The Great Jeff

by Tony Abbott

  She turned on her heel, then wobbled down the walk to the driveway. It was the second time today I’d seen her shaking when she left a house.

  It was cold. I shivered. “Should I bring our stuff back to the car?”

  “What? No. Leave it on the step.”

  She beeped the car open and we sat in the front seat, waiting for Mr. Andrade, the landlord. He didn’t come soon and when he finally arrived he wasn’t alone. Two cars pulled to the curb and flicked off their lights. A small man got out of his car at the same time as a big-chested man in a suit got out of the other one.

  “Oh,” she whispered. “Him.”

  “Who is it?”

  We went to the front door to wait for them. The little man was the landlord. He was sour-faced and quiet, while Big Chest said he was a state marshal.

  “A marshal?” I snapped. “Where’s your badge?”

  He smiled, but not at me. “Hello again, Mrs. Hicks. You remember me.”

  “I…” She shook her head.

  “Yes, you do remember.”

  “Mom?” I said.

  While the landlord said nothing, the marshal fiddled in his side pockets, murmuring something, then handed her an envelope.

  She waved it away and wouldn’t take it. “You can’t do this,” she said.

  “I can.” It sounded like he snickered, then cut himself short. “I did inform you it might come to this. Please take it.”

  He pushed the envelope at her, and she took it or it would have fallen to the ground. His hand was already back in his jacket.

  “I’m sorry, we have to,” said Mr. Andrade. He was short, nervous, shaky. “I need my house back. I don’t own lots of houses. Only three. Mortgages, all three. I’m not a rich man, you know? I need my house.”

  “Your house!” she said. “How can you say it’s your house? It’s my house! I just left it yesterday. And you can’t lock me out of it. I know my rights! It’s illegal! I’ll have my lawyers get right on you for this—”

  I didn’t know how it got so loud so quickly, but Mom turned her eyes on the marshal and kept going. “You know he can’t do this! I have rights. You can’t surprise us with this kind of thing. There are laws—”

  The marshal raised his hands in the air and lowered them slowly. “It’s not a surprise exactly, is it, Mrs. Hicks? I talked to you three months ago and told you three months and three months is up now. Do you have back payment? And do you have a lawyer?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “All right, then, ma’am,” he said. “But you are correct—”

  “She moved out!” Mr. Andrade said. “I saw it. I looked in the window. No furniture! You moved out. Days ago. I thought you moved out—”

  “What?” I said.

  “Your furniture. I looked in last week, furniture gone. I didn’t go in, but I looked in. I looked in today. Furniture still gone!”

  “You looked in our house?” I said.

  Mom shook her head like there were bees buzzing around her. “No! No! We’re decorating!” At that point a police car drove up and a woman got out. “Oh, lord, what’s this now?”

  A big mess was growing in front of our house. The policewoman had a pretty face, a heavy belt packed with stuff, including a gun. She seemed young.

  “You didn’t pay me rent,” the landlord was saying, “you didn’t pay me for five months, not all of it.”

  “Five months! That’s a lie,” I said. “A week. A couple of weeks, right, Mom—”

  “Yes, weeks,” she repeated me. “Not months—”

  “Almost five months. Will be five months next week. I gave you all the chances, many chances. I wrote to you. Mr. Barnes here, Marshal Barnes, has seen you and told you. The court allowed you here since August.”

  “Mom? When did all this happen?”

  “You removed furniture,” the landlord went on. “You don’t pay me. I thought you went. I gave you time. All I have to do is put a notice in your mailbox, which I did do, several times. You knew I did, because I watched your son take in the mail.”

  “You watched my son?” she said. “You pervert!”

  “Now, ma’am,” said the marshal.

  “You spent my money!” the landlord said. “If you don’t pay me, I can’t pay my bank. They could foreclose on me. Not to pay rent is stealing from me.”

  “That’s just… insane,” I said.

  “No. Not insane,” Mr. Andrade said, turning to me, then back to my mother. “Believe me, I’m in trouble without rent. I have bills. We all have bills, Mrs. Hicks. Many bills—”

  “Ms!” she said. “Ms. Lewis. I’m changing my name. And I can get it. Just give me a little more time.”

