Taym rarely dines out but when he does he tips exorbitantly, lavishly. He shields his receipts from America and scribbles in forty, fifty, sixty percent for the both of them; if the bill is small enough he simply doubles it. It’s not exactly a habit he can afford, but he does it anyway, rationalizing that in the interim he’s sustaining himself largely on toast and broth and canned peaches anyway, all of it cheap. He doesn’t want America to see because she might think that it’s some sort of water-hearted generosity, and he knows he won’t have the wherewithal to correct her.

---

America had told him once that she didn’t believe in the idea of deserving things, let alone people, but it’s so central to the way he conceives of the world that she might as well have said that she didn’t believe in gravity, or breathing.

I deserve this. If he didn’t have the thought of it he isn’t sure how he could stand it.

---

He is outside Chicago and Ashdown isn’t even a name he’s ever heard yet, and he’s mostly better, now: just a crop of persistent sniffles and a sore throat from days of dry heaving, both of which would have been easy to chalk up as a cold if anyone had cared about him enough to ask, not that anyone has, now that Alex has been abandoned somewhere uptown.

He’d been at this same bar a few weeks earlier. Been here with Alex, actually, and they’d scraped up enough for a score largely by poaching cash tips. Alex always succeeds through a sort of wide-eyed innocent charisma that put him instantly in the good graces of nearly everyone and especially of raspy-voiced old women waiting sleazy bars; Taym always succeeds because even with his tremors attacking him on the regular he had a remarkable knack for sleight-of-hand. Before the shakes had set in he’d been better at picking pockets, but now he’s relegated to the role of scavenger rather than predator.

The same bartender is here now as he blearily leans over a drink that he feels he’s sorely overdue. He thinks this is where the guilt comes in, but all he feels is wretched and sorry for himself and cold, wiping his nose on one grimy sleeve and nonchalantly pushing a fiver into the other. He tries to tell himself I deserve this, but he doesn’t believe it. He’ll believe it later, when it comes on the heels of vomiting up bar fries and tearing up his throat again, and it’s a balm to the shame.

---

The best thing he ever stole was a cellphone that was a day away from brand new. A front-facing selfie with a dog had been the wallpaper. He’d figured if they could afford a dog they could afford a new phone.

This was months before Ivy, before the shelter staff pretended he wasn’t lying when he said he had somewhere to keep her and they waived the home visit and, silently, the adoption fee, desperately wanting to help her since this poor shaky b*****d had been in every day to visit her since bringing her in and since her kennel’s getting freed up, one way or the other. He’d taken her lead into his hands with a horrible sense of all the guilt he’d never felt for stealing that cellphone. One of the employees handed him a couple of twenties and told him to make sure he spent it on a worthwhile cause. He’d bought her the little boots to protect her feet that the shelter (and sometimes Taym, when he visited) had been wrapping in gauze while they recovered from the tenderness of her life on a slab of blisteringly hot concrete. He felt indebted to her for getting cash out of his pocket, where it always had the potential to alchemically transfigure itself into his poison of choice.

The temptation there came in swells and sweeps like an unpredictable ocean full of dangerous undercurrents and things with sharp teeth, an ocean that looked beautiful from afar as oceans always did. Ivy helped, now that he had her: put her head on his knee and gazed at him with her big dumb eyes that trusted him implicitly. It was a little sick, maybe, that she worked and his own daughter hadn’t, but if he didn’t feed Ivy no one would--her stint at the shelter and its narrowly-avoided end proved that--and Tuesday had had an entire doting family to pick up the slack of his inevitable failure.

He calls his mom all the time, and leaves a message when it goes to voicemail. He thinks of all the times he’s done the same to her, and he thinks: I deserve this.

---

The thing he wants more than anything, which he makes no secret of wanting, is stability. The word has gained an almost arcane significance, a sort of talismanic mantra, and maybe the fact that magic is real makes that thought a little more comforting than it might have otherwise been.

