He made copies of her social security card and birth certificate on Cha-Cha’s printer-scanner-fax-copier. The living room was a mess. A stack of printouts sat on the loveseat, a cold cup of coffee sat on the floor. He did not look at the papers; whatever Cha-Cha and Tina had found interesting enough to print out from the Internet would surely not interest him. He once again thought of his teenage self, standing in the entryway and wanting to belong here. Now Cha-Cha and Tina’s lives seemed terribly boring, as did their son Chucky’s, as would Todd’s once he left the service. He went back into his mother’s bedroom.
He put the originals back in her dresser drawer and sat on the bed again, this time closer to Viola. She smelled like strong soap and baby powder. There were various small yellow plastic buckets stacked on the nightstand. Troy couldn’t imagine their purpose. He wondered if she used a bedpan or just wore Depends.
“So the fingerprint isn’t public unless you want it to be,” he said. “You gotta opt in to making it part of the public database, and the way it works is that so many other people have opted in that that’s how you get a match. But I wouldn’t make your fingerprint public cause then, you’re right, somebody could steal it and maybe steal your identity.”
Viola nodded.
“Mmm-hmm. Now I understand. You say you need the thumb, right?”
She stuck out her hand. She clearly saw his explanation for the bullshit that it was, but she loved him, and it seemed as if his lying had tickled her, provided a bit of entertainment. He pressed her thumb onto the ink pad, onto the piece of folded-up paper, and then used a sheet from the box of baby wipes on her nightstand to wipe the ink away.
They sat there not saying anything for a while, Viola looking Troy up and down again.
“You know, Lucky Boy, I’m in a lotta pain,” she said. “Folks think I like to exaggerate, but I’m not. All in my arms and my chest it hurts, like I said. Especially right now cause I ain’t had enough pills this morning. And on top of that Cha-Cha got me feelin down. You know what you could do for me?”
“What you need, Mama?”
“Take me for a ride, like how you used to drive me around the east side. You got your truck? You just gotta lift me up into the seat, we don’t gotta bring the wheelchair. Just ride me around for a little while.”
He felt he could not spend another minute with her today. It was impossible. He stood up, collected his papers, and kissed her on the forehead.
“Next time, Mama. I gotta go.”
BACK ON THE east side, Mrs. Gardenhire listened to the TV but did not look at it. Meerkats and large African lizards scampered across the 46-inch screen.
“Mama, why not face the TV instead of the door?” David asked. “It’s got a great picture.”
“Picture’s too clear is the problem. Makes me feel like the animals is here in the room.”
“Well, I thought you said the old one hurt your eyes.”
“That’s what I thought was hurting them,” Mrs. Gardenhire said. “But now that you brought this new one, I figured out they just plain hurt.”
She faced the doorway where David stood, but her focus was on the TV in the far corner. She tilted her head toward it, and when the creatures sounded like they were in peril—a lion stalked onto the scene, say—she shot a peripheral glance at the screen until the danger receded.
David’s brother Greg had pawned their mother’s old 32-inch flat panel two months earlier. It was a move too stereotypical to be heartbreaking for David—a drug addict stealing his mother’s TV—but it did anger him. Mrs. Gardenhire, queen of second and third and thirtieth chances, waited three weeks before telling David the TV was gone. Three whole weeks without her animal shows. David bought her a brand-new 46-inch LED flat screen and vowed to stop by more often.
“Where’s Greg at?” he asked.
David leaned against the front door’s frame. He planned to stay in the front room the duration of this visit, as he did most visits if he could help it. The house was crammed with pictures he’d rather not see. Of Greg when he still looked related to David, before his long-term relationship with heroin aged him a good twenty years. Of their dead father, Gregory Sr. Of David’s ex-wife. His mother wouldn’t look at the television head-on, but she cherished frequent glances into the past. David did not.
Mrs. Gardenhire shifted her weight in her armchair.