  “Well, I’m afraid that’s not possible,” the marshal said, and he motioned to the envelope in her hands. “You are holding a Notice to Quit. Mr. Andrade is right. But you’re also right. We cannot lock you out today—”

  “We’ll lock her out—”

  “We cannot lock her out, not today,” the marshal repeated firmly. “It’s not legal. You have to let them back in.”

  “An hour to get the rest of your things. I’m sorry.”

  I went ballistic. “You can’t be serious! You can’t throw us out. What are we? Who do you think you are? Some kind of—”

  “Please, son,” the policewoman said, putting her hand on my arm. “Mrs. Hicks, your son. Mrs. Hicks—”

  “Hicks was my stupid husband’s name!” Mom screamed at the cop. “And don’t touch my son. Jeffie, stop. An hour is… it’s nothing. I need a month.”

  “What? Mom, don’t say that!” I shouted. “It’s our house. We live here. It’s our house!”

  “A month,” my mom repeated, lowering her voice.

  “A week,” the landlord said. “You put the rest of your things in a storage locker. One week.”

  “Two weeks,” she said, with a pleading look at the marshal.

  “Mom, no!”

  “Two weeks sounds fair,” the marshal said. “They need that much time.”

  Between them they were slicing bits off my life.

  “Does that sound fair to you, Mr. Andrade? It does to me. Two weeks? You’re a fair man. They have the Notice to Quit. Ma’am, you have the notice, and I will be back. For a third time. I don’t come back more than three times. I’ve never had to. Mr. Andrade has a right to his money. It’s like you went into a store and took something without paying for it. It’s the same thing.”

  “You’re…” she started, then just shook her head.

  I was shaking. Lights were on in the other houses, lampposts, garage lights, cars slowing as they drove past the police car, faces looking at us from the street.

  Mr. Andrade threw up his hands and stomped down the walk and back up again. “I have a sign. For Rent sign. I have a right to put it up. On my lawn. I’m showing the house. Two weeks? Okay. Two weeks. I’ll show the house then.”

  “I’d suggest you get a storage locker, like the gentleman says,” the marshal said quietly. “You don’t want us to have to put your things on the curb, do you? You do not. That’s not how we want this to happen. Storage locker. There are plenty around. You’ve already started to downsize, yes? Well, then…”

  Mom just nodded, biting her lip not to cry. We watched Mr. Andrade open the trunk of his car and tug out a sign about two feet square. FOR RENT in big red letters on a white background with a telephone number. He pushed it into the lawn next to the sidewalk so both directions could read it. “The neighbors will know you don’t pay. Seven thousand dollars. More maybe, if there is damage. That’s how much you owe me since June.”

  “What? Seven thousand? Mom, tell him!”

  She closed her eyes. “Just give us the new key,” she said. “Two keys.”

  “One key,” the landlord said.

  “I need my own key,” I said. “Sometimes I’m here by—”

  Mom pinched my arm, which meant shut up. “One key will be fine,” she said.

  “Two weeks,” Mr.
Andrade said. “I’m sorry. End of it. Over.”

  She pushed away from them, dragging me up the walk to the door. When she inserted the new key and opened the door, it came over me again. My legs jerked me around and I gestured at Mr. Andrade. You know what I mean.

  The marshal shook his head. “Now, son…”

  The landlord just hung his head. He tugged the marshal with him. “No, it’s okay,” he said. “I understand. I’m sorry for the boy.” He beeped his car open and got in.

  It rushed through me. I was a bad person. Mr. Andrade’s face sank. I practically felt the blood drain from it. He wasn’t any different from everyone else. No better, maybe, but no worse. He was miserable. I felt small and stupid.

  “Wait… I… didn’t mean…”

  But his car was already moving.

  CHAPTER 20

  DAYS AND NIGHTS

  Sunday came and went. We barely said a word and didn’t leave the house.

  The next two days I was a zombie. School, house, Mom, night, sleep, no dreams, school, house, Mom, night, sleep, no dreams.

  Wednesday morning I woke up laughing like an idiot.

