by Tales of Two Americas- Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (retail) (epub)
As Hanna sleeps, Laura calculates how much money she has saved, the tread on her tires, how far they will need to travel so that Hanna might begin to forget about the life she’s leaving behind. It all makes Laura very tired but then she looks at Hanna’s lower lip, how it trembles while she’s sleeping.
How It Has Always Been
The next morning, Laura hears the knocking at her front door. She wraps herself in a thin robe and takes one last look at Hanna, still sleeping, lower lip still trembling. Laura has always loved Hanna, even before she understood why her entire body flushed when she saw Hanna at school or running around her backyard or sitting on the roof outside her bedroom window. Dating one of the Boys was a way to get closer to Hanna. Laura would kiss Hanna’s brother and think of his sister, her smile, the way she walked around with her shoulder muscles bunched up. Being with the brother was not what Laura wanted but she told herself it was enough. For the first time Laura feels something unfamiliar in her throat. It makes her a little sick to her stomach. She thinks it might be hope. Downstairs, Anna is standing on the front porch shivering. She has a splitting headache. When Laura opens the door Anna quickly slips into the house. Anna squeezes Laura’s hand and heads upstairs into Laura’s bedroom. Anna crawls into bed behind her sister, wraps her arms around Hanna’s waist. Hanna covers one of Anna’s hands with hers. She is not quite awake yet.
“Don’t make me go back there,” Hanna says, hoarsely.
Anna tightens her arms around her sister, kisses Hanna’s shoulder. Anna says, “You have to go back to say good-bye.” There is a confidence in Anna’s voice that reassures Hanna.
Hanna sighs, slowly opens her eyes. She sees Laura standing in the doorway. Hanna smiles. “You don’t have to stand so far away,” she says. Laura grins and crawls into bed with the Twins. Laura says, “Remember when we were kids and the three of us would lie on your roof at night during the summer to cool down?” Both Hanna and Anna nod. The three women roll onto their backs and stare at the ceiling—the cracks and water stains, how it sags. “We were miserable even then,” Laura says.
How Hanna Finally Confronts Her Mother
Where Hanna has always been the protector, Anna has always been the voice of reason, able to make the right choices between impossible alternatives. When they were girls and Hanna would plot retribution against anyone who had wronged the Twins, it was Anna who would deter her sister from acting thoughtlessly. When Red Ikonen would stumble into their room drunk and Hanna would try to stab him with a kitchen knife or bite his ear off it was Anna who grabbed her sister’s arm and said, “It’s him or Superior Home.” It was Anna who would sing to her father and stroke his beard and soothe all the meanness out of him. In these moments, Hanna would feel so much anger inside her she thought her heart would rip apart but then she would let the knife fall to the floor or she would unclench her teeth because anything was better than Superior Home, the state facility where motherless children were often discarded until they turned eighteen. They heard stories bad enough to make them believe there were worse things than the stink of Red Ikonen’s breath against their cheeks as he forgot how to behave like a proper father.
Anna held Hanna’s hand as they walked back to their house, a bracing wind pushing their bodies through the snow. Hanna tried to breathe but found the air thin and cold and it hurt her lungs. As they climbed the porch stairs Hanna stopped, leaned against the railing, her body heavy.
“I don’t feel so good,” she said.
Anna pressed the cool palm of her hand against Hanna’s forehead. “You get to leave soon,” she said. “Hold on to that.”
Hanna stared at her sister. She said, “Come with us—you and Logan and the baby.”
Anna shook her head. “It’s my turn to stay.”
“Bullshit. We’ve taken our turns long enough.”
The front door opened. Peter glared at the Twins. “Where the hell were you last night?” He grabbed Hanna by the elbow, pulling her into the house, and she let him. She wanted to save what fight she had left.
In the living room the scene closely resembled the tableau Hanna stumbled into the previous day with Ilse Ikonen sitting on the couch, poised regally like she had never left and had no need to offer acts of contrition.
