“I know you think you’re doing the right thing,” Cha-Cha said. “But you need to go on and let me in so me and your mom can work this out.”
“Just let her have a couple days to herself, Pop,” Chucky said. “She just needs a couple days.”
“It’s already been a day and half! She just ran off and didn’t tell me or your grandma or anybody where she was going.”
“You knew she’d be here.”
“Doesn’t matter! She knows I don’t know nothin about the pills Mama’s got to take, or what appointments she has or—”
“She obviously called Auntie Lelah and told her everything, or Grandma would already be in trouble.”
Was he talking smart? Cha-Cha thought so. He really could have punched him.
“So what, if I try to come in, you’re gonna hit me? Is that it? You shouldn’t be choosing sides, Chucky. Especially since you haven’t even heard my side.”
Chucky uncrossed his arms and put a hand on Cha-Cha’s shoulder. Cha-Cha stifled the impulse to flinch.
“She’s not trying to see you right now, Pop. That’s huge. In all the years y’all been married, she ever stay mad at you longer than a day?”
“I know it’s huge! I don’t need you to tell me about my own wife. Why do you think I’m here? We made you, remember that. If she wants to stay here for a while longer, fine. But we at least gotta talk.”
Inside the house, Chucky’s son, Isaiah, yelled, and someone immediately appeased him. Having been publicly cuckolded by his ex-wife made Chucky think he had a right to moral superiority when it came to relationships. If Todd were here, he would have cooperated, Cha-Cha thought. Todd, his spitting image, would remind Tina that she’d invited folks to a party that was supposed to be happening in two days, and that the person who really suffered by her staying away was Viola. Too bad Todd was stationed in a faraway desert, getting ready for a second tour in an even more dangerous desert.
“You’re worried about her forgiving you,” Chucky said. “But you need to be worrying about why you’re acting up in the first place, Pop.” He stepped back into the entryway and gently closed the door on his father. He might as well have slammed it.
A smashed silver Lexus sat in the middle of Cha-Cha’s driveway. Oil leaked from underneath and trickled toward the gutter. A diagonal gash across the passenger side revealed a mangle of folded metal and plastic. California plates, all four cheaply tinted windows rolled down to different levels. Cha-Cha parked on the street and stuck his head through the driver’s window on the way to his front door. A film of grease-dappled burger wrappers obscured the backseat and floor, some from fast food joints not found on this side of the Mississippi. The front passenger seat held a heap of tape cassettes. The chemical-sweet stink of Luster’s Pink lotion crowded Cha-Cha’s nostrils. The sum of this detritus was Lonnie.
In the kitchen Lelah beamed as she made breakfast for dinner. She put down her spatula, hugged Cha-Cha round the neck.
“He’s been here an hour and Mama’s already so happy,” she whispered. “I think he’s a little drunk, though, which is why I’m making breakfast.”
“You didn’t tell him nothing about Mama’s, uh, new news, did you?”
“God, Cha-Cha, no. Just go in there and say hi.”
“I dreammmed of a city called Glor-rry, / So bright and so fair. / As I entered the gates I crieeed ho-ly, / And the angels met me there.”
Someone had used every pillow in the room to prop Viola up. Her dressy black sequin turban perched on her head. She squinted in rapture, and tears shimmied down her mole-flecked cheeks. Her right hand rested lightly in her sixth child’s upturned palm.
Lonnie’s bony limbs folded into the armchair. His black leather baseball cap sloped low over his brow. Mustache: a scraggly broom; eyebrows: two inverted checks. Legs possessed by their trademark jitter inside navy blue track pants. Baby-sized teeth chipped here and there. But his voice? His voice did much to make up for all that mess.
“They carr-rried me from mansion to man-sion, /And oh, the sights that I saw. / Then I said I want to see Je-sus, / The man who diiieed for us all.”
They froze in time, Cha-Cha silent at the door, his mother closed-eyed, and his brother looking out the window, stalling before he started the chorus. Lonnie and Viola communing in a way Cha-Cha could hardly imagine. Lelah walked in, breaking the spell.
