Family Recipe

Scarlett wouldn’t stop screaming, and Justin didn’t know what to do. He left her in her rickety crib in the room that smelled like maybe something had crawled in between the walls and died—another thing he hadn’t got around to figuring out yet—and dug frantically through the bathroom cabinet hoping there was some baby Tylenol in there or something, and found only dusty cotton wool, a pack of Band-Aids, a tube of toothpaste as hard as cement, and a bottle of Calamine lotion he couldn’t even shift because something had been spilled in there are some point and now the bottle was stuck like glue to the shelf of the cabinet.

He slammed the cabinet shut, rattling the cracked mirror that was set into the door. His stark reflection stared back at him, wild-eyed and frantic. He was losing it. He was fucking losing it, it was the middle of the night, and Scarlett was still screaming.

Four days.

It had only been four days since he’d got back into town, and he was already proving what he knew everybody thought: that there was no way in hell Justin O’Dwyer could keep those kids together. No way he wouldn’t fuck it up, because everyone in Enterprise knew that the O’Dwyers were nothing but trash and Justin was no different than the rest of them.

From the room next door, Scarlett’s wails sharpened in pitch and Justin’s eyes stung.

“Okay,” he said, hurrying back into the bedroom. Scarlett was sitting in her crib, her thin onesie soaked in sweat. Her fingers were clenched tightly around the bars of the crib and her hair, usually wispy and downy, was plastered to her head as though Justin had just lifted her out of the bath. “Okay.”

A bath.

He could do that. He had vague memories of being sick as a kid, and Mom running him a bath to try to get his temperature down.

Justin lifted Scarlett into his arms, stepping back carefully to avoid his still-unpacked suitcase lying on the floor between the crib and the bed. Scarlett screamed again, her hot little body like a furnace against his chest. She pushed against him like she was trying to get away, and Justin leaned down by the bed and let her go. She flopped against the mattress and cried weakly as he unfastened her onesie and then her diaper. Then he carried her into the bathroom.

He held her on his hip as he ran the water in the bath, shifting from side to side hoping the rhythm would soothe her, but in the cramped confines of the little bathroom her cries seemed even louder than before.

Justin closed his eyes and tried not to hear them.

A week ago he’d had a normal life. He’d been just about to take his GED Preparation Practice Test at the community college in Pendleton when he got the call. Four hours after that he’d been back in Enterprise like he’d never left this shitty corner of Oregon to begin with, looking down at his mother’s body and telling the guy with the forms that yes, that was her. That was his mom, though she hadn’t looked right, unmoving and expressionless and gone in ways that Justin still hadn’t got his mind around. That was his mom with her lank dark hair, her thin mouth, and that faint scar under her right eye from when her cousin threw a rock at her when she was a kid. That was his mom with the track marks up both arms, even though last time he’d spoken to her she’d promised she was clean.

For the baby, she’d said. She was staying clean for the baby. And she’d sounded like she meant it too, so Justin hadn’t pointed out he’d heard the same when Harper was born, and when Wyatt was born. He’d been hearing her tell herself that this time would be different his whole life. It was why he left.

It was why the kids didn’t even know him.

Harper had barely been walking when Justin had packed his bags and left home at fifteen. She said she didn’t remember him, and he didn’t know if that was true or not because she yelled it like an accusation, like a reason to hate him, and maybe it was. Harper was six now. Wyatt was four, and Justin had only met him once or twice before, though sometimes Mom had sent him pictures that he’d saved on his phone. And Scarlett was only fourteen months old, and Justin hadn’t even held her until four days ago.

He didn’t know these kids. He didn’t know how to be a big brother, let alone a goddamn parent.

Scarlett’s screams were all the proof he needed of that.