Pee Bucket

Fifteen-year-old Lucy comes home through the back alley to find two open duffel bags on the futon. She already knows what they mean.

  It had just started sleeting and I’d just climbed up on the chain link fence when I spotted that yellow bucket just sitting there, just past the back-porch steps.

Shit. Lisa must’ve smelled that pee bucket from where it had sat under the futon bed on our back porch.  

Earlier, Mom and I had gone to grab our usual Saturday breakfast down at the Dunkin’ Donuts on the corner of Quincy and south Boston Avenues. On the way back, we’d eaten our donuts and Mom drank her coffee as we cut down the alleyway behind all the back street neighbors’ houses.

We had to sneak around like that, `cos Lisa, one of Mom’s waitressing buddies, said that if her landlord knew she’d sublet that back porch to us, we’d all be out on our asses.

   Now, I turned to see Mom back there, still on the other side of that fence, head down and grinning at something on her phone.

I ran across and up the steps to the porch door, which we always left unlocked `cos, like, what was there to steal?  Inside, two blue duffle bags sat, unzipped and gawping open on our futon bed.  

You’re out. That’s what those luggage bags said, and, trust me, by age 15, I spoke fluent eviction. I thumped across to Lisa’s back door and the typewritten note taped above the door handle:    

Attention: Ms. Saoirse Callaghan

Tenant last day:  Wednesday, November 6

Rent outstanding: 2 weeks @ $200 per week = $400. Cash or Venmo only.

Note: Until November 6, no further use of any shared spaces.

By now, Mom was finally over the fence and across the yard, and I knew by how she thumped up the porch steps that she’d spotted the pee bucket, too. 

My Mom ripped off that note and pounded on the apartment door while calling Lisa a diabhal bitseachán. And listen, nobody needs to be an Irish-English translator to know those words mean a devil-bitch.

  Weekend nights, I often woke to Lisa and Mom’s voices through the wall behind our bed. Beer bottles clinked as they ranted about their restaurant manager and which customers were cheap assholes and which of the line cooks had been off his ass that night.

Later, I woke again to Mom easing back our futon quilt. She smelled of beer and restaurant French fries, and our room reeked of pee in plastic, which I actually liked.

But last night, Lisa and Mom must’ve fought. And why hadn’t I woken up to hear and stop them?

Unlike my Mom, Lisa attended college. Most evenings, she let me use her laptop while she was out working or studying or whatever. Shit. Now, as Mom stood texting someone, I remembered that my school backpack was still inside the apartment, in Lisa’s living room.  And inside my school backpack were all my sketching pencils and my new sketch pad from the dollar store. 

Mom had crossed to the two green storage boxes under the porch windows, where she was snapping off the lids.

“Mom? Stop. Just listen! We’ve three more days—maybe four if you pay—”

  “—Shut the hell up, Lucy! I wouldn’t spend another night in this bothán if I had to sleep on a bench on Boston Common.”

She’d always had a shitty right-hand pitch, so when Mom lobbed my bras and panties and vintage blouses toward the futon and our bags, they flopped onto the porch floor.    

“Lucy Margaret Callaghan. This is not the time for one of your arty farty ideas, OK? Pack your shit up. Now. We’ve to be out of here before that diabhal bitseachán comes back out here, giving me more of her buinneach.”

 So I picked up my clothes and packed my duffle bag while eyeing that kitchen door where, any minute now, Lisa would appear and say:

Of course you can both stay. Just pay the rent and let’s lose that stinky pee bucket, yeah?  

Then, I’d do my cute kiddie shtick and ask if I could please, please go in and grab my backpack and art supplies.

Twenty minutes later, I followed Mom back down the porch steps where the sleet had turned to wet-December snow. She kicked our pee bucket so hard that it rose up and then rolled all the way to the chain-link fence. 

 We pulled up our sweatshirt hoods to detour around the apartment building’s fire escape, then along the gable wall and underneath other people’s apartment windows.         

 Oh. My. God. Was that a window getting pushed open? Oh, yes! When I turned, Lisa’s living room blind was pulled up and, through the dirty glass, there she was.

Mom turned and bellowed: “Yo! Let’s go, here!”

 I ignored her to race right back to where Lisa, still in her nightgown, had opened that window, clutching my backpack by its top handle.   

 “Ready? Catch!”   

 I set the blue duffle down. Lisa pitched and I caught while a car with thunk-thunk music turned into that front parking lot.            

  I stayed there, staring up at Lisa and willing her to say: Stay. Just stay. Or, listen, why don’t you stay—at least `till your Mom’s snagged another place?

  At last, her mouth was open; her lips moving. “Lucy, Sweetie, look after yourself, OK?”

The car music turned louder. Someone slammed a car door or trunk shut. Lisa closed her window.     

The car, of course, belonged to one of Mom’s old boyfriends; he  looked like that bartender dude from three restaurants and jobs ago, but hard to tell. I dragged my duffle along the wet, whitening blacktop; my backpack over my shoulder while, through the passenger-side window, Mom signed for me to hurry up.

 I thought: Here. We. Fucking. Go. Again.

Well, at least this guy had a car, right?

As we drove back down Quincy Avenue, I pictured that pee bucket back there under that fence where the snow smelled of me and Mom and our stinky pee.   

adolescence American Fiction Boston Eviction Housing Insecurity Irish American Fiction literary fiction Mother and Daughter new writing short fiction Story Sunday Working-Class Fiction