  I’d dreamed about needing to go to the bathroom. I guess everyone has. Maybe it was Rich’s problems in New Hampshire, I don’t know. I was running around a strange old building, a kind of weird rambling mall, and people were telling me where a bathroom was, and I had to go really bad, but it was far away, through room after room, along corridors, up and down flights of old stairs, and when I finally got where they’d said to go, the toilet was sitting out in the open in the middle of a room like a throne.

  People walking all around it.

  I tried sitting because I really needed to, but everyone watched me, so I didn’t go and asked where another one was. More alleys and rooms and stairs.

  Once I found a toilet sitting in the corner of a ladies’ dressing room. Women changing their clothes everywhere.

  At last I found a school lavatory, a kind of locker room, and I used the toilet there, but when I looked down I had apparently been doing my business on the person who had sat down before me. He hadn’t finished yet. I was in a guy’s lap and he was mad that I was ruining his pants.

  But that wasn’t the end of it, because the guy started chasing me from room to room, complaining that I’d messed his pants and he needed clean pants to be where he needed to be, so could I hurry up and clean them? I kept telling him I had no idea how to clean them, but he kept appearing and showing me his pants and saying I had to.

  “What the heck?” I said, sitting up in my bed. “What does that mean?”

  Dreams are sometimes simply weird and you have to laugh at them because otherwise you’d be scared out of your mind. It was only when the endless stairs and rooms faded from my mind and my bedroom took over that I realized that dreams were one thing, and they could be as strange or funny or dumb as whatever, but I was being kicked out of my house.

  Mom yelled, “Bus! Bus! Jeff!”

  I didn’t know what I was going to do about the bus in two weeks—a week and a half now—when our time ran out, which I still didn’t believe was possible, because Mom said she was working on it. But I bolted up, got dressed, and collected my notebooks in, seriously, under a minute. I looked for Mango Street, but I couldn’t find it. “Mom, where’s my book? Why can’t I ever find my book? We have a test soon.”

  “What book?”

  “Mango!”

  “That’s a fruit, honey.”

  “Mom!”

  “Maybe you left it in New Hampshire.”

  “What? Did I? No!”

  “By the way, I won’t be here when you get home. I’ll leave the key under the side doormat. I have a lead, Jeff. On a job. Guess where? At the medical office across from the library. The new building. They need an office manager. Right up my alley.”

  “Really?”

  “This could be it, honey!”

  I hoped so, except I didn’t really have much hope left. The way things were going I figured our situation was a ball that only rolled downhill.

  When I got to school, I scanned the classroom library. Not a single Mango, which makes it sound like a lousy grocery store. I’d try the main school library later, then the public, if I had to, and maybe catch Mom after her job thing.

  Hannah was talking with Mr. Maroni. No, not with him, to him. The way he listened to her, frowning and nodding, reminded me of Mrs. Tracy from St. Catherine’s, who listened like she was trying to hear whether a person was saying something other than what they thought they were saying. Hannah went back to her seat not looking at anyone.

  “So,” Mr. Maroni said a couple of times until we paid attention. “Day after tomorrow, our Mango test, half the class period, all essay, so that’s that. The next book we’re all going to read together is Of Mice and Men. I’m sure you’ve heard of it?”

  A few hands.

  “John Steinbeck, 1937. Gritty, bold, cinematic style, or rather written to be easily adapted to stage or screen, which it was right away. And, continuing our theme of short classics, it’s very short. Shorter even than our last one, coming in at a hundred and three pages.” He held it up. It was as thin as a cell phone.

  Applause from here and there.

  “Seriously, I’m not trying to be the best teacher, it just comes naturally. But first, Hannah says that Sandra Cisneros has a great website. Lots of biographical information, letters from her, and you can write to her from it. So, if you want to go further, you have that.”

  Hannah was sitting in the opposite corner of the room today, near the author posters. She was back to her quiet self after her big speech and looking out the window at some crows.

