The Turner House (31 page)

“I'm not sorry about the elevator. I mean, I'm sorry for jumping on you, but I still think there's something between us.”

Alice smiled, and if she were a different sort of person, Cha-Cha imagined, she would have given his arm a conciliatory pat.

“I don't want to belittle your feelings, but I don't think you'd feel this way about me if I hadn't taken advantage of our relationship in the first place. I've just told you more about me than I've ever told a patient, Charles. That's the only intimacy I can give you.”

She pulled a business card from her purse and handed it to him.

“No one would blame you for wanting to take a break from therapy, but I really don't think you should. This is my mentor Gus's information. He's smarter than me, and funnier. You two will get along.”

Cha-Cha put the card in his shirt pocket. He felt lonelier already.

She no longer trusted herself to be on Yarrow Street alone. She had Marlene's money, and the hours in the big room would be too long. She would end up at Motor City.

If Brianne were a volatile daughter, it all would have hurt less. If slammed doors and shouting matches figured into their history, Lelah might have taken the morning's events in stride, confident that they'd get over this disagreement as they had others. She had never articulated her anger or disappointment with Lelah, save a snippy text message or two, but now Lelah saw that Brianne had it in her to cut Lelah off. Sever ties and move away. All of this time Lelah had thought that Brianne couldn't see the truth about her, that she retained an element of naïveté where everyone else in the family knew Lelah to be a failure.

David knew the truth about her, had seen her on Yarrow and not run off. So she called him. Offered to treat him to lunch at Slows, the barbecue place he'd wanted to take her to that first day they ran into each other downtown. He said he only had time for coffee, and that he needed to meet earlier than lunchtime. They met at a bakery near Wayne State with pricey pastries and nice outdoor seating.

Now that he sat across from her, she could not figure out the right way to present her ludicrous proposition: that she move in with him for a very short while as she figured things out. It had seemed a sound idea as she sped away from Brianne's, then pulled over to breathe, and think, and decide what to do. If she stayed with him, she would not go to the casino; if she stayed with any of her siblings, the temptation would still be there.

She stalled. She talked about Viola's upcoming party, about her siblings arriving from out of town. Her mouth moved without much effort from her brain. After several minutes of this she noticed that David wasn't looking at her. In fact, he was making a show of looking at everything but her. The umbrella shading them, the water bowl on the ground for dogs two tables down, a panhandling old man in a Lions jersey making his way up the block. Lelah asked him what was wrong.

David put his messenger bag on the table and pulled out an oblong, cloth-wrapped thing. He didn't unwrap it; it didn't need unwrapping. She wished she could save their relationship at this moment, keep it free from what was about to happen. Preserve it in amber like a prehistoric organism maybe, and wear it on a chain around her neck. Proof that she could be cherished by someone, if only for a while. What was about to happen and what
had
happened had nothing to do with each other. She wasn't sure how he'd procured what was wrapped in that cloth, but it did figure, given her luck, given the morning she'd had, given how secure she'd started to feel with him, and what she'd had the audacity to think possible. Before he spoke she felt herself slipping in his eyes from person to patient, lover to bad decision. She'd lost everything else, but this one thing, what her and David were starting to have, should have been hers to keep.

He did not unwrap the item, but he did explain.

With a brother like Greg and a mother so forgiving, David Gardenhire had reason to be familiar with east side pawnshops. Two summers ago he had visited every pawnshop within feasible walking distance of his mother's house with a picture of Greg taken on Christmas six years prior, and solicited manager promises not to do business with his brother because his things were surely stolen. It was a naïve, unenforceable request, but he hadn't known any other way to regain a sense of control. He returned to these pawnshops yesterday.

Gregory Sr. had been born again at Second Baptist Church in downtown Detroit as a condition of marrying David's mother, but having migrated up from that part of southeastern Texas with strong Catholic roots, he'd worn his very Catholic crucifix until the day of his death. Although David had wanted his mother to bury the necklace along with his father, Mrs. Gardenhire's penchant for memento hoarding prevailed. It was draped over the corner of the best picture of Gregory Sr. on her mantel (taken in the seventies; he has a small, hopeful afro and graying sideburns) waiting for the day when Greg finally got desperate enough to steal it.

