The Summer of Our Foreclosure

by Sean Boling

  Chapter Five

  The sign didn’t arrive as soon as I thought it would. It was childish of me to think that my questions and reality checking were part of an ordered chain of events that would naturally lead to the redness being raised the next day. It didn’t even come the next week, or few weeks. The lax timeline made it more comfortable for my parents to lie. They had plenty of time for either me to forget I had asked, or for them to concoct an excuse.

  Other signs arrived. Several of my friends’ families had stakes driven into their fronts. A grizzled man in a pickup truck would come once a week, with the signs perched on white wooden crosses lined up in his bed. We would watch him like a roulette wheel, stalking him slowly on our bikes, some of us on foot, wondering where he would stop next, as he would perform his ritual a couple of times per visit: unfolding himself with a grunt from the driver’s seat, already brandishing his rusty spade with the splintered handle; plunging the tool into the lawn a few times, turning a small patch of green into a dark hole rimmed with loose dirt; shouldering one of the white crosses from the back of his truck and dragging it over to the spot; planting it, tamping down the dirt around it, and ignoring our presence the whole time.

  About half of the homes that had been marked were occupied by my friends and their families. Shay’s house got hung with one during the second visit from the old man with the truck. She mentioned that we would not be visiting her mother at the fast food restaurant from now on, as the resentment her mother was barely able to conceal while working that job was uncontrollable now that they were resigned to foreclosure. She and I spent a lot more time together, though, because she wanted to avoid her mother when she was at home as well. We all spent more time together than ever before, which of course was already quite a bit. But those who had been marked with the red words proceeded to lose whatever feelings of obligation they had maintained toward their families when it came to making up some time with them on weekends or holidays, for if the walls of their houses weren’t vibrating with anger, they were sagging with sadness. And no one really wanted to see their parents like that. So we commiserated and tried to make each other feel better without actually talking about anything specific. Instead we would understand why that rock was thrown a bit harder, or that bike wiped out from taking a turn too aggressively, and we were no longer surprised when we would see tears flow in the process, and we pretended not to notice when they would continue to trickle down long after the physical pain of the fall had subsided or the loss had been tallied.

  Most families decided to keep living in the house until they were forced out. From what I was able to glean from my friends’ tales of their home life, the reasons why they stayed were varied: some seemed to do so as a matter of convenience, others as a form of protest, while the rest had lost the will to do much of anything, much less plan a move. They all kept working. In fact, many of them worked longer hours than ever before, and worked weekends, apparently just as interested in avoiding their families as their children were.

  Occasionally a family would leave in the dark, sometime past midnight and before dawn. Nobody’s house was furnished very thoroughly, so it was easy enough for them to try to pack up and escape undetected. We had all moved from smaller homes or apartments, and getting into our Ranch houses stretched the budgets enough to render new or additional furniture unaffordable. A few of us would always be aware of when someone was trying to sneak out, however. We would hear the car doors slam, or see the headlights filter through the blinds in our windows, and if we hadn’t caught sight of them in their driveway, we would wait and see in the morning who was missing, whose parents had whisked them away without letting them say good-bye.

  Other houses that were paid a visit by the sign man were occupied by people without kids, so they had been empty most of the time, anyway. And then there were others that received a red mark that really took us by surprise, since we had never seen anyone in them, and assumed there was no owner. Blaine informed us that those houses must have therefore been investment properties, and he clearly took pride in having to explain to us what that meant. Once he did, I debated consoling my parents by telling them that as stupid as they may feel about buying at Ranch Ranch, at least they weren’t stupid enough to see it solely as an investment opportunity, and kid themselves that anyone would want to rent here. But that would blow the lid off my surveillance, my reality checking, for even when the time inevitably came that my parents would have to acknowledge they were drowning, most likely after a sign had finally been raised in front of us, they certainly would not go so far as to admit any feelings of stupidity. Not to me, at least.

  Meanwhile as most people were trying to avoid looking at the sign on the cross stuck in their front lawn, or looking constantly in the direction where it may appear someday to see if it had arrived, something of a very different sort arrived at Blaine’s house one Saturday morning.

