Delivery

Loud fixtures in the stairwell cut shards of awful light into whatever sleep the girl still had in her. They stepped out into the parking lot. Her pajama feet--shoved into snow boots--began to collect sweat, started to itch. Her little brother asked for donuts, and then sneezed. Their mother didn’t answer. She had darted ahead to the snow-covered car, scraping at the ice on the door handle with her key in search of the keyhole.

“Careful, guys, it’s icy!” she yelled without looking back, her words filling puffs of visible air in the yellow beam of the street lamp. 

The girl grabbed her brother’s hand--a red mitten soggy with snot--and told him to keep walking, go back to sleep, both at the same time. This was every morning, except Saturday and Sunday.  

“We’re getting donuts, right?” he looked up at her and she could see the sleep fading from his face. That would make it all go much more slowly. She knew they had to sleep if they wanted the time to fly by and the car to be warm. When they were awake, it took so long and felt so cold. 

“Shhh,” she told him, picking up the end of his scarf, and wrapping it around his mouth three times until his whole face disappeared. The gray rumble of the car cut into the silence. As it crescendoed and settled to an uneven hum, the girl could hear radio voices bring the chatter of that bigger, warmer world into the cold belly of the car. 

“Let’s go,” Mom shout-whispered with one foot still on the icy ground and the other inside the car. The tail lights lit the kids’ faces, eyes widened and blinking. “Come on--get back to sleep,” she said as she stood up and slid the front seat forward, making room for them to climb into the back, into sleeping bags spread flat beneath the frosty rear glass of the hatchback.

“Are we getting donuts?” the boy asked again. 

One time they stopped for donuts after they finished the route. It was a warm September morning with a watercolor sunrise that turned off the street lights and woke up the birds. Morning sounds came through the car window as they rounded a corner out of a wooded road and onto the main drag. 

“What do you think they’re saying?” the mother asked. 

“They’re saying we should get donuts!” the girl said. 

“Donuts!” her brother shouted. So they got donuts that day, and each morning when they left the apartment at 3am in their pajamas, he hoped it would happen again. 

“Shh,” the girl said, shoving her brother into his sleeping bag like she was packing a sandwich. “Go back to sleep.” He rubbed his snotty nose into his pillow as the door closed and the mother turned down the radio just enough to hear his tiny snore. The girl climbed into her own sleeping bag, rolling a bit over her little brother as the car moved backwards through the world. 

She waited a minute, deciding whether to be a grown-up that morning, or to be a child. She was nine, and could do either at any time. It was her superpower. 

“Are we?” she asked. “Are we going to have donuts?” There was no reason to expect they would. 

“We’ll see,” said their mother into the rear-view mirror, the way mothers do when they talk to their children in sleeping bags in a hatchback while they’re delivering the Wall Street Journal at three in the morning.

When the girl opened her eyes, it was full-on daylight, a crisp and blinding sun that came from all sides. Her brother’s sleeping bag was empty, still-zipped and shedded cocoon-like in the corner. In three years, they’d never seen such bright and startling daylight on that trip. 

“Mom?” 

The engine was off, and the driver’s side door was open, but the air outside was almost warm–not the thick, hard cold she expected. She climbed out of her sleeping bag and through the crack between the front seats, then poked her head out into the warm world until she could see her mom and her brother, their backs framed by the green and brown of unfamiliar woods. Her brother’s pajamas were at his feet while he peed against a tree, his mother’s hands on his shoulders, his naked butt facing the road. “Where are we?” she yelled, wondering how long they had driven to outrun winter. 

“You’re up!” said the mother, bending down to zip up the boy’s pajamas. “We’re about six miles from Virginia Beach.”

“The beach?” She thought perhaps she was still sleeping. It was March, which was the month she always thought should turn to spring, but always stuck in winter. She leaned into the car to look at the clock, its numbers still invisible with the engine stopped. The giant bag of newspapers was still sitting full, gray, and awful in the passenger seat. 

“What about the–”

“Fuck ‘em,” said the mother as she helped the boy climb back into the car. The girl had never heard her mother say that word before. She backed up startle-faced into the back seat so her brother could climb in behind her. 

“Fuck ‘em,” he said, tumbling between the front seats, into the flattened sleep-space of the hatchback. He smelled like pee. 

“Who wants to get some donuts?” The mother turned the key and the car started in a magnificent instant, without the groan and rattle that it made in the cold and the dark, 400 miles north. 

“Meeeeeee!” the boy squealed, wiggling back into his sleeping bag. 

The clock’s green illuminated face said 10:22. 

“Hold on. I think I have–” The mother leaned over and dug a cassette tape out of the glove box, letting things fall to the floor in front of the massive bag of rolled newspapers. A parking ticket, chapstick, one glove, one baby sock. The girl watched each item fall. Nothing looked familiar. The mother turned up the volume and the song was in the middle, a barrage of drum beats–rhythm suspended between a melody they hadn’t heard yet. She reached over, opened the passenger side door, and pushed the bag of newspapers off of the seat and onto the road. The boy laughed and clapped his hands. A pile remained on the seat, and she picked one up and threw it out the door as far as she could. He cheered again. “Want to do one?” she asked. 

“No, you.” He was smiling. Excited for donuts, and for seeing something different happen. There were four left, and with each one she tossed, he cheered and clapped, while the girl watched and tried to figure out what was happening, what was ending, what was starting. 

“Wait,” she said, words spilling out before she’d formulated the reason. “Can I read one?” She read it cover-to-cover, smelling the newsprint and the piss, listening to the music from the glove box. 

They ate donuts on the beach, sand cool and strange through the bottoms of their footie pajamas. The boy had his unzipped to the waist as the weather warmed, and the girl thought about it, but there were too many people around. The mother had shed the puffy coat and scarf and hat but still had a bundled-up bottom half: wool socks, snow boots, leg warmers nearly up to the knee over her sweatpants. As the sun climbed higher and higher over the waterline, she had to decide whether she’d shed all of those layers or take them back home. 

A family scaled a distant dune, each with beach bundles, even the smallest lugging a chair. Her hair was braided perfectly, the mom could see as they got close enough to take in each twist and wave where the sun caught it. Two parents and the girl with the braid and a teenage boy–they walked past the girl and her brother and her mother so close that they smelled the sun screen and the perfume and the fresh laundry smell of the towels. 

“Why are they in their pajamas?” the girl asked her mother, staring down at the three of them, their feet sweating against the sand. “Why is she wearing boots?”

“Shhhh,” the mother said, steering her daughter’s unsteady sand walk in a wider arch around the three of them. 

“I want donuts!” the teenage boy said as he looked back over his shoulder at the little brother shoving the remains of a chocolate covered donut in his tiny mouth. 

The girl decided to hear and hold that last part and not the rest–the older boy wishing he had what they had. They had everything.