Hanna tried to squirm free from Peter’s grasp and he finally relented when calmly, quietly, Anna said, “Let go of my sister.” Peter held a natural distrust of twins. It wasn’t normal, he thought, for there to be two people who were so identical. He also harbored no small amount of jealousy for the relationship twins shared. While he was not a bright man, Peter was smart enough to know he would never be as close to his wife as he wanted.
The Twins stood before their father, their mother, their husbands. They stood in the house where they had grown up filled with broken people and broken things. Anna thought, This is the last time we will ever stand in this room, and Hanna suddenly felt like she could breathe again. She tried to say something but she couldn’t find her voice. Her throat was dry and hollow. The Twins looked at their parents and thought about everything they had ever wanted to say to two people so ill-suited for doing right by their children.
“I’m sorry to intrude,” Ilse said, her voice tight, her words clipped. She crossed her legs and fidgeted with a big diamond ring on her left hand. “I wanted to see how you girls and the Boys were doing, perhaps explain myself.”
Anna shook her head. “Explanations aren’t necessary,” she said. “Your leaving is a long time gone.”
Hanna removed her wedding ring and dropped it on the coffee table. Peter sneered and said, “Whatever,” and Hanna rolled her eyes.
The Twins stood before their father, their mother, their husbands. They sucked in a great mass of air, threw their shoulders back. They had rehearsed this moment more than once but then they realized that with all the time and wrongs gone by, there was nothing worth saying.
How Hanna, Laura, Anna, Logan, and the Baby Got Away
They piled into Laura’s truck, their belongings packed tightly into a small trailer hitched to the back. They sat perfectly still, held their breaths, looked straight ahead.
ENOUGH TO LOSE
RS Deeren
THIS WASN’T LONG after Alice told me she was ready to start a family. She said we were ready this time but I think her definition of that word and mine don’t exactly match up. I was riding shotgun in a no-bells, no-whistles F-150 that was more repairs and patches than actual truck. Rid drove, licking at the chew inside of his bottom lip as he barreled the Ford through the morning, the trailer swaying on the ball hitch. Fifteen minutes from the third house on the list. Half past seven in the morning and the humidity already bubbled up from the fields and the smell of dead grass and asphalt baked in the cab. The radio still worked but the first time I turned it on, Rid punched it off before half a note sang out. Don’t got time for that, he said. I hadn’t touched anything on the dash since, not that any of the knobs worked anymore. When the July heat caught up with the humidity June had left behind, I found out that the crank for my window was busted too. I brought it up to the boss but all he told me was that the tranny was new and the tires spun, and that was all I needed to get the jobs done.
Three months in with Secured Properties, mowing lawns for bank repossessions at ten bucks a pop, and I had inhaled more grass clippings, caked my eyes in more dust, and ridden more backroads than I had known were in Tip County. My ma told me about the job. I hadn’t mowed a lawn since my dad let me lug his push mower around my neighborhood, ringing doorbells and offering my services, and even then, at fourteen, I was raking in at least twenty bucks per. Plus I could rely on one of the old folks in the area to come out with lemonade or sun tea. I didn’t want to take this job but Pioneer Sugar hadn’t returned my calls, not even for a seasonal job, and there was no way I was asking for my job back at Walmart. Alice sold Wrap-It—a plastic body wrap that was supposed to help people lose we
ight—from our home and at parties she organized. She had been able to get only her sister and my ma to work for her full time so the money only trickled in. I didn’t want the job, but I needed it. So I called Secured, passed a piss test, signed a W-4, and drove out to the company garage when the new pay cycle started. That’s where I met Ridley Bellows, leaning against the loaded trailer, sipping a gas station coffee.
“Morning,” I said, “Name’s Tim.” I held out my hand. “You must be Ridley. The boss said you get out here early.”
“Gives me more time for more jobs,” he said. He shook my hand, not so much limp, as if he were a weak man, but as if he didn’t want to bother. Like he didn’t have anything to prove to me. “Got everything loaded this time but tomorrow you gotta get here early to help out. Let’s go.” We climbed in and pulled onto the dirt road, heading straight to the first yard.