  A huge pleasure boat, hovering somewhere between a yacht and a speedboat, was towed through the gate by a diesel flatbed truck, like a set piece being dragged onto the field for a Super Bowl halftime show. The procession slowly made its way along our streets, people coming out to stand on the curb and watch it pass. And while there was no Grand Marshall or beauty pageant winner seated on the bow waving at us, there was Blaine’s father waving it proudly over to his driveway. The adults who had lined the streets for the sparsely-attended parade went back inside, many of them shaking their heads, while all of us kids followed it to its destination, peppering the delivery driver and Blaine’s father with questions upon arrival. The driver answered us by handing out brochures for the boat dealership, while Blaine’s father gently waved us off with avuncular assurances that we would all have a chance to explore it once he took care of some paperwork and inspected it.

  As our boat fan club dispersed and the buyer and seller went inside to finalize the deal, Blaine pulled me aside.

  “You get first crack, dude,” he told me. “We’re taking it to the lake tomorrow.”

  “What lake?”

  “That one out past the high school.”

  “I didn’t know that was ‘the’ lake.”

  “It is to people who have boats,” he grinned.

  “I didn’t even know there was ‘a’ lake out there.”

  “Technically it’s a reservoir. But they call it Lake…some Spanish name. You coming?”

  “Sure. What about Miggy?”

  Blaine hesitated. “Well…it’s a family trip.”

  “Oh, so my parents are invited?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” I said, not sure whether I liked the prospect of having them along. I looked over at the vessel. The driver had backed it in and it took up the whole driveway. Blaine’s family had parked their cars on the street to make way. “It’s a big boat. I’m sure Miggy’s folks could fit on there, too.”

  “They’d be uncomfortable,” Blaine quickly replied. “I’m not bringing Lana and her family.”

  I paused and tried to figure out how that was relevant, but could not. He and Lana had yet to spend any time together in school or in either of our neighborhoods.

  “I wouldn’t be bringing Miggy,” I finally said. “He’s your friend, too.”

  Blaine acted as though I still had not said anything. “Do you want to come or not?”

  I shrugged. “I said yes already. It sounds fun.”

  “Cool,” he put his grin back on. “Tomorrow morning, bright and early. Come on over when you hear us loading up. Tell your people.” He drifted in to their open garage. “I’m going to see if Dad needs any help with anything. See ya.”

  “See ya,” I replied in kind, though I wondered if he would have noticed had I not replied at all.

  The kids from The Barrio tended not to come over to The Ranch on weekends since our parents were around, if not always visible, and I wanted to see if they had caught sight of the boat sailing past their neighborhood on its way to the Rancho gate. With all of the activity at Blaine’
s house, the tunnel was inaccessible, so I went back to my house to hop the fence.

  As I reached our driveway I saw my parents peering out the window above the garage, pressing the sides of their faces against the glass to get as clear an angle as possible of the boat. They sheepishly acknowledged me with waves and I decided to tell them later about the invitation to ride on it.

  I went through the side gate into our backyard, swung myself onto the top of the fence, and jumped to the ground on the other side. I looked straight ahead at the barren plains of beige, the train tracks hidden behind a lengthy embankment made of leftover dirt from the construction of our homes that had now settled into the same tone and consistency and hosted the same weeds as the earth around it. The wind whipped my eyes dry and I imagined, as I almost always did when I first landed on the other side of our fence, that there was nothing behind me and I was the lone visitor on a distant planet, or the sole survivor on ours.

  The walk along the fence line was marked, as usual, by very little noise coming from the backyards, while the wind that kept people inside, particularly the parents, screamed across the valley floor and pelted the boards with pebbles and particles of dirt. Occasionally the muffled sound of music could be heard from inside a house, or the sound of someone yelling, or the squeals and commands of children playing in a yard, and in rare instances an adult could be heard puttering outside, watering some plants or scraping the rust off the grill of a barbeque on wheels.