A few pawnbrokers had claimed to remember David. Even at CHAINS-R-US, the Walmart of pawnbrokering on the east side, the elderly Vietnamese owner said he had turned Greg away.

“He said the chain was too flimsy,” David explained now. He spoke to the street to the right of Lelah, but Lelah stared at his face, at that unusual elegant nose and those full lips.

David had idled at the window because he had no more shops to visit. Eventually a young woman with very thin eyebrows and a slicked-back ponytail came out of the back room. She sat in front of the desktop computer and placed an open laptop next to it. She logged on to eBay.

“I always wondered what they do with the shit no one wants to buy, you know, so I just stood there and watched her,” David said now.

Thanh had opened a folder on her laptop full of photos of a knife. On the desktop computer she pulled up a listing for a similar knife on eBay.

“I
knew
I'd seen that knife before, so I banged on the glass until she turned around. I asked her where she got it, and she described you.”

Lelah let out a sound, not quite a whimper, nor a sigh.

“At this point I'm pissed, like real hot,” David said. “And I feel stupid. But I still ask her all these other questions, trying to make sure it was you. She ends up showing me that flute case with your name on it, and after that I had to admit it to myself.”

David had tried to visualize his living room floor, the cool concrete beneath him and his breath becoming shallow. He couldn't. Instead he felt the sucking warmth of Phuket, Thailand. Remembered how he and Troy and a sailor named Tasaka from Queens had left Bangkok, tired of watching Ping Pong tournaments on TV and too afraid to seek out whores. In Phuket they found beaches, friendly Australian girls, and booze. They met a man with a boat who sold them on a nearby island with even better beaches, and a lot of Singha for the ride there and back. The rest of that evening remained hazy in David's memory, but when they traveled back to Bangkok the following day the sailor Tasaka, who was half black and half Japanese, had been upset about losing a knife he'd bought in Okinawa and had planned to give to his father. David remembered Tasaka showing the knife off early on their boat ride, using it to open beers, and he'd always figured the driver stole it when everyone got drunk. But there was the knife yesterday, stolen by Troy twenty years prior for no apparent purpose. Perhaps Troy had planned to sell it to pay off some debt and forgot. Or maybe—and this seemed very possible now—Troy Turner was simply an asshole.

“And you pawned it cause that's what you
do
, right?” David said now. “I guess you probably have to pawn shit all the time.” He finally looked at her.

She didn't reply.

“I don't think we should, whatever this is,” he said. “I'm not doing it anymore.”

Lelah pinched the skin between her forefinger and thumb. She felt lightheaded.

“You don't wanna say nothin? Nothin at all?”

She wanted to say plenty. About mistakes, about how she had been one way so long, it was hard to turn around so quickly, but that she did feel different, even from this morning when she'd lied to her baby girl and broken something between them. She wanted to say that she just needed time, that she could dig herself out of all of this with more time.

“You want me to
beg
you to change your mind?” is what she said. She hoped she sounded strong. “I'm done lying and begging.”

He should have left by now, she thought. But he still sat there.

“Look, my brother Greg's been on heroin since '97 at least,” he said. He put on his Intervention Face: eyes large with compassion, mouth tight and authoritative. “My mom just keeps giving him chance after chance after chance. I can't be that person for you.”

“I'm not asking you to be!”

David whipped his head around to see if anyone else had heard her.

“Don't act
crazy
, Lelah. You don't need to get loud. I'm just—”

“Nobody's acting crazy. You're trying to make me out to be something I'm not. I have problems, yeah, but I'm a grown woman. I already told you at my mom's house, I'm not asking you or anyone else to save me.”

“Right. But you're staying on the east side and nobody knows.”

“You know what? I should go,” Lelah said. She yanked her purse off the back of her chair. She had come so close to asking him to save her.