“I’ve got eggs, Mama. Just a little bit, and some bacon. Lonnie, yours is on the stove. What’re you lurking in the doorway for, Cha?”
“Big brother Charles!” Lonnie stood up and flung his right hand to his forehead in sloppy salute. “You’re lookin desk-job sharp in your business-casual slacks.”
“Oh, Cha-Cha’s home!” Viola said. She tried to straighten up on her pillows and wiped her face with her hand. “Where you been, Cha? You ain’t came to sit with me in a long time.”
She held out her hand to him, so Cha-Cha had no choice but to take it, lean in, and give her a peck on the forehead. He wondered whether his mother even remembered forsaking him in his time of need.
In four swift steps Lonnie crossed the room and clapped Cha-Cha on the back. Lelah shooed them into the hallway.
“Your car looks terrible, and it’s leaking,” Cha-Cha said.
“Hit somethin in Ohio. Fell asleep. Don’t worry about that. How are you doing?”
Lonnie walked into the kitchen. He shoveled eggs into his mouth with a wooden serving spoon.
“I’m fine. You drove here?”
“Yahp,” Lonnie said. He broke a piece of bacon in half and put that into his mouth too. “After we talked, Tina called and said Mama wasn’t doing so great. That combined with your own predicament made me hop in the car. I borrowed some money from Lily, the girl from Hawthorne I was tellin you about? We back together, I think.”
Cha-Cha remembered that he’d promised Lonnie a hundred dollars on the phone. Those desperate calls seemed so long ago.
“Miles and the girls flyin in Friday,” Lonnie said. “My girls is flyin with em, too. Didn’t wanna drive cross-country with me, I guess. Duke’s flyin out from Oakland, but it’s just gonna be him I think.”
A Turner invasion and Cha-Cha had nowhere to hide. Soon they would be hitting him with judgment and unsolicited advice from all sides. A room full of funhouse reflections of himself, distorting what he knew to be true.
Lonnie washed down his bacon with a cup of coffee from Tina’s favorite mug. He wiped his hands on the front of his track pants.
“So, what you got goin on right now? It’s still light out. You know what I always wanna do first thing I get in town.”
Cha-Cha knew: head to Yarrow Street and see what was going on.
“You remember Courtney the man? He used to wear that lime-green jumpsuit, runnin around the east side lookin like a bolt of lightning?”
“I don’t remember any men named Courtney.”
“Sure you do. He started the Yarrow Gang, but he didn’t run it for too long cause he tried to hold up that liquor store with a hammer. Remember? He was high out his mind. A gotdamn hammer. Clerk shot him in the face.”
“Oh.”
“Remember Terry Randolph? Had a twin named Tyrone? Tyrone owed some people some money, but they killed Terry instead. Slit his throat, I think, right on the basketball courts. This was around ’73.”
“No, I had Chucky by then. Working too much.”
“I know you remember how Lydia Osage got shot by the police. They were chasing down somebody who robbed somebody on Fischer and shot her when she came around the corner with her groceries?”
“Can we just ride, Lonnie? Can we just ride and not talk about who’s dead and who all got shot?”
“Sure. I’m sorry. You know I like to reminisce.”
Lonnie drummed his fingers on his knees and stared out the window. The streets were alive to him, Cha-Cha did know. Lonnie—the hallway pisser, the brick scavenger, the lead singer—had been more social, mischievous, and curious than Cha-Cha, and
as such spent his teenage years making friends and enemies on blocks, dance floors, and basketball courts throughout the city. To him listing the too-soon-dead was paying homage; to Cha-Cha it was depressing.
“So you worked out the haint situation, huh?”
“What makes you think that?” Cha-Cha asked.
“Lelah said y’all had some sort of ‘experience.’ And that you’re snoring up a storm in the house.”
“I don’t know what happened, but I got too much going on to worry right now. I’m sleeping again, that’s true.”
He had been taking sleeping pills since that night on Yarrow Street. He didn’t know if the haint was still coming to him, but since he was still alive and well, he liked to believe that it was not. He was also now determined to disprove Alice’s main hypothesis; he wasn’t so pathetic that he needed a ghost to give his life purpose.