  I came to the corner where the fence met the wall, and turned into the alley that separated the two territories. At the other end of the passageway, lingering by the street, I saw Lana Torres and her former school bodyguard, Dulce Villanueva, who was now one of The Barrio’s versions of a teen leftover who couldn’t score any living arrangements with anyone in High School Town. She was only a year ahead of us, a freshman, so theoretically she still had a chance to swing a deal in the future, but she was big and loud and everything that Lana was not. Her dad did a lot of landscaping work in the high school town and gave her a ride whenever he had a job there, so she rarely rode the bus with us. She waved me over in a manner that suggested she would hunt me down if I didn’t comply. So I did.

  “Whose boat was that?” she said with her heavy accent that I was always convinced she clung to and made heavier than necessary, like this guy my dad worked with who was from Boston originally but hadn’t lived there for thirty years and still insisted on speaking with an accent that sounded like a comedian imitating someone from Boston when he would call Dad at home.

  “So you saw it?” I asked, which I knew was a stupid question, but it was my reason for coming over.

  “Of course, dumb ass,” Dulce didn’t waste the opportunity to pounce.

  “Blaine’s family,” I said.

  Dulce and Lana looked at each other and smiled.

  “So, you like Blaine?” I asked neither one in particular, but kept my eye on Lana. She looked down shyly and added a blush to her smile. Dulce did the talking.

  “Are you just gonna ask us stupid questions all day?” she said.

  “No,” I said, and debated whether I should ask the more pointed follow-up question I was forming. I held off and changed the subject. “I’m riding on it tomorrow with him.”

  “So?” Dulce snorted. “You think that makes you all hot shit, too?”

  “I’m just saying I’m going for a ride.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” she laughed, “You’re just along for the ride.”

  Lana started to look a little embarrassed. I wasn’t sure if it was for Dulce’s sake or mine. I decided to roll out my blunt question after all.

  “Do you really like Blaine?” I asked, “Or do you just like the boat, and his clothes, and the car he’s going to get on his sixteenth birthday?”

  Dulce looked like she was about to hit me. I tried not to look as though I was bracing myself and braced myself. Lana took a step back and now looked worried.

  “Fuck you, man!” was what Dulce finally blurted out. “Are you calling us whores?”

  “What?” I said, sincerely dumbfounded. “No.”

  But then it did occur to me, as Dulce started pushing me, that one could certainly interpret my question that way. She kept shoving me in the chest and started to taunt me. “Why don’t you move out of your rich-ass neighborhood if money don’t mean nothing to you, bitch! Join the real world, bitch!”

  Her shoves were getting more intense. Lana half-heartedly tried to step between us, but it just wasn’t in her to do such a thing. Meanwhile I was caught between defending myself against a violent girl who was bigger and stronger than me, and the old adage about not hitting a girl.

  “Look,” I said while trying not to trip as I let the momentum of Dulce’s blows carry me backwards. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just get jealous of Blaine sometimes, okay?”

  “Why, bitch?” she said, unrelenting. “You got money!”

  I steadied myself and absorbed her next shove without moving, and yelled right in her face, “I ain’t got shit, you fat fuck! Any money we had is gone now! A nice house doesn’t mean shit, Dulce! It’s a mirage! A fucking mirage! Do you even know what a mirage is, you stupid asshole?”

  “Who you calling stupid?”

  “I called you fat, too, Stupid!”

  She took a swing at me, but I saw it coming since I figured what I said would instigate a punch, so I managed to dodge it. Missing her target raised her temperature even more, so she decided not to take any chances and just barrel into me, driving me into the ground. Lana screamed for help, and as Dulce pressed my profile into the dirt with my face aimed toward The Barrio, I saw a bunch of the guys who like to drink beer by the road on weekends come running towards us. I felt myself being lifted from the ground, and among the gallery of faces I saw Miggy’s older sister, Lourdes, stepping forward to take custody of me. The excited chatter that filled the air was all in Spanish, so I asked her, “Am I in trouble?”

  “No,” she assured me. “They think it’s funny.”

  “That a girl was beating up a boy?”

  “It’s Dulce. She’s always good for a laugh. I’m surprised they stopped her.”