He wakes up next to America and this is no easy morning of sleeping in and lazy laughter and wandering hands. He has to go to work, she has to go to class, and she’s still hollow-eyed and trying to bear up under a weight that is too heavy for anyone. Last night had not been a good night. Money’s tighter now, with classes; she still has her distant support network (plus one) and she’s got herself, centered and stubborn, but even the banal details of day-to-day life have gained a certain hardened edge. He’s trying to convince her, in a roundabout way, to be defiant and contrarian in the face of prospective failure instead of crippled by the idea that it’s some sort of blow to her character and to the concept of America, who is Strong, but it’s not something he’s good at even under normal circumstances, let alone the ones she’s in. He keeps trying anyway.

He loves her, and it is terrifying. He wants to think about shared houses and arguing over whose turn it is to do the laundry; about fences and neighbors and futures and other domestic fantasies too knee-knockingly pleasant to touch, but he can’t, with the weight of a terrifying reality that’s already changed once under his feet and threatens to change again at any moment.

He does think, just this once, in the snatched few moments of pushing his nose against her shoulder in the grey light, that he deserves this, even if she doesn’t. A world away somewhere April is uprooted; Tuesday is fatherless; his own parents are consigned to parenthood again even as their hair grows grey and retirement looms. He has plucked the stability from other people’s hands, put it into his own pocket for his own selfish purposes and squandered it for a few snatched hedonistic minutes of escape and other.

He could leave her, of course. His own problems are small and quiet next to hers, and he feels wretched and weak when they cut him low and he finds himself turning his eye back to the ocean and thinking maybe once, but they’re problems, and as much as he finds himself delirious with the validation of being an anchor to someone he feels, sometimes, the enormity of the task when that someone is her with all of her bigger, stranger problems that might never go away, the same way his don’t.

In this worst moment he tells himself I deserve this, thinking of the roots he’s torn from other people’s feet, and of a future he’s not sure, now, he’ll ever get to have with her. It makes it easier to think about being with her, somehow.

Catholic guilt, he jokes about something else entirely, but it’s what he’s thinking about. Suffering is a language he understands.

---

He has to dance around things with the therapist. There are things he can’t say, but the shape of it, of the lack of stability and an uncertain future, is there, and it’s there when he divulges, impulsively and wretchedly, that thought: I deserve this. The idea of an Anubian scale somewhere that desperately needs to be balanced.

There’s a conversation, after that. One of the only real ones he’s had in a long time with anyone but America, and the only one about her. Of the weight of the trust she puts in him. There are parts he leaves out, too intimate, too taboo and embarrassing, but he adds them into the equation as he labours through its figures, looking for the elusive equal sign, the solve for x of everything that she is to him and that--and this is the hard part--he is to her.

The counselor’s accusation hurts almost physically, and it’s said mean and angry, not like a doctor’s saying it at all, just a person who’s seen what a nasty thought Taym is harboring and is too disgusted not to let him know: what a shitty way to treat someone, he says. If my wife thought of me like a sacrifice to be made I’d leave her. And then, with a certain cold pointedness: Does she deserve that, Taym?

And then he tells Taym, measured and calm, exactly why he thinks it makes thinking about being with her easier.

He comes home that night dizzy and sick with the unfamiliarity of self-reflection. She wants him to cook for her, so he does--she always wants him to teach her; he’s showing her how to make panna cotta--and she clearly craves his company, her hip bumping his and her nose pressed to the smell of his cigarettes and his aftershave clinging to his collar. For once he doesn’t gently put distance between them when one of his roommates wanders through the kitchen, and puts an arm around her waist instead.

It’s an entirely new way to think and one that he isn’t good at, but he tries, watching her take the spoon from his fingers with a sort of new and dumbstruck wonder at her proximity to him. He looks at her and frames a thought not of terror and an uncertainty of what tomorrow is shaped like, but a thought of her relaxing blind and deaf into his hands and of tomorrow, no matter what it’s shaped like, having her stories in it and her laughter and her, and he sinks his fingernails into that rosy thought and tells himself over and over: I deserve this.