’08 was bad for most people. Normal people. Bank people. People caught somewhere in between. Everybody. Normal people lost their homes, bank people lost their banks. Both lost faith in each other and all that was left behind were countless properties nobody could buy and nobody could sell. I was one of the in-between people. Alice and I got by, lost some things along the way but still had enough to feel more or less human. We married out of high school and rented the back half of a duplex on a dead end road that butted up to Scott’s River. I had a few semesters’ worth of college in me but the only thing I learned was that I could spend more than my share of time and money on something and still not feel like I’d learned anything. But I promised Alice, and she me, that we’d get enough put away and get ourselves a place.
The few people who came out of ’08 ahead had more properties than they knew what to do with. That’s where the in-betweeners like me and Rid came in. We kept those properties looking livable until they sold. Nobody wants to buy a shack sinking into a yard of chin-high weeds. We’d pull up to a double-wide or a split-level out in the country and before we unloaded, Rid walked around the whole place with a cheap digital camera, snapping shots of the house and yard. These were the before shots, he told me the first day. Then, once we finished with the job, he’d go back and snap the after shots. So we can prove we did the job and didn’t fuck it up or break in or anything, he said.
Rid didn’t say much that wasn’t related to the job. On my first day out, he circled the house with a weed whacker while I wrangled with the mower. I’d never been on a zero-turn mower before, one of those speedy numbers that wasn’t much more than a rubber seat cushion bolted above three sets of blades and a set of levers used for both acceleration and steering. Just a nudge would gun that sucker along and if you didn’t give both those big levers the same amount of love, the whole thing would start spinning out of control like some redneck hovercraft.
“Lines gotta be straighter,” Rid said when I passed. “Lines gotta be straighter.” I swerved down the lawn, taking a wide turn at the road, and made my way back toward the house. “For the grace and love of naked baby Jesus, kid, you speak English? Boss don’t pay if the job looks like shit. Straighten those lines out!” I squinted through the clippings kicked up in the wind and jerked side to side as I looped around the lawn. The job looked like hell, even after Rid tried a quick touch-up, and he still had to blur the after photos just enough to hide what looked like a drunk haircut. That first house, a boarded-up cottage on a half acre, took forty-five minutes. In the truck, pushing past seventy, Rid let me have it.
“Fifteen minutes per job, max. Got it?” he said. “Thirty-minute drive time between jobs. That paces out to twenty bucks an hour. You just cut that in half.”
“Sorry, Ridley,” I said. “It’s my first time out.”
“A job worth doing is worth doing right and quickly. The first time. Hear me? And call me Rid, only my ma called me Ridley.”
And that was Rid. Twenty bucks an hour, speeding from one vacant house to the next with a twenty-seven-year-old nobody in tow and a work list that looped and spiraled wider and wider as more jobs came in. We would start the week mowing abandoned summer homes in Caseville and by the weekend wind up halfway to Flint spraying weed killer outside foreclosed apartment complexes. When the next pay cycle started, we’d be back up along Saginaw Bay, mowing those same summer homes. They stopped being homes by the time Rid and I got to them; they were only a crisp ten-dollar bill, calluses, and heat rash to us. It took only a couple more fuckups on the zero-turn and an earful from Rid before it all became routine to me. Pull in, unload, before shots, mow, weed, trim, after shots, load out, move on. Seventeen or so hours a day. At Rid’s pace, it looked like something that resembled a sweet deal.