  Dulce was still hollering at me, in both English and Spanish, filling in the blanks between calling me a bitch and a puta and a motherfucker and a joto with whatever came to mind, as the men chuckled and held her at bay. Her dad arrived and whisked her away as the beer-breathed men cat-called them on their way back into the pile of homes. I naturally heard my share of animal noises and whistles, too, as Lourdes beckoned me to walk with her to their house.

  “Why?” she asked me as we drew farther away from the din of verbal ignorance. “I mean, Dulce? Are you kidding? How can you take that poor girl seriously?”

  “I know, I know,” I agreed. “She just got to me this time.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She was calling me out for being some rich punk just because I live over the wall.”

  “So?”

  We turned onto the path that led to their house and were now hidden from view of the fight audience. I stopped to catch my breath as I suddenly felt like crying.

  “We’re losing our house, Lourdes.”

  I barely managed to keep from bawling, but my efforts were no doubt very obvious. Lourdes gave me a hug and said she was sorry. I could not hold it any longer. I let loose a prolonged sob into her shoulder.

  I composed myself as quickly as I could and apologized for laying that on her. She was nice enough to barely acknowledge it happened and instead picked up on our conversation.

  “Why would she even say that?” she asked.

  I sighed at having to admit my part in the incident, though doing so sped up my recovery even more. “We were talking about Blaine’s boat, me and Lana and Dulce, and they were acting all gaga over him, so I guess I accused them of only being interested in his money, and Dulce took that to mean I called them whores.”

  Lourdes smiled. “I wonder what Lana
thinks.”

  “Thanks,” I groaned. “Like I ever had a shot, anyway.”

  “C’mon,” she got us to walking again. “Miggy must have had his headphones on when the shouting happened.”

  We arrived at their house and made our way to the backyard and sure enough, Miggy was haphazardly tossing seed into the bird cage that took up one corner of the lot while he bobbed his head up and down to the music coming through some headphones attached to the player hooked on his waistband. He saw us and slid the headphones down onto his neck with one hand while birdseed seeped between the fingers of his other.

  “What’s up?” he looked quizzically in our direction. It occurred to me that maybe I had some visible cuts or bruises. Lourdes saw me check my face and neck with my fingertips.

  She said to me, “You’re clear.” She said to Miggy, “He got his ass kicked by Dulce.”

  “Right on,” Miggy broke into a huge smile. “Now you’re really part of the neighborhood.”

  He flung the remaining seed over his shoulder into the cage and we all sat on some old patio furniture teetering on top of the parched bumpy ground that was lightly strewn with flattened dry weeds. I recounted the episode for his benefit, while Lourdes teasingly cross-referenced the version I told Miggy against the one I told her. They told me their respective Dulce stories, and we came to the conclusion that if she had been born under more affluent circumstances and attended a leafier school, she would have a prescription for every psychiatric medication on the market.

  Lourdes jumped up and retrieved her high school yearbook, which had just been distributed the previous week. Dulce’s class photo betrayed none of her hardly-suppressed rage. We marveled at the ability of the photographer to coax such a pleasant smile out of her, and searched for any candid shots which may have captured the truth. None were listed, which in itself was somewhat revealing, but then again she was only a freshman.

  Since Lourdes had the book out, she went through it with us practically page-by-page and provided biographies of the people featured most prominently and background information of the events that marked the key points in the year and locations that provided the backdrops in the pictures. We found out who was dating whom, who had been dating whom, who would like to date whom; we found out who was friendly with whom, who comprised which cliques, who had broken ties with whom, and most importantly, what we should learn from these maneuvers: how to maintain one’s dignity in the pursuit of a relationship or friendship, for the duration of it, and at the end of it should it come to that; and how much more difficult it would be to apply those principles in practice than it would be to grasp them in the abstract while learning about them in the yard on a Saturday afternoon, as the emotions that would come into play would be powerful factors, and we needed to steel ourselves in preparation for them, to not fool ourselves into thinking we could completely avoid them, but not let them fool us into abandoning the rational doctrine we were being armed with. We got her take on who the up-and-comers were amongst the junior and sophomore ranks, who would be the biggest influences on the student body. She included herself on that list without the slightest bit of hesitation. She gave us tips on how to recognize whether someone of higher social rank was worth responding to should they approach us: if it was a legitimate outreach and an opportunity for elevation, or if it was the groundwork for a joke or an attempt to find a lesser light to hang around with and make themselves look better. She wanted us to understand which people, organizations, and clubs not considered cool were worth the risk in the interest of developing a persuasive college application. She prepared us for how kids from the countryside are perceived on campus, and how we could make sure to avoid falling into the stereotype. And she emphasized that all of the above was extremely important if we expected to find a place to live in town, as that would only happen if we attracted an invitation. Asking around was not an option. If you had to ask, you weren’t welcome.