“I can’t keep thinking about something I can’t control.”
“Sounds good to me,” Lonnie said. “You been by that shrink’s house again?”
“What makes you think I been to her house? I’ve never been to her house. Lelah’s been runnin her mouth to you, and she don’t know what she’s talkin about.”
Lonnie tugged at his crotch and shrugged.
“I would’ve gone to her house. I’da gone to her house and no one but us two would’ve ever known anything, I’ll tell you that much. Specially if I’d have been as good as you been your whole life. You got a picture of her?”
“Yes. No. Not anymore.” Cha-Cha turned on the radio to discourage further conversation.
Someone had stolen the garage. The aluminum-sided late addition to the house was gone, and if it weren’t for the fact that the brick on the back of the house there looked fifteen years cleaner than the rest, it would be as if it had never existed.
“Motherfuckers,” Cha-Cha said. He pulled the car into the back alley.
Lonnie whistled.
Some sort of ingenious, stealth operation must have taken place because the back gate lock was intact. Save for the heap of geriatric sundries on the ground, one would have been hard-pressed to find a fingerprint or scrap of evidence.
“I was just here two days ago,” Cha-Cha said. He jiggled the handle of the kitchen door. Still locked.
“Somebody missed their calling in life,” Lonnie said. “This right here’s some MacGyver shit. A multiple-man operation. For scrap metal! They musta dragged it over the fence in sections. Why not just cut the fence? They already had the tools.”
“Where the hell were the police? Where the hell was McNair, huh? The hell I’m payin him for if he can’t even tell me somebody up and stole a piece of my house?” Cha-Cha circled the pile of junk on the floor like a carrion eater. He kicked a box of Depends as hard as he could. Its side crumpled too easily. He hit the walker with his cane, lacquered wood to cheap aluminum.
“Motherfuckers!”
“Calm down, Cha, before you throw that hip out,” Lonnie said. He smacked at something between his teeth. “Thought you was lettin the bank have the house anyway.”
“I never said that! Nobody ever said that! I was just here with Lelah. And Troy. I never said that. I’m paying almost seven hundred dollars a month for this place, gotdamnit.”
“We got insurance?” Lonnie asked. “They might cover somethin like this, maybe.”
“Motherfuckers!”
Lonnie stood and witnessed Cha-Cha’s tantrum. His round, ungainly brother cursed and swatted at the air and cursed again. For a moment Lonnie worried whether Cha-Cha could rile himself up into a heart attack, but since he had never been one to stand between a man and an outpouring of emotion, he let it continue. Lonnie looked at the house, then to the corner, where a car stopped longer than the sign required before driving on. He muttered a quick thank-you to God—a more open-minded and ethereal god than the one Cha-Cha envisioned—that he had never developed a taste for the truly hard stuff, the kind of stuff that made a person snatch a rickety garage under cover of night.
Leverage
Lelah saw the moving van parked in Brianne’s reserved spot but refused to believe it belonged to her daughter. It had only been two days. It was too extreme for her to have rented a van already, too final. She parked in a guest spot and walked over. From what she could see through the rear windows, the van appeared to be empty. That was a small relief. But then she saw Rob standing at the top of the apartment stairs with Bobbie in his arms. Bobbie spotted her and called out.
“Gigi! Gigi, come here now.” His squeaky voice mimicked the bossy tone of an adult’s.
She climbed the stairs with her hands outstretched for her grandson, offering Rob the smallest amount of eye contact one could dole out without appearing rude.
“Hi, Rob, hi.”
“Hi, Ms. Turner,” Rob said.
He actually seemed to be mulling over whether he was going to hand Bobbie to her, weighing his options, as if he had options. After about five seconds he passed Lelah her grandson. Lelah kissed Bobbie, squeezed him so tight he squirmed, and then handed him back.
“Brianne’s inside,” Rob said.