“What’s today? Tuesday? If it’s Tuesday, then I ain’t seen him since last Thursday.”
“It’s Tuesday,” David said.
“Well, he ain’t came around since Thursday, then. I gave him fifteen dollars to weed my annuals, and he took off,” she said. “He ain’t weeded nothin before he left, either.”
Mrs. Gardenhire had a twitch in her shoulder that made it bounce up and down involuntarily. A delicate movement like a bird preening its feathers. David fought a familiar urge to put his hand on the shoulder to calm it down. His mother didn’t like attention called to her condition.
“I’ll take care of the annuals right now, Mama. You just stop giving Greg your money.”
A genuine two-shouldered shrug from Mrs. Gardenhire, followed by a sigh.
Outside, David took off his T-shirt and left it folded on the porch. He knew nothing about weeding but figured anything that wasn’t pretty should be yanked up. He’d bought the lot next to his mother’s house as a sort of garden annex several years before. Then he purchased several other properties on the east side, places where people had once worked hard, hazardous jobs to pay their mortgages, all for less than five thousand dollars. He owned property in a more desirable neighborhood downriver, but he liked to tell people that one day the east side houses would make him rich. Truth was, landlording his east side properties was more time-consuming than he’d expected, and he planned to purchase empty lots moving forward.
Words like ghetto, dilapidated, and run-down were inadequate to describe this portion of the city, David thought. An apt descriptor eluded him, but Kyle, a geeky kid on his installation team, had come the closest.
“This isn’t postindustrial, post-white-flight, or post-automobile-boom,” Kyle had said. “It’s like, post-zombie-fucking-apocalypse. This is like after the zombies have turned everyone they could find, and then they burn down the buildings to run out the last survivors—right into their clutches and shit.”
They’d been sitting on the back bumper of David’s van drinking a beer; Kyle had just turned twenty-one.
“Okay, I can see zombie apocalypse,” David said, although comic books had been his brother Greg’s thing, not his. “But what about the houses still standing?”
“Simple. Just-turned zombies are still sort of human in the brain, you know? They’re prone to human sentimentality in the beginning. So the houses they lived in, they naturally don’t go as hard on them. Maybe they do a rudimentary prowl of the rooms, but they can’t bring themselves to burn them down. So if their families are in the basement hiding in airtight saunas or whatever, they get passed over.”
The airtight saunas had thrown David for a loop, but the zombie-apocalypse part stayed with him. He liked how unabashedly nerdy Kyle was, and wondered if he’d had to fight to keep himself that way coming up over in Brightmoor, or if things were different now.
In his basketball shorts and sneakers David could have been anyone. He could have been the David from twenty years before, and he could still have belonged to this block, barren as it was. He was not like Troy, who held on to a notion of still fitting in the neighborhood. David knew that if it weren’t for his mother and his few tenants, he’d have no reason to visit the east side. But he was not from anywhere else, either. Not San Diego, where he’d kept an apartment for ten years for the sporadic periods when he wasn’t on a ship. He didn’t belong to where he lived now, near the river; no one was really from that fledgling neighborhood. He’d looked into more established “hip” neighborhoods in Midtown, but they weren’t for him. He was too smart to pretend he was alright with being a token in a city with such a
large black population, with walking into new restaurants where the all-white patrons looked at him with suspicion, as if his very presence suggested that they weren’t as close to “revitalizing” the area as they’d hoped.
Mr. McNair rattled the garden’s gate. Short pants, Redwings cap, and polo shirt. David let the old man in.
“Betsy got you out here gardening?” Mr. McNair asked.
“Nothing too skilled, just some weeding,” David said.
It bothered him that Mr. McNair always called his mother by her first name. McNair never called Troy’s mother by her first name, nor Mrs. Breedlove from up the street. True, David’s mother was some fifteen years younger than the other two women, but it still seemed improper.
“Weedin? Boy, looks like you just yanked up some good stuff,” McNair said. “Let me see.”