  The last point she made before excusing herself to see what was available for us to eat and drink was that she would not be able to assist us in any way directly; she would help in subtle ways and be sure to casually praise either of us if by chance we were mentioned in conversation amongst the campus select, but that any overt attempts at being our spokesperson would only damage our prospects, and lower her status. The cult of self-determination ran strong on a campus where projections concerning life after graduation were weak, for even though the town it was in held sway over us, it was nowhere to be found in the consciousness of anyone in the world who mattered, and any connections made there were not getting anyone anywhere, anyway.

  Her explicit reference to all of us being on campus together caved in on my mood. I had been so excited to gather so much valuable intelligence that I had practically forgotten there was a good chance I may not end up going to the school with them, or perhaps only go for a brief stint. I wasn’t sure what my parents’ plan was: if we were going to move once the foreclosure was officially pronounced, or if we were going to squat in the house as long as we could before being evicted. The squatter option would provide me with more leeway to earn a spot in town and enjoy a successful four years thanks to Lourdes’ mentorship, regardless of where my parents wound up. What’s fifty miles compared to one hundred or two hundred if I was only going to come home on weekends, anyway? But my parents would have to agree to it.

  Lourdes called Miggy inside to help her in the kitchen. I grew a bit melancholy as I found myself alone pondering an uncertain future. They mercifully re-emerged and saved me from my thoughts. Their parents and grandmother were off for the day with their brother in a distant farm town down the valley, meeting the family of a girl their brother had been dating. Neither Miggy nor Lourdes had any opinion on the matter, as they had never met the young woman, but meanwhile we were free to clear out the fridge and the cupboards at will, and they were getting the party started with every bag of deep fried items they could cradle in their arms and a half-full case of soda in tow.

  Miggy brought out a radio and tried to get something besides Mexican stations, but we were as always out of range, and the only pop station that occasionally reached us was barely audible over the static. Lourdes chided him for denying his heritage, but he claimed he just wanted to show us some dance moves and needed the right music. He decided to make the best of his circumstances and fused his hip-hop moves with the Banda music he was dealt, slowing his gyrations down to the pace of the tuba bass line that crept under the accordion and brass oom-pah oom-pah beat cackling through the tiny speaker, deciding to invent a whole new form of expression. We joined him and tried to name and market our new form of dance. I can’t recall any of the names we came up with, as our actions became incidental to my mind, and were absorbed by the joy they inspired; things felt right, felt like what people our age should be doing. Lourdes felt younger, we felt more mature, and all of us ended up about where we should be.