■ ■
A month in, I parked outside the duplex, beyond beat. I stayed out, listening to the grind of cicadas through the open windows of my truck, drinking a tall boy. The lights inside were off. Alice went to bed early so she could get to the gym at five to sell to the before-work crowd. The owner let her sell from a booth she set up behind the StairMasters and she pushed a sale or two most days. She passed her afternoons at home, posting to Facebook and fitness boards, trying to sign up enough people to earn a promotion from her higher-ups. Her sister managed to sign up some of her friends for a while. Those were a few good months. Alice had enough wraps and diet pills going out that we paid off one of the MasterCards. Then the school year kicked in and her sister’s friends went back to class and stopped selling. Things got tight again and we maxed out the Visa. That’s how things go. I was used to that up-and-down just so long as I could punch a clock and get another day behind me. Why bother looking back when you’re never going to get closer to those days? That’s just how time works, a straight line. But I have to admit, in those few moments alone in the dark car, maybe a little drunk, looking at the stained vinyl siding of my life, I’d pull the photo I kept behind the sun visor and think about the boy. The son Alice and I gave up when we were seventeen. I didn’t have to look at the picture much by then, I already knew, no matter how long I stared at it, that I couldn’t see him growing inside Alice. It was a wrinkled four-by-six snapshot that happened to find Alice and me standing next to each other outside our high school cafeteria. I had my arm around her waist and was trying to kiss her. Plant a sloppy one on her that only teenagers have the balls to get away with. But the wrinkled moment isn’t the kiss, it’s the half second where she pulled away and I missed. To anyone else it’d look like I was leaning to kiss her belly, our boy. But I know better.
He came a day after we turned our graduation tassels. Ten round pounds, twenty-one inches. A big, heathy boy with ten fingers and toes and adoptive parents sitting out in the lobby waiting to take him from us. All the papers signed and nothing left but the “thanks a lots” and the “have a nice lifes.” When the nurse wrapped him and handed him to Alice, he didn’t curl up to her. It was as if he knew, like he had heard from inside Alice as we interviewed couples who wanted him and could care for him. Maybe he felt it when Alice reached out to shake the hands of the couple we finally found and when their hands met, all the love and connection a boy can have for his mother pulsed from Alice’s belly, down her arm, and into the bodies of his new mom and dad. When Alice brushed his cheek with her finger, he turned away and stared past her arms, past me, to the door of the delivery room. I can’t forget his dark brown eyes. He had my father’s eyes.
I finished my beer and took the empties inside, lining them on the kitchen counter with the other returnables, about three dollars’ worth. There was a note on the fridge: T., No sales today. Return bottles tomorrow. Buy bread. Love, A. The mugginess in the living room escaped from a cracked window and in the quiet, the breeze sounded like music as it left the house and ran along the river. I didn’t want to wake Alice with my smell; sweat and two-stroke gasoline doesn’t make for good company in bed. I left my grass-stained clothes in a pile at the end of the couch and sat down in my underwear. If Alice had come out to see me, I wonder if she’d have said that I was what
ready looked like.
■ ■
It was noon a few weeks later when the boss texted me a new job: a ranch in a cul-de-sac outside Samson. We were supposed to get an updated list of jobs at the beginning of each pay period but if a “quickie” like this came across the wire, the boss would forward it to us. He never passed on one. The banks paid Secured Properties forty bucks per job so for every ten Rid and I made, the boss made twenty. We were also only one of three teams the boss had running across the region so I can only imagine how nice it was to be him. At least he paid for the gas and never bounced a paycheck.
“Got a quickie,” I said. “Near Samson.”
“Christ,” Rid said, “that’s twenty minutes the other way.” By that time, Rid and I had worked into a kind of communication with each other, the kind of thing that’s born from spending too much time together doing the same thing until it’s a habit. Rid wasn’t the kind of guy to double back. Our second week together, the weed whacker kicked up a faceful of poison ivy and he couldn’t see straight for a few days. He had me drive and it took me missing only a couple of turns, no more than a few minutes burned, before he booted me back over to shotgun. Twenty minutes was a lifetime to Rid, either that or it was the line that separated life moving forward and life standing still.
“C’mon, Rid. It’s ten bucks now instead of next payday. I know it’s worth my time.”
“You’re the kind of guy who stops to pick up a dime, aren’t you?” He rolled his fingers along the steering wheel.
“And you’re not?” The job we were coming from had a small stable and a corral overgrown with Queen Anne’s lace and dandelions that hid piles of sunbaked horseshit. The first hit with the zero-turn sent a cloud of it raining onto the two of us. When we loaded up from there, we smelled like the type of guys who would stop to pick up a penny.