Mr. McNair took the bunch of curling leaves from David’s hand and sniffed them. Then he laughed and slid them into his shirt pocket.
“These is basil, David. Good basil. I’ll just take em and you can blame me if Betsy comes lookin.”
Embarrassed, David stood up and went to the porch for his shirt. When he returned to the garden Mr. McNair was patting his shirt pocket and looking at David oddly, as if trying to decide whether David had committed some crime he’d heard about. The ropy veins in McNair’s neck bulged.
“What’s going on, Mr. McNair? Something bothering you?”
This could be more bad news about Greg, David thought. In the winter McNair had caught Greg stealing aluminum siding off of Mrs. Breedlove’s house. Ever since Viola Turner moved away, Mrs. Breedlove had been his mother’s only remaining friend. The news about Greg’s theft humiliated her so much that for weeks she’d begged off of Mrs. Breedlove’s invitations to come play pinochle. Or maybe it was not about Greg. Maybe it was finally time for McNair to confess that he was more than a friend to David’s mother. Maybe he would make an honest woman out of her, old as they both were.
“You talk to Troy Turner lately?” McNair asked.
David chuckled out of relief.
“I seen Troy Turner a couple weeks ago. Why?”
“Somethin’s goin on over there on Yarrow,” McNair said. He looked over his shoulder in the direction of the street.
“What do you mean? Something like what?”
“Well, somethin like somebody. Somebody’s been in and out of there for a few weeks.” Mr. McNair lowered himself onto a log in the shade of the house.
“Used to be, right after Mrs. Turner moved out, folks would stop by all the time,” he added. “But nowadays Cha-Cha only comes by when I call to have him check something out. So something ain’t right.”
“They’re coming in and out with a key?” David asked.
“Looks like. They got a key to the gate, the back garage, and the house.”
So what’s the problem? David wondered. The sun shone from high in the sky, and he was ready to get back home and into the shower. An hour or two of silence would do him good right now, he thought.
“What do you want me to do, Mr. McNair? It sounds legal.”
“Hell, I don’t know about legal or illegal. All I know is it’s strange. I wouldn’t think so if it was Troy or somebody.” Mr. McNair paused, leaned in closer. “But it’s little Lelah, David. What business she got sneakin in and out of there like some junkie thief?”
David did not wince. Both of them knew these last few words were too much. The old man opened his mouth to apologize, but David raised a hand to say it was okay.
Lelah could have been scheming on the house too, trying to figure out a way to short-sell or otherwise profit from it. The thought saddened him. That house wasn’t worth more than three thousand dollars if it was worth a dollar. Troy might have had his reasons, but a family of adults fighting over a scrap of worthless land was too depressing. Lelah who collected her brothers’ postcards in a scrapbook in high school. Lelah who had told David he wasn’t “worldly” enough for her, even though neither of them had ever traveled outside Michigan. Lelah who looked the same, her extra weight having settled in all the right places.
“I think it’s nothing to be worried about,” David said. He wiped his hands on the front of his shirt and ushered McNair to the gate. “If they got a key and there’s nothing left to steal inside, then I say leave it alone.”
Mr. McNair pulled the basil out of his pocket and sniffed it once more. He nodded.
“I suppose she’s got as much a right as any of the other ones to be in there. You tell Betsy I came by.”
David watched Mr. McNair cross the street and round the corner. He wondered what he’d really been trying to get at. The conversation had a doublespeak quality to it, like the way two spies in a movie can appear to be discussing holiday travel plans when they’re really plotting an assassination.
