by Steve Paul
“You’re coming home with me,” Troy said. “Jeri’s already made up the back room. The kids can double up.”
Why was everyone telling her what to do? It was almost as dismaying as the way they pushed their faces into hers, nose to nose, thinking she wouldn’t hear them otherwise. She didn’t want to go home with Troy or hear him go off on Juanita. She wanted to be in her own home. She liked her home, the first house she’d bought on her own, a tidy airplane bungalow in Old Northeast, north of St. John, where she’d been told it was safer. The second story, bright with windows, sat neatly above the back half of the house, like an upstairs sunroom, and she kept her houseplants there year round. It was a sturdy little house made of limestone and brick and stucco. “A popular design in the thirties,” the agent had said. There was a maple in the parking area, shapely shrubs along the foundation, a lilac and peonies in the fenced backyard. When she had time she’d put in more flowers. She’d had the stucco and wood trim painted the summer before she met Juanita. Once an old Irish-Italian neighborhood, all sorts of people now lived in Northeast, in all the rainbow colors. She’d bought into the neighborhood for that very reason. Wasn’t their president half-and-half, like her? She liked to think she and Nita would just blend in.
When they first met, she enjoyed showing Juanita the area, driving past the mansions along Gladstone Boulevard and up to Concourse Park where kids played in the fountain. On Sunday it was full of mostly Latino families, and she’d driven Nita there deliberately. “Looks like a Mexican zócalo,” Nita had said with a snort, taking Ladonna by surprise. It was her first glimpse into Nita’s dislike of newcomers. They should do it the way we did.
Across from the park, the old Colonnade wrapped around the newer Kennedy Memorial, where Parks and Rec planted cannas and coleus each spring. Copper thieves had recently stripped half the tiles off the Colonnade domes. She was in Juanita’s Jeep when she first saw the ravaged roofs. “I don’t believe it!” she’d exclaimed, asking Nita to pull over. “Is nothing sacred?”
“Hello?” Nita had replied, and gave her a disdainful look. “You’re such an innocent, Don. What kind of world do you think you live in?”
She remembered now: the first bad night had come soon after that remark.
* * *
When her brain cleared, she’d know whether she still wanted Nita in her house. At the moment her head throbbed and her side ached. Troy was still talking.
“… You’ll need looking after, sis. Let us do that for you … For godsakes, that crazy woman shot you in the stomach!”
His voice lifted up, and she turned slightly and gazed at him, then slowly shook her head. “It was an accident, Troy.”
It was her first complete sentence, and the knowledge gave her strength. So she was on the mend. If she closed her eyes, maybe he’d leave and she could catch her breath. My devoted baby brother.
“Go home,” she said without opening her eyes.
He leaned toward her again, forehead wrinkled. “You say something, Don?”
“I’m okay,” she whispered, opening her eyes. “Please go home.”
“Go home, the woman says.” He crossed his arms over his chest and sat back in the visitor’s seat. Once he left, she planned to ask a nurse to push the chair away from the bed so she wouldn’t have to look at worried eyeballs or smell her visitors’ hot breath. At least the medical staff treated her better. Troy would stay until he’d harried her into some concession.
“Don’t you think you’ll need some looking after?”
He stayed for a full hour more, talking intermittently, circling the room, asking a nurse if there was a doctor he could consult with, reminding the woman he was Miss Price’s only close relative who was ambulatory—Daddy didn’t get about much and Mama was dead. “I’m the brother and I’m shocked that Officer Juarez is even allowed in this room.”
The nurse reminded him that it was Officer Juarez who’d raced her to the hospital and waited through surgery and talked with the medical staff. It was Officer Juarez, the nurse said, who brought what Ladonna might need for an extended stay.
“Officer Juarez did not phone her family,” Troy said, his voice growing louder. “It is my opinion, as her brother, that a restraining order should be put on that woman so that she does not come here again.”
“You’ll need to get the patient’s permission.”
“She can’t give it. She’s too drugged.”
“Then you’ll have to wait till she can. Until then, it’s a dead issue.”
“That’s just it!” Troy shouted at her. “If that accidental bullet had been one centimeter up or down, this woman would be dead!”