  When the dance-off and laughter had worn us down, we sprawled out into various positions in front of the television, the satellite dishes perched anachronistically atop the shaky sheds providing our link to the mainstream. We surfed through waves of uninspiring possibilities and settled on a movie channel showing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Perhaps we felt obligated to experience some fear after all that wistfulness. Lourdes asked us if we had seen the original, and we didn’t know there was one. She had seen it in High School Town at the small movie theatre there, which usually functioned as a last resort for blockbuster movies that were on their way out of a theatrical run and trying to squeeze a few bucks out of the nether regions before heading for people’s homes. But on occasion the old one-screen cinema hosted a midnight showing of a cult classic or a weekend festival if there was a sufficiently determined band of film geeks at the high school, which there had been for the last couple of years. Lourdes didn’t say much more about it until we started eewing and oohing at the parts splattered with viscous; she then kicked in with her comparative analysis about how the or
iginal was more about suspense than gore, how it was more about someone being chased than being physically taken apart, how little was actually shown in the interest of allowing one’s imagination to do the rest, all of which sounded suspiciously to us like the critique of one of the film nerds she had earlier confessed to sort-of dating but never quite committing to, so we called her on it and she drily denied everything with a suppressed smirk. She finally admitted that she may have borrowed some of his ideas, but quickly tried to turn it into an example of the preparatory education she was trying to impart for our benefit, maintaining it was an illustration of dabbling in that which may be uncool to our townie campus elite, but cool to the larger elite who read college applications.

  I may very well have fallen in love with Lourdes that day; it’s hard to know exactly. I certainly started to admire her a tremendous amount. Though if you think you’re in love, I suppose you are, even just for that moment. She was a safe way to consider whether I had found that sweet spot between my feelings for Shay and for Lana. Granted, she was even sharper than Shay and not as beautiful as Lana, but she had a few years on each of them, and Shay could still come up to that level with age and Lana could come down. In the meantime Lourdes became my standard, and I had a funny feeling that the admiration was mutual, that she felt something similar for me; a funny feeling in part because I was probably kidding myself.

  We started to get drowsy as the sun set, and hanging around trying to force any more great moments struck me as potentially undermining all the greatness that had sprung freely throughout the day. I excused myself and Miggy asked if I wanted to hang out tomorrow. I was about to accept the offer when I remembered the boating invitation with Blaine’s family. I mentioned my prior engagement and they looked at me incredulously from their languid poses amongst the furniture.

  “Will Kelsey be joining you?” Lourdes asked condescendingly.

  “I hope for your sake she is,” Miggy grinned at me, “in a bathing suit.”

  “Oh, please,” Lourdes said. “If you guys want to know what Lana will be like in high school, there’s your role model.”

  I enjoyed Lourdes’ reaction to Blaine’s older sister because I could interpret it as jealousy and further enhance my self-flattery when it came to Lourdes seeing something in me that no other girl had.

  “Is that so bad?” I asked, rubbing it in just a bit.

  “Kelsey’s okay,” Lourdes qualified her previous dismissiveness. “I feel kind of sorry for her, actually. It’s like she’s so convinced that because of how she looks, people will think she’s a bitch no matter what she does or what she says, so she doesn’t do or say anything.”

  Her attempt to understand someone she didn’t think much of prompted me to raise the pedestal even higher on which I had placed Lourdes. I considered dropping the word “admire” from my thoughts on her and jumping right into usage of the word “love” from that point on, but it felt a little juvenile; as if that many boys who fell for their friend’s older sister ever ended up with them.

  I told them I would give them a full report and then wondered aloud, on the subject of full reports, if my incident with Dulce would make the rounds at school Monday.

  “She doesn’t ride the bus,” Miggy reminded me. “And Lana never speaks, so unless someone saw something out their window or Dulce’s dad let her out of the house again for the weekend, which I doubt, you’re probably in the clear.”

  “See, Lourdes?” I called over to her on my way out. “That would be the best part about being with someone like Lana or Kelsey: they’d be really good at keeping a secret.”

  “Well, almost the best part,” Miggy added.

  Lourdes rolled her eyes at him. Though honestly, she probably rolled them at both of us. I kicked myself a tad for giving her the opportunity to see me as a goofy kid once more, and hoped I had not tarnished any maturity points I may have built up for the day. But I had a feeling that people who respected each other allowed for some idiocy in the relationship.

  Of course all of these notions I was forming about relationships were not really applicable to someone my age. The realization that I was not yet capable of trying out any of the ideas that were forming made me ache a bit as I walked toward the wall. Adulthood seemed so far out of reach. Though it was not as if the frustration of understanding something while being unable to effectively carry it out was exclusive to young people, as the foreclosure parade was making clear to me. And it was not the least bit comforting to think that I may always be susceptible to such a disconnect.