Rob was an inch or so taller than Lelah, with a smooth, medium-brown complexion and the sort of swirly, light brown eyes that made boys look more innocent than they were. He was likely not used to people staying upset with him for long—those sparkling eyes underneath his thick eyebrows compelled you to forgive him. But Lelah had not forgiven him for his early absence in Bobbie’s life, nor had she forgotten the hypocritical, self-congratulatory behavior of his parents. Once Rob had changed his tune and decided that he did in fact want to be a father, his parents had thrown a belated baby shower at their house in Grosse Pointe. Lelah, Marlene, Francey, Netti, and Tina had gone together. The unapologetic bourgieness of his parents—with their not one but two Romare Beardens on the front-room walls that they just had to point out—the way they lavished attention and affection on Rob, the baby boy of his family, as if he were doing a valiant service by deigning to be a father to his son, never mind his short-term negligence—it had all been too much bullshit for the Turner women to stomach. Francey had made a very Francey-like comment—not out of malice but for the sake of small talk—about how times had surely changed, because she could remember when a black family couldn’t even buy a house in Grosse Pointe thanks to their now infamous point system. Rob’s parents had looked at her blankly and changed the subject. Every Turner woman but Lelah and Brianne had left within the hour. She pushed those memories down now and gave him a shoulder squeeze.
“Thank you, honey,” she said. “It’s good seeing you.”
Inside the apartment, the scene reminded Lelah of her own recent eviction, the sort of chaos that resulted when there was no time to see one packing project through from start to finish. Heaps of clothes in every corner, dishes stacked on the couch, a wastebasket overflowing with ripped-up documents. A foreboding sense that many items would be permanently lost or trashed in a mad rush to get everything out the door. Brianne, in pink sweatpants and a white sports bra, dragged a duffel bag through the hallway to the kitchen. She plopped it down with a grunt.
“So you’re moving out today?”
“Yep,” Brianne said. “Gotta give the landlord keys by three o’ clock.”
Lelah’s phone said that it was already 11 A.M. No way this place would be packed in four hours, not with Rob futzing around with Bobbie. Brianne left the room and came back with a plastic bin of toys. She set the bin outside the front door and yelled downstairs for Rob to come pick it up.
“Can I help?” Lelah asked. “I’m pretty good at moving out in a hurry.”
Bad joke, she realized too late.
Brianne shrugged. “No, we got it. Thank you.”
“So Rob’s driving the van, and you’re gonna follow in your car? Tonight?”
“Yep, as soon as we drop off the keys.”
“Oh.” The lack of eye contact rattled Lelah. “Well, are you gonna come back Saturday for Grandma’s par
ty?”
“Don’t think so. We need to get settled, and Bobbie’s been on too many long car rides lately.”
“You know, Grandma’s sick.”
“I do know that.”
“Like for-real sick. Really sick. Worse than whenever you saw her last.”
Brianne knelt in front of the couch and wrapped dinner plates with bath towels from a hamper. She carefully placed the wrapped plates in a box.
“Do you think you guys can wait? It’s just two days until the party, and then y’all can leave early Sunday morning.”
Brianne’s hands stopped moving.
“I am turning the keys in at three, and we are getting on the road to Chicago before it gets dark.” She said this like a chant, as if saying it repeatedly might make it come to pass.
“Alright, well. I want you to have this.”
Lelah reach into her purse and pulled out the thousand dollars she’d set aside for Brianne at Cha-Cha’s that morning. She held the money out to her, but Brianne did not budge. Lelah set it on the arm of the couch.
Brianne went back to wrapping plates. Rob walked in with Bobbie, saw Brianne sitting on the floor, the helpless look on Lelah’s face, the money on the couch, and turned on his heels.
“Please take it, Brianne.”
“You want me to take that?” Brianne pointed her chin at the stack of cash.
“Yeah. Why not? I don’t want you moving to Chicago with nothing. If you’re determined to go, then I support you, fine. But you shouldn’t go empty-handed. It’s just some just-in-case money.”
Lelah wanted to add something about not moving in with anyone, especially a man, with nothing to offer, but she thought better of this.
“Where’s that money from, Mommy? That’s the money Auntie Marlene gave you?”
“Yeah. Well, kinda, yeah. It’s some of her money in there.”
“Oh my god,” Brianne said under her breath, but Lelah heard her. Brianne pursed her lips and went back to wrapping plates.
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