“You need to calm down, sir, or leave.”
He was drawing a crowd. An orderly the size of an NFL tackle approached, dwarfing “Tall Troy.” Tears stung her eyes. Get out! she thought. Every last one of you!
The drugs were wearing off, and as they did the event came back piece by piece and more vividly than she expected. She’d hoped it would not come back at all, that some invisible hand would wipe the memory away, like something erased from a chalkboard.
* * *
There’d been a pall over her house since the first night Juanita came home drunk, sullen and full of blame. Nothing surfaced and nothing cleared the air. After several days, they resumed speaking to each other but the air was tainted, like the smoky stench that lingers following a house fire. Then it happened again: Nita came home late, clearly inebriated, or stoned, behaving as if something she refused to identify was Ladonna’s fault.
The following day, after dinner, Ladonna made her move: she would not tolerate drunken and accusatory behavior, or the black mood that followed. Juanita had changed and not told her anything at all. “Loving people share their woes,” Ladonna said. “And you haven’t shared a thing. You glower at me, challenging me to guess what your problem is. Guess!”
Nita stared at her in silence.
“What I’m asking,” Ladonna continued in a calm voice, “is for you to leave. For a while anyway.”
“Leave? What do you mean?”
“Take your things and move out.”
“It’s our house, Don. Where am I supposed to go?”
“First off, it’s not our house, Nita. It’s my house. You’ve lived here for maybe fifteen months. Second, I’ll give you a week to find someplace to go. Okay?”
Nita cursed and threw the glass in her hand against the fridge. It shattered, and the shards rained down over the floor near Ladonna’s feet, one small piece flying into her ankle. Juanita was shouting, “Where am I suppose to go?” over and over. Then words of abuse fell across her head and into her ears, words she had never before heard anyone hurl at her—bitch, whore, nigger.
“Who is it? Is it a man?” Nita shouted, eyes wild, her mouth a jagged rectangle. She looked completely deranged.
Stunned, Ladonna did not move. Absolutely nothing in their life together had prepared her for this outburst. “I’m leaving the room,” she finally said. “When you calm down we can talk.”
Juanita crossed the kitchen in two huge strides and grabbed her arm, spinning her around. “You’re not leaving this room. And neither am I.”
Spittle blew out of Nita’s mouth. She was no longer human, and Ladonna could only think, Mad dog! Rabid dog! Adrenalin raced to her head, making it feel hot and light, and she pulled her arm away, yelling, “Let go of me!”
But Juanita grabbed her other arm, holding her as you might a small child, pinning its arms to its sides. Then Nita shook her, and Ladonna screamed, “You’re crazy!”
She could not reconstruct it all. It had happened too quickly. She felt herself pulling away, peeling one hand loose, slapping out at Nita. Then an elbow came free, which Ladonna thrust upward to Nita’s face, catching her on the cheek. Nita grunted and moved back. When she stepped forward, one hand shot toward Ladonna’s head, grabbing her hair.
“Let go!” Ladonna screamed. “You’re hurting me!”
“You just hurt me.”
She pulled at Nita’s fingers lodged in her hair, then took a heel and tromped on Nita’s foot, but she was in her work boots. Ladonna gasped: Nita was still in uniform. The realization felt like a splash of ice water. When had Nita become this walking land mine, a cop with an explosive temper? She was scared and couldn’t abide the insanity.
“Nita, let’s stop this now.”
“You started it!” She dropped her grip on Ladonna. “You started it, bitch.”
How could she say that to her face? And in Ladonna’s own home? Ladonna looked her in the face, flabbergasted, uttered, “How dare you,” in a low threatening voice, and slapped Juanita hard across the face. For a long second they looked at each other in the full knowledge of the moment’s ugliness. And then Nita’s hand dropped to her belt and she unsnapped her gun from its holster. Ladonna felt as though she was watching a bad film in slow motion.
“No one slaps me. Not in uniform. Not even you!”