  I saw some illumination hovering above the wall behind Blaine’s house, and my contemplation was instantly drowned in adrenalin and visions of his sister. Lourdes was supposedly my new touchstone, my ideal, and here I was trying to maintain a straight line to my fence and not stagger over to the tunnel. But I could see it as a test of my resolve, a chance to close that gap between ideas and actions that was so befuddling. I could sneak through the tunnel and take a peek just to prove to myself that I knew better now, that there was more to what makes a girl worth pursuing than looking good in a tank top and boxer shorts and a willingness to take erotic self-portraits and yes, what a great idea. I decided to look because it was the rational thing to do, I told myself. I assumed she was home thanks to the boat trip tomorrow, which would provide yet another opportunity to solidify Lourdes’ place as my benchmark.

  I jogged over to the Arturo Gate and wondered for a moment if I would even be able to recognize Arturo if I attended the high school next year. I quickly fidgeted through and gently lifted the decoy inside Blaine’s yard to survey the situation. Kelsey’s lights were out, and the living room was dark, too. The source of the illumination turned out to be their parents’ bedroom. With equal parts disappointment and relief I started to lower the cover, figuring it would be best to reverse course and continue on over to my back fence, since the side gate in Blaine’s house was right underneath his parents’ bedroom.

  But then I heard the shouting. Blaine’s mother was re-launching into a full-throated diatribe after what I presume had been a pause to catch her breath while I had been scanning the back of the house. I slid the drywall cover to the side and set it on the ground so I could concentrate on what she was yelling. I assumed her husband was the target, as they never did anything to their kids other than fawn over them. My suspicions were confirmed when I distinctly heard her bray at one point, “Of course you did, what American bank would ever give you a loan at this point?” and he barked at her to lower her voice.

  She somewhat complied, so it became difficult to hear them. I noticed that along the wood fence delineating their property from their neighbor’s stood a young tree that had grown just big enough to quite possibly provide adequate cover should I risk getting closer. The allure of potentially solving the mystery of not only where the father came from, but where his money came from, was worth the risk as far as I was concerned.

  I crawled out of the hole and sidled over to the corner where the wall met the fence, and used the wall to help me spring to the top of the fence. I then took slow single-file steps towards the tree that caught the light from the combatants’ window and beckoned in the breeze. I didn’t have to worry about anyone next door seeing me, as the house was one that had never been inhabited. I carefully ducked and weaved through the skinny branches to find a sufficiently cloaked position. The fence wasn’t high enough for me to see directly in, and the tree wasn’t big enough to climb safely, but I was still able to see the mom from the shoulders-up. She was still doing the talking, and the dad must have been on the bed, as she was looking slightly down as she spoke. I had missed most of what she was saying during my acrobatics, but was able to once again tune in as I achieved a sense of balance.

  “…American Dream, American Dream…you say it so much it doesn’t mean anything anymore. You’re like a parrot who was taught how to say it. What does it even stand for at this point?”

  This jab inspired the dad to get up off the bed. Hi
s head and shoulders were now in view, too. Seeing them both from the chest-up made it look like someone was putting on a puppet show.

  “You never knew,” the dad said, now ignoring his own request for low volume. “You don’t know anything about the American Dream because you never had to worry about it; it was always there for you, it was handed to you, so you never had to think about it. How could you know what it means?”

  “So tell me, Yuri…”

  Blaine’s dad’s name was Yuri? He always told us to call him Steve.

  “…tell me what the American Dream is.”

  “You’re standing in it!” he bellowed.

  The kids’ rooms were on the other end of the second floor. But since their rooms appeared dark, I thought maybe Blaine, and perhaps Kelsey if she was home, were on the computer in the downstairs office in the front of the house, since it was too early for them to be in bed. Whatever the case may be, I hoped that they were not within earshot of this. I was taken aback at how upsetting it was to watch even someone else’s parents fight, to know it was real and not a public service announcement or a couple of actors attempting to win praise for their work. Also upsetting was how titillating I found it to be.

