Bearded Women by Teresa Milbrodt Page B

them.
    Bakery bag with two-day-old sugar cookie crumbs.
    The bakery girl has a break at four-thirty. If I only take a half-hour for lunch, I can leave work early and have a muffin when she does. I learn the bakery girl likes crocheting and her cat is named Cinnamon. I tell her I like sewing. She compliments my new lavender pantsuit and says the colour goes well with my complexion. No one has ever said anything about my complexion before.
    When I look away I know her arms and legs are growing. Her shoulders widen. Her back straightens until I am certain she is at least eight feet tall and our hands are the same size.

Ears
    The second pair of ears are on the sides of my neck. They’re a little smaller than my head ears and can’t actually hear anything. All four of my ears are pierced, four holes each in the top ones, two holes each in the bottom. Most of the time I forget about the second pair, don’t even notice them when I’m looking in the mirror. When I go out I wear turtlenecks and scarves because I’d rather not be stared at, but when I’m at work at the tattoo parlour I let them show. Customers tend to think they’re some sort of self-imposed body modification.
    I become a tattoo parlour mascot on the day my roommate Lee moves out to live with her asshole fiancé. We live on the bottom floor of three-storey house—Lee and her daughter share a bedroom, and my son shares a bedroom with me. Lee’s fiancé has stayed the night at our place several times. Her daughter sleeps on the couch then, but usually ends up in bed cuddled next to me because Lee and the asshole fight so loudly. Even in my bedroom with the door closed you can hear the names he calls her. More than once I’ve told Lee that she and Prince Caustic have to keep it down. I don’t want my son or her daughter to be hearing such things. Lee says the kids are asleep, but I know that’s not true.
    By the time Lee is packing her last few belongings I’ve known about the move for two weeks, but it’s still a shock.
    “You can’t move in with that jerk,” I say for the twentieth time while Lee loads her collection of stuffed animals into a milk crate. “He’s abusive.”
    “He’s small,” she says. Burke is an inch shorter than Lee and maybe ten pounds lighter, but Lee’s body is hunched in the morning after Burke’s been yelling at her. “He always feels like people are challenging his manhood or something. I can’t yell at Burke. It would hurt him too much.”
    “The bastard’s not made of glass,” I say.
    “We’re going to get counselling,” she says. “He agreed.”
    My ex-boyfriend did, too, but I never managed to drag him within a mile of the counsellor’s office. It took me six damn years to figure out he was a loser. He’d yell at me one minute and say he loved me the next. He claimed it was stress from his job and from us having a little kid that made him moody. I thought I’d marry him. He was Jacob’s dad after all. Jake was three when we moved out. I had to do it while my ex was at work. We’ve been living with Lee ever since.
    Lee is thirty-four and can barely read, convinces Jake or her daughter Izzy to help her understand her mail. I think she has some form of dyslexia and I’m not sure how she managed to graduate high school, but Lee is determined to a fault and won’t get tested for a learning disability. She says she gets along well enough, but I know she’s too embarrassed to admit to anything. That’s why she’s been working third shift at the auto parts factory for sixteen years. That’s why she hates dating. It involves someone else finding out she can’t read. Burke is Lee’s first boyfriend since Izzy’s dad left five years ago and moved to California. I’m pretty sure part of the reason they broke up was because she refused to get help and he refused to keep reading everything to her.
    Burke is impossibly kind when it comes to helping Lee, reads her letters and books and magazines aloud, and