Her own hand dropped to cover Juanita’s fumbling with the pistol. Then four hands pulled and pushed, all of it in so few seconds and in such clumsy mayhem that she would never be able to fully visualize the sequence of events. She wasn’t sure she was even watching the gun or their hands but thought she’d shut her eyes in horror, her hands swatting Nita’s. When she heard the shot, it only registered as incredibly loud, deafening both ears. Then she was lying on the linoleum, on her back, watching the ceiling turn red. Her side felt odd and began to throb, and when she touched the hurt place, her hand came back wet, as though water were leaking out of her like a broken pipe. Nita was standing over her, screaming.
Then she was being wrapped in blankets, picked up and laid across the backseat of Nita’s Jeep, her head swimming, the motion of the truck lulling her to sleep. And when she awoke she was in this place, machinery purring nearby, nurses moistening her lips with ice, and Nita smiling pitifully at her and whispering, “You’re gonna be okay. I know you are … I’m so sorry, baby. It’s gonna be back the way it was …”
* * *
At the end of the week, Juanita’s department sent over their investigator once again. She could speak now, if she kept it soft and slow. And when he asked her, once again, what happened, she struggled to remember what Nita had twice whispered in her ear. Help me out, Don. Just this once! Please …
“It was on the kitchen table … the gun. She was about to clean it—”
“Excuse me,” he interrupted. “Was Officer Juarez going to clean her pistol in uniform? They said she was in uniform when she brought you in. Do you recall?”
She closed her eyes and swallowed. Nothing was coming back to her. “I don’t remember. I can’t reconstruct it …”
“Just curious,” he muttered, looking down at his notes. “No one I know cleans their service pistol in uniform.”
He turned to her, waiting, and she looked away.
“It sounds silly,” she said finally. “Stupid even. I picked it up … I think I’d just made a joke … and she grabbed it back. Thought it was loaded. The gun dropped out of our hands. It hit the table—no, the floor—and fired … I was in the way.”
For a second their eyes met, and then he dropped his gaze to the clipboard. He knew she was lying.
“Miss Price, you have to pull the trigger. No Glock will fire just because you drop it. You can bludgeon it with a hammer, and it still won’t fire.”
“Well, it fired … Freaky thing …” She said it softly, as if she hadn’t heard his last remark.
He sighed and mumbled under his breath, “That’s what they all say.”
She wondered if Juanita was still in the house—my house! She imagined Nita going through her things, watching the TV, eating, and sleeping in her bed. My house! Juanita owed her. Owed her big time. She was certain now; she wanted Nita out.
Exhausted, Ladonna shut her eyes. The officer was talking to her again. “No,” she told him, “I won’t be pressing charges.” There was no reason to. It was a freaky accident and they were probably both at fault. The sergeant clicked his pen shut. He sighed once more and gave her a penetrating look. He didn’t believe her and she tried not to care. He couldn’t prove anything. No one could. She felt a chill seep in and pushed the button for the nurse. She needed more blankets.
“Thank you and get well,” the officer said. “I’ll leave my card with the nurse.”
The door opened and closed behind him. No one remained in the room. And what if the nurse gave his card to Nita, would she ever see it again? The nursing staff believed Nita, and liked her. It was Troy they didn’t like. She couldn’t remember the officer’s name. She opened her eyes and gazed toward the window. The shade was partly closed, gently diffusing the late-afternoon light. How peaceful it was. If only it would stay this way: no people, no pressure, no secrets.
She didn’t remember falling asleep until a sound woke her. The light in the window had faded to a dull silvery gray. The rest of the room had turned into dusk. She shifted slowly, measuring the weight of her head and the stiffness of her neck. A shadow filled the door, and she gasped inaudibly. When the door closed, she went suddenly cold as though caught in a shaft of frigid air. A medicinal scent wafted toward her, and her body tensed. The odor was faint and familiar but not from the hospital, and her stomach pitched in revulsion. Bourbon, wasn’t it? The square-ish shadow moved, and she gripped the sides of the bed, struggling to pull herself up. The shape paused, pulling back into the gloom. Ladonna froze, struggling to bring it into view as her eyes adjusted to the dark. Then a woman’s voice whispered her name. “Don?” The shape became instantly recognizable, and her heart lurched, as though an invisible bullet had at last found its mark.