  “Oh, you mean debt?” she cracked back. “I’m standing in debt? That’s just the cost of it, Yuri.”

  He exhaled deeply and calmed down, much to my relief. Blaine may have been acting like a bit of a prick lately, but I wouldn’t wish dueling parents on him. The dad even appeared to smile, as though his wife had provided him with just what he needed to steer the conversation back toward a conversation.

  “You know that’s not a problem, my love.”

  She was not the least bit soothed, however.

  “Yes it is,” she said forcefully while trying to keep her voice down by channeling her intensity into karate chop hand gestures that chopped to the beat of her voice. “Yes…it…is. You may not pay your bills, but we still end up paying in other ways.”

  He kept trying the comforting approach.

  “Why don’t you take some time off,” he said, “or quit. Relax a little. You don’t need to work, you’ve always done it just to give you something to do.”

  It still wasn’t working. She clutched her head and ran her hands down the sides of her face before adopting a more desperate and imploring posture.

  “I work,” she started to explain slowly, “because I’m scared shitless that you’re going to run out of bridges to burn and we’re going to need the income.”

  He straightened up and went with a more stoic stance.

  “Have I always provided for you?” he quizzed her.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever wanted for anything?”

  “No.”

  “Then why don’t you trust me?”

  “Just because something has happened in the past doesn’t mean it’s going to keep happening in the future.”

  “You don’t even know what I do,” he said.

  “Yes I do,” she sprang right back. “I do know what you do. I just don’t know how you do it. I know that you never pay anything off and move on to another loan from another bank in another part of the world for another fake business venture…”

  “…They’re not fake.”

  “…Okay. Doomed. Badly designed. Cockamamie. Whatever. I know these things. But how you get away with it? You’re right. I have no fucking clue. You didn’t come to America to pursue a dream, you came here to hide from the rest of the world.”

  He gave up. His upper body sank below the puppet stage. She watched him descend but took no pleasure in it.

  “Are you coming on the boat tomorrow?” I barely heard him say.

  “Sure,” she shrugged. “Why not? If we’re going to hide behind the damn thing, we might as well use it.”

  “We don’t need to hide behind it,” he verbally gathered himself for one last shot. “It’s to have fun. By the time they find out in Azerbaijan what’s going on here, we’ll be long gone before the foreclosure sign ever goes up.”

  He didn’t actually say “Azerbaijan”; he said the name of some ancient town or province I assumed was somewhere between Europe and Asia with a name I couldn’t quite place or re-pronounce, and thus could not commit to memory.

  Meanwhile, she said something along the lines of “Thank God. Wouldn’t want anyone to think we were just like them.”

  Regardless of what she actually said, her tone was unmistakably sarcastic. That much was true as I found myself staring into the leaves and branches of the tree with the window blurring into the background like an accident victim or a mentally unstable person I was trying not to stare at.

  I dropped myself into the vacant yard next door and stood for a while, unable to complete a thought. The lights went out on the upstairs stage I had been watching, though the flickering of a television screen remained. I headed back to the wall and vaulted the fence parallel to where the tunnel mouth opened. Before I went underground I glanced up at Kelsey’s window, which was still dark, then took a few extra steps to peer around at the other side of the house and saw Blaine’s window casting a small amount of light, about the wattage of a reading lamp. He must have heard his parents. I wondered how he handled it: if he tried to make out what they were saying, or put on head phones to drown them out, or wrapped a pillow around his face and screamed into it.

  Upon landing in my backyard, I saw through the glass patio door that my parents were huddled around the island in the middle of the kitchen, talking over mugs of something steaming, and I was grateful that at least they were unified in their deception, that they managed to bond over discussions on how to live their lie. I went around the house to enter through the front door so as not to startle them or elicit any questions, but I still felt as though I was intruding when I greeted them and assured them I had eaten. They seemed eager to resume their conversation from where I had interrupted, so I stretched and said I was heading upstairs. But before I did, I remembered to extend the invitation for a boat ride. They went from stunned silence to stuttering acceptance within seconds, and may very well have forgotten what it was they had been talking about.