Segment 18: When a Third World Came West

I was rocking my leg on the other  against the beige and pink stitching of Kim’s couch while Sam took apart a CD player and studied it and while Kim six months pregnant, scrubbed the white aluminum sidings of her living room window ledges with Clorox cleaning spray.  “I can’t believe they’d arrest him for that,” She was saying and I was agreeing but she said that we’d get the money back in two months time and that I’d be able to pay my brother back on his credit card just as soon as Sam went before a hearing in front of theGrahamCountyjudge.  Kim had been through something like this before.  She’d gotten a DUI driving five of her roommates back from a show in Greensborough and she took the full fall for all of them because they were too trashed to speak up for themselves and face the policeman. Baby clothes were scattered along the other window ledges, in their plastic wrappers and in pinks, blues, and greens because she still didn’t know what it was and there were toys too, still in their Epschool cardboard boxes, plus bags of blue Toys R Us bags strewn by the grey entertainment stand.  She went over to the counter and showed me some new photographs of Jeremy’s grandparents who were standing behind a grey rock in front of Grandfather Mountain, his mother dressed in a beige quarter length sleeved dress jacket with ruffled grey piping at the collar, and ruffed stoned dangly turquoise earrings.  She mentioned something about how her parents were good looking, she showed me a picture and I saw her mother with short sleek hair and appropriate light crimson lips that she was piercing; standing next to Kim’s father whose hair had gone mostly grey. She was worried about how the baby would turn out and who it’d take after- she or Jeremy and I said that I’d bet on it looking more like her and her mom.  I could tell from how long Kim had labored in learning about the baby, studying pictures online of the stages you go through when your pregnant, showing all her friends the sonogram, asking questions out loud when she was supposed to be reading her child psychology textbook. I knew from the start, when she’d called me on my black portable phone from my dorm room after we hadn’t spoken in two weeks from an argument that she’d take this kid under her wings and lean on it in a way that she’d tried to on me and her friend Joey, and Jeremy.

While Sam and I were driving home he brought it up to my attention that he wasn’t going to live here anymore and that he was ready to move on to go to another city.  I looked around at the stately fresh strawberry brick on the other side of campus in front of the student union that was laid out asymmetrically and studied the new framed doors around the science building that held the auditorium.  I could see how another place could feel more exciting.  But I protested that he had to stay here to go before the judge so that I could get my brother’s money back to him that I owed and I begged Sam to rethink it over and to consider staying for about another two months.  I told him that if he did this that I could finish my summer semester course, that I’d think about transferring to another school, and that I’d go with him to this new place for which he wanted to live.