Addiction Is Real
When Lelah dropped Bobbie off the night before, Brianne had pressed $40 into her palm, and Lelah took it without protest or question because she was eager to get to David’s. In the big room she’d added the money to her meager stash in the pocket of a duffel bag under the bed. She should have questioned Brianne about the money, tried to put up a fight for appearance’s sake, but also it was about time her daughter compensated her a little. Childcare was expensive. Maybe Rob had finally made good on his promises of child support. At the very least Lelah should have found out if the money would be recurring, or where it came from. Something in Brianne’s behavior suggested a secret, and under normal circumstances Lelah would have drawn it out by now. Maybe she was seeing someone new. That could be a good thing, Lelah supposed. Far be it for her to begrudge someone a chance at romance. But taking money from a man was a different story. No time like the present to find out what’s going on, she thought. She showered and dressed. She had hang-dried her clothes on the bathroom shower rod, and the wrinkles in her jeans didn’t disappear after she squeezed herself into them. She took the $40 back out of the duffel bag. She’d stop by Eastern Market for some of that pineapple-coconut cake Brianne liked, then pop by her daughter’s apartment, clearing-the-air cake in hand.
A man stood on the porch in front of the window. Lelah could tell from where she stood on the staircase that it was David. His body was already that familiar. His pointy elbows were up and out, his long hands over his brow. He was trying to see through the curtains. It’s going to be over already, she thought. She opened the door.
“Hey,” he said. “I, uh.”
“Come in if you want.”
David ducked as he walked in, as if the doorframe wasn’t tall enough for him. He smelled like fresh dirt, cut grass, and sweat.
Lelah looked him in the eyes, reminded herself that days ago he was any old person she used to know on the street. He looked away, past her to the living room’s bare and dingy walls.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” he said. “I was just over at my mom’s, and Mr. McNair told me he saw you.”
She could laugh. Of course it was McNair—he’d likely known since the first morning, and told everybody on three blocks each way from Yarrow. She hadn’t put enough thought into this. How easy it was to fool oneself when desperate.
“What do you want from me?” she asked. She sat down on the second-to-last stair. David stood above her at first, but he seemed to still be having trouble making eye contact and opted to sit down next to her. Their hips touched. He did not turn to look at her.
“What do you mean? I just heard you were here, and I don’t know why he was telling me in the first place, like he was asking me for advice or something. I guess he wanted me to tell Troy, but I couldn’t do that, considering.”
“Considering what?” Lelah asked. She looked at the side of his face.
David stretched his long fingers away from one another.
“Considering,” he said, “that I didn’t even know if it was true, or what the situation is.”
The skin of David’s palms had none of the pinkish undertones of Lelah’s own. It was ye
llow, and his lifelines deep and dark.
“Also considering that we been seeing each other, Lelah. And if that’s none of Troy’s business—”
“It isn’t,” Lelah interrupted.
“Then I figured I’d come over here and see what this is all about. Maybe this ain’t any of Troy’s business either.”
He looked at her now. He had no right to come here, she thought. Asking for an explanation, expecting to get one just for showing up.
“I don’t need saving, David. I’m here, you’ve found me out, that’s fine. But I don’t need anybody to save me.”
“God, nobody’s trying to save you,” he said. “I don’t know. I didn’t think everything out before I came over, but here I am, right?”
Lelah felt the situation was plain; she was there because she had nowhere else to go. But maybe it wasn’t clear for someone like David, someone who had likely never been evicted and had connections all around the city.
“Your apartment,” David began, and Lelah saw that he was going to make her say it all out loud, that he wouldn’t just break off whatever they had and leave.
“My apartment does not exist.”
“Your job?”
“May or may not exist, it’s still up in the air.”
“What happened to your stuff, like furniture and clothes?”
He’s never been evicted, Lelah thought.
“I’ll show you,” she said. She jumped up and turned to climb the stairs. David followed.
Lelah stepped into the big room, and David lingered in the doorway. She didn’t know what she hoped to accomplish with this. Maybe the meager furnishings—an ancient twin bed, a flimsy chest of drawers—would repulse him into leaving her be. David did not appear repulsed.
“This used to be Troy’s room, huh? I remember this upstairs window.”
“It was everybody’s room at some point,” Lelah said. “Except mine.”
The Turner House Page 18