THE GOOD NEIGHBOR
BY LINDA RODRIGUEZ
South Troost
James had always said that part of the secret of being a good neighbor was knowing when to keep your mouth shut. And, of course, being a friendly, welcoming person. He was working in the garden, as usual, when the Clarks moved into the house next door. James went right over, like a good neighbor should.
“Welcome to the block, folks. My name is James Marvin.” With a warm smile, he held out his hand to the husband. He had to look up to meet the man’s eyes, and James was not a short man. The guy was probably six-five. White with reddish hair. Built like an athlete.
“We’re the Clarks,” his wife said, holding out her hand so James had to shake with her instead. She was tall too, probably an inch or two over six feet, with skin as medium brown as James’s.
He waited for first names, but the two of them turned back to what they were doing as if he’d already left. So they became just Mr. and Mrs. Clark.
The house they bought had belonged to the Martinsons, who, like so many in the neighborhood, had lost it in foreclosure. The bank owned it for more than a year.
Working outside in his garden, James was glad to see someone living there again. At first.
The garden was his wife’s before she died. Celeste had roses, peonies, iris, lilies, the classic perennials. She wanted an English cottage garden. When her cancer got bad, James took over.
In the process, they lost a couple of rosebushes, so he replaced them with tall purple coneflowers and black-eyed susans. Native plants that were drought- and neglect-hardy. Summers in Kansas City had always been hot and dry, but they’d been growing hotter and drier, even if idiots wanted to dismiss the idea of global warming. James had been a high school biology teacher before he retired, and native plants had long been his passion.
As he lost Celeste, he lost more of her perennials, as well. When he started trying to rebuild his life without her, he planted butterfly weed, beebalm, and gayfeather. The garden got him through the grieving process. He added more and more native plants and tall prairie grasses and enlarged the garden until it took over half the front yard and most of the back. James saw it as his memorial to Celeste. He felt closest to her when kneeling in the dirt, wrestling with weeds or dividing and tra
nsplanting.
His son Scotty lived in Germany, working for the Department of Defense, so he didn’t visit often. But Scotty called every weekend. Again and again, he tried to persuade James to sell the house and move somewhere safer.
“That neighborhood has really gone downhill, Dad.” Scotty’s voice always reminded James of his own father’s. It was strange how those things skipped generations.
“It’s what it always was, Scotty, a working-class neighborhood. Just the way it was when you were growing up.”
“When I was growing up, that head shop and porno place where all the crooks and hookers hang out was a pet store, and the Epicurean Lounge with its armed guards at the door was Eddy’s Loaf ‘n Stein. The liquor store on that corner was a pizza restaurant. The tattoo parlor was an expensive beauty shop. Mr. Emory’s, wasn’t it?” Scotty’s voice had an edge of sarcasm to it.
“So, businesses have changed along Troost. That’s not really the neighborhood.” Scotty always tried to make things sound worse than they were.
“Dad, you’re one block from Troost. That is your neighborhood.”
Sell and move somewhere safer, Scotty repeated. It was an ongoing argument.
Shortly after the Clarks moved in, workmen began digging up Mrs. Martinson’s shrubs and perennials and cutting down all their trees. Chainsaws and other power equipment roared for days. James had to leave his house to escape the noise and the headaches it gave him. At the end of a week, nothing was left outside the Clarks’ house but grass.
James was appalled, but kept his mouth shut. The good neighbor.
Not long after, he wakened at 4:45 a.m. to a heavy pounding sound and Tony Boll’s drunken shouts to his wife to unlock the door and let him in. Tony lived on the other side of the Clarks. Tony kicked at their door, screaming curses.
Suddenly, Mr. Clark’s deep voice joined in. He told Tony to shut up and go away somewhere to sober up. James sighed and stepped to the window. He knew Tony wouldn’t take that well. Tony threatened to kick Clark’s ass up between his ears. Fists cocked, he charged over to where Mr. Clark stood on his front steps in his robe and slippers. James didn’t see clearly what exactly happened, but Tony wound up on the driveway, screaming in pain. Clark went back inside.