“Look, I'm sorry. Don't leave like that,” David said. He half stood. “I'm not, I'm not trying to say you ever made me feel like I had to help you, but that's how I
am.
It doesn't even matter what you need, I'd try to solve your problems, which is a problem, you know? I need to stop doing that shit. And I'm not trying to say I don't like spending time with you cause I do, I just—”

“What? You want me to call you up when I get my shit together? I'm not on
drugs
, David. Those things were junk that nobody wanted. I'm surprised I got anything for them at all. It's not like I'm running up in my mother's house and stealing her TV, or snatching cash outta her purse like your brother.”

David stood up now. He put the cloth bundle into his bag. His mouth spread into a miserable, close-lipped smile. When would she see those perfect teeth, that lovely face again?

“The thing is, you're
exactly
the same as him,” he said. “Maybe worse, cause you ain't even figured out how fucked up you are yet.”

The words settled on her shoulders like a curse, and one thing was clear: there was no one to save her but her. No salvaged job, no daughter's forgiveness, no big-room reprieve from the world, and no beautiful, meditating man.

“Why'd you have sex with me in my mother's basement?” she asked. “If I'm just like your brother, why didn't you stop seeing me when I told you about my eviction?”

David looked past her once again, out into the street. He appeared exhausted to Lelah, his full forty-three years old. He shrugged.

“I don't know,” he said. “But I shoulda never done it. I shoulda never done any of this. Biggest mistake I've made in a long time.”

“Fuck
you
,” Lelah said. “You don't even
know
me.” She remained seated as he walked away. “Fuck
you!
” This time louder. It was either this or cry, and while she did want to weep for the loss of him, doing so would have been giving in to self-pity, and she needed to be done with that for good.

D
AVID HAD INTENDED
to drive to Troy's in Hamtramck, to free himself of every ounce of Turner bullshit in his life, but he turned on Belvidere instead. There was a little stretch of Edsel Ford Service Drive abutting the freeway back there that Greg used to frequent. Last February David had caught him picking through the dirty snow for scrap metal like a magpie searching for glint. Today it looked like the church on the corner had finally cleared the neighboring lots of debris. All of the grass was evenly cut, and there were no bits of houses for a person like Greg to sift through.

David turned onto Holcomb, his mother's street, at a crawl. If he saw Greg, he would jump out and punch him in the face, he decided. Run him down with this installation van should he be in the street. Somehow blot him out. He scanned house porches for a not-so-old man in a very old pea coat and saw no one. A relief, truth be told. It was just as likely that if he had seen his brother, he wouldn't have done anything at all. He feared he might even loan Greg money if asked, that the memory of the big brother who had drawn comic book heroes and still managed to be so damn
cool
would forever keep David in its thrall, just as whatever memory his mother held on to—of a cheerful, nappy-headed little boy who used to help her in the garden, maybe—supplanted reality and made her keep on forgiving.

He parked across the street. He saw his mother walking through her empty-lot garden with Mr. McNair. They picked their way through plants David could not name. They held hands. The sun reflected off of his mother's shiny black wig, and Mr. McNair's hand moved to the small of her back. His mother and Mr. McNair. Betsy Gardenhire and Mr. McNair. David realized that he didn't know the old man's first name, that he'd never before considered the fact that McNair had a first name. He didn't know that Norman McNair had loved his mother since the day of his first wife's funeral. Arlene, who had worked for a black undertaker's family in Conant Gardens for forty years, and found both Norman and Francis Turner their truck-driving jobs at Chrysler through that undertaking family's connections. She had loved succotash. Betsy McNair was the only person to bring a dish that Arlene would've liked to the repast after the funeral.

David unbuckled his seat belt but idled, torn between getting out of his van and driving home. After a few minutes he stepped out of the car. He was halfway across the street when he noticed Greg. His brother was in the garden too, bent over red and green cabbage in their father's old overalls. Yanking up weeds with a cigarillo pinched between his lips. Greg muttered something and everyone in the garden laughed, like easy friends. Funny to feel embarrassed more than enraged, as if catching an intimate moment shared by some other family. David returned to his van and headed to Hamtramck.