here anyway,” Clark said. “It’s no big deal.”
“And then you deliver papers?” Lois asked. “Don’t you ever sleep?”
“I’ll nap after I deliver the papers,” Clark said.
It almost made the six to seven hours of sleep Lois allowed herself seem like a luxury. She was exhausted even now, and the weight of pulling the bicycle and the wagon behind it was making her arms burn.
Clark didn’t even seem winded. Given the way he’d caught the beer bottle earlier in the evening, there was no question I Lois’s mind that he should have been on the football team. It was strange; although he obviously rode miles and miles a day, he didn’t have the lean build of a bicyclist. He was built more like a football player.
“Have you ever considered joining the team?” Lois asked.
“After tonight?”
“Before that,” Lois said. “You’d get a scholarship easy.”
“How do you know I’d be any good?” he asked, smirking.
Lois glanced pointedly at her mother and Clark looked down as though he’d forgotten all about her. They were almost back to Lois’s car, having circled the block.
Clark staggered a little, and then said “She’s getting a little heavy.”
“I’m serious,” Lois said. “You’re working yourself to death when you could take an easier way out.”
He stopped and turned. “There’s no guarantee that I’d get a scholarship, and football takes a lot of time. I wouldn’t be able to work and stay on the team. It’s pretty expensive to be on the team anyway; players are expected to pay for a lot of the trips.”
Lois could tell that these weren’t the only reasons; he was looking away from her as he said it. The fact that he’d thought about it and decided that it wasn’t for him made her a little sad.
Of course, if he had been on the team, he’d have been as upset as the other players when Lois’s story came out, so maybe it was for the best.
“If you’ll get the door,” Clark said. He grunted and sagged a little, as though Ellen was getting heavy, but the timing was off somehow. It was almost as though he was faking being tired.
Lois raced for the passenger door and opened it.
Clark gently leaned forward and slid Ellen Lane into the passenger’s seat.
Lois had done this very thing more times than she cared to remember, and in her experience, maneuvering someone’s dead weight was clumsy, exhausting and difficult. There’d been times it had taken Lois ten minutes just to get Ellen in her seat and the seat belt snapped in place.
Clark made it look easy.
He leaned forward to snap the seatbelt into place, and to Lois’s horror Ellen woke up.
“Pedro!” she said.
For a moment Lois had the horrible notion that she was going to try to kiss Clark. Ellen sometimes got overly affectionate, especially with men. She sought constant reassurances that she was still young and beautiful.
Before Clark could react, Ellen wrapped her arms around him and started sobbing.
Clark tensed for a moment, and then he relaxed, although he was still bent over her. He said something to Ellen in a low, soothing tone, and a moment later she released her grip. He clicked the seatbelt into place and then he said something else to her.
A moment later he closed the passenger side door.
There was an odd expression on Ellen’s face, strangely thoughtful. Lois hadn’t seen an expression like that on her mother and certainly not when she was drunk.
Clark turned to face her.
“Thank you so much,” Lois said. “I don’t know what I’d have done…I couldn’t just leave her in the alley.”
“You’d have figured out something,” Clark said. He reached into his fanny pack and pulled out a card. Handing it to her, he said “If it gets to be too much, you might consider calling these people.”
Lois glanced at the card and scowled. She said “You don’t know anything about my family! You think church is going to fix any of this?” It surprised Lois how quickly gratitude turned to anger. How dare he judge her? How dare he judge her mother?
Lois could judge Ellen all she wanted, but no stranger had the right to look down on her.
From his expression, Lois could see that Clark realized how upset she was getting. He frowned and seemed to struggle with himself for a moment.
“I had three foster parents who were alcoholics,” Clark said. He looked at her and didn’t look away. “Some of them could get mean sometimes.”
Lois opened her mouth to say something, and found that she couldn’t think of anything to say. As quickly as the anger had appeared, it vanished. Obviously, this wasn’t the kind of secret that was to be shared lightly; she knew just how hard it was to open up about it.
“Brother Wayman was able to help me make some sense of it all,” Clark said. “He’s got a lot of connections and he could probably find somebody to help.”
The parking lot was almost empty, with just Lois’s car, Ellen’s car and the cars of four other people in the lot. It suddenly occurred to Lois that she might have been able to bang on the back door and have gotten some help.
“I’m sorry,” Lois said. “It’s just…”
“Family,” Clark said. He smiled wistfully. “You love them no matter what.”
Lois stared at him for a long moment, wondering what there was about his expression that made her chest tighten up.
“I should get going,” Clark continued. “I have clothes to wash and papers to deliver.”
“Right,” Lois said, feeling suddenly awkward and embarrassed. “I’m sure Lucy is going out of her mind by now. We’d better get back.”
He nodded and stepped forward, taking his bicycle from her. “If you need anything, just let me know.”
Pushing the bicycle a little away from her, he mounted it, and a moment later he rode off into the darkness.