  “You know,” he said, “so many things for young people—stories—are supposed to be about hope, right? They feed you this stuff as if you don’t know any better. As if you don’t look around you. Happy ending, or if not happy, exactly, at least there’s got to be a future. Because without hope, kids will break, right? You’ll shatter. I don’t believe that, and neither do you. I think we might agree that there’s a good bit of hope at the end of Mango, but maybe not—maybe?—in our next book. No spoilers here, but something to keep in mind—hope or not—as you read this twentieth-century tragedy Of Many Mice. Sorry, Of Mice and Men. You can finish it by fifth period today, no doubt, but I prefer slow reading, so by Tuesday, if you would.…”

  Hannah undid her eyes from the crows and turned back to us. While Mr. M went on, I heard her reading in my mind again.

  One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I am too strong for her to keep me here forever.

  I hoped it was true and not just a metaphor or a made-up story about made-up things. Either way, I knew I had to read it, the whole book, all hundred and ten pages.

  The rest of the school day was a haze of Hannah’s face and those words and a pair of arms—not hers, not brown, maybe my mother’s—holding me, keeping me there, and the sound of crying as I tried to pull away. I didn’t know what that meant, but it made me sad and nervous at the same time.

  I took the bus home, flew off down my street, but stopped short when I saw a truck in our driveway. The backup lights flickered on, and it curved onto the street and drove away.

  I walked slowly up the sidewalk to my house. I peeked in. No one. The key was on the concrete under the mat by the side door.

  Throwing my stuff on the kitchen table, I listened for sounds. Only my breathing. There was a smell of sweat and paint in the air, but too faint to be anything but what a guy might leave behind walking through. I scavenged for food. The refrigerator blew cold air at me while I stared inside at not all that much. Butter. Lettuce. A jar of pickles. A packet of cheese. Rubbery carrots. I ate the cheese and some crackers while I read over the note on the kitchen table, especially the last two words.

  Job appointment at 3:30 in town. I’ll be home with dinner. Maybe celebrate!

  My chest sizzled with something. It was nearly three thirty now. Could this interview actually be
the one? Maybe it would turn us around. We could keep the house after all. Talk about hope. I wanted to be there when Mom handed Mr. Andrade a big check and he backed away, shocked but smiling. Problem solved.

  Mom’s interview was in the new medical building across from the public library, which had to have Mango. It was a classic, right? I went to the bathroom, imagining the interview. When I washed up, the hot water never got hot. The kitchen water either. I wonder how soon Mr. Andrade would fix that. Would he even bother?

  Hopping down the front walk, I felt all those other faces go away and there was Hannah in my mind again.

  This isn’t everything. I’m not stuck here.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE BLUE HOUSE

  The afternoon grew colder as I walked. The sky grayed. There was a straight way to the library from my house, but I didn’t take it. Zigzagging on streets I normally don’t use kept me off the main roads. I was getting used to the idea of walking distances, but I didn’t want to press the idea of a kid alone. Mom’s paranoia had rubbed off on me and you never know who’s watching.

  So I’m pushing ahead on sidewalks and through yards where there are no sidewalks, when suddenly it strikes me that while I wasn’t paying much attention to what was around me, my feet were directing me, because my legs suddenly stalled and I froze near the corner of Harrison Street.

  Here? Why am I here?

  A few more steps to the left and I saw it. Across the quiet short street was a two-story blue house with a charcoal-gray door. A wreath-y sort of thing hung on the door at eye level. I knew the house almost as well as my own. Tom Bender lived there.

  How many times had I pulled open that side door with him, set foot into the narrow hall, and stepped into his kitchen, where an island cramped the small floor space. Once when I entered, there was a warm smell of soup and bread baking.

  Who bakes bread anymore?

  “Let’s go up,” he’d say. “You have to see the new model.”

  “Another one?” I’d say, or maybe I just followed him.

  Upstairs to the right and left were bedrooms, with a pale green bathroom in between. Maybe it wasn’t green anymore. I remembered noticing the peeling ceiling when I looked up once. The room we usually went into had light gray walls, finger-darkened around the light switch. His desk. Packed bookshelves. Rumpled half-made bed. Puny collection of comics. Model cars, all the same car in different sizes: a fat low Cobra, red, white racing stripes, pumped-up tires.