The Turner House (6 page)

“Now I know it can't be my birthday already, can it?” She said. “Russie, why ain't you tell me we were celebratin my birthday today?”

They moved toward her, kissed her cheeks and gripped her papery hand.

“Mama, you know it ain't your birthday,” Marlene said. “You're more than a month out. We're having a family meeting tonight.”

“Oh Lord,” Viola said. “About what? Y'all votin on something? You know Cha-Cha's gone do what he wanna do. Ain't no democracy in this family.”

Cha-Cha felt his face burn and heard his siblings snicker. Troy snorted.

“No I'm not, Mama,” Cha-Cha said. “If we vote, I'ma listen. One man or woman, one vote.”

Russell sat on the edge of the mechanical hospital bed and put his hand on Viola's good leg.

“It's about your house,” he said. “We owe the bank more than it's worth now. To be exact, we owe forty—”

“Bottom line, Mama,” Francey interrupted. “Do you think we should sell the house? Or do you want us to figure out a way to keep it?”

“Well, it's not that simple,” Russell said. “That's why I was tryna break it down for her.”

“She
understands
, Russell, god-lee,” Marlene said.

“Just let Russell finish,” Netti said. “Before Mama gets confused.”

“Who's confused?” Viola asked. “Y'all ain't even said nothin yet. I know how much we owe the bank, Netti. You forget I was there when we did it?”

Netti, chastened, said she remembered.

“And I don't wanna lose it,” Viola continued. “I plan on movin back just as soon as I get strong again. Just a couple more months.”

Viola continued to flip through channels. She paused briefly on a megachurch telethon.

“Why everybody lookin at me crazy? I'm serious. A few more months is all I need, so just sit tight. Shoot, I ain't fixin to be up in this room forever.”

She flipped through channels some more and finally settled on an old western, replete with covered wagons and
pew
-
pew
gunshot sound effects. She leaned back on her pillows and yawned, signaling she no longer wanted to be bothered.

Back in the kitchen, Tina was dicing a mound of boiled potatoes for salad. The Turner siblings returned to their seats in the dining room. Each felt a coward for not pointing out the obvious to Viola. She would never live on Yarrow again.

“You short-sell that house, it won't even be worth four thousand,” Troy said. He'd found a toothpick and talked while jabbing the thing at his gums. “Mrs. Gardenhire's son, not the one strung out on herr-on but the younger one, Dave? He bought that house next door to them for only fifteen hundred. And that was back in '03. What we should do is short-sell to somebody in the family, but someone that you can't prove is family on paper. That way we still own it, and only have to pay what it's worth now.”

Cha-Cha suspected that Troy was referring to his girlfriend, Jillian, and he didn't like it. She and Troy's relationship was so volatile that Jillian just might burn the house down out of spite.

“If anyone without a Turner name should buy it, it should be Rahul,” Netti said. She and Rahul, an Indian man who worked in accounting at her office, had lived together for fifteen years. He held more clout among the Turners than Jillian, but he still wasn't blood.

“Rahul owns all those properties in Dearborn—”

Here an argument broke out, because Troy didn't see what was wrong with Jillian being the buyer, and Netti came too close to telling him what the rest of them thought. Then Tina said the whole plan felt dishonest, which set everyone's eyes to rolling and forced Cha-Cha to side with his wife, despite wanting to roll his eyes too. Russell and Francey were both willing to see the Yarrow house go, and Marlene burst into tears when they admitted this. In true Turner fashion, the only thing they all could agree to (after Russell agreed to treat) was tabling the matter in favor of finding somewhere to eat dinner. Troy said he already had dinner plans. Marlene volunteered to stay back with Viola and keep an eye on Tina's wings.

Francis Turner's garden had turned to weeds shortly after his death. The house's surviving residents had their reasons for not picking up trowel and hoe in his memory: Lelah was working two jobs, not to mention taking care of Brianne, and Viola said simply, “Francis never liked me pokin around with his plants when he was alive, so why would I start pokin now?” No one had a good answer to that. The state of the garden, coupled with a string of car thefts on Yarrow, prompted Miles, the eighth Turner child, to invest in a garage. He said a garage accessible through the back kitchen door would not only protect a vehicle or two but also provide a way for passengers to get into and out of the house during the winter months without slogging through the snow on the street. So the backyard was paved, and an aluminum-and-wood two-car garage fitted to the back of the house like a caboose.

Lelah, not wanting to risk another night with her car in plain sight, planned to park in the garage. She turned in to the alley behind the house, a poorly paved strip that separated the Turner property from a boarded-up house that faced Fischer Street, and climbed out of her car to unlock the back gate. She tried to ignore the blackness of the alley behind her as she fumbled with her key. The trees from neighboring lots hung low, and she felt the hard bodies of unripe mulberries crush beneath her feet. They should have sprung for an automated gate like Mr. McNair's, she thought, because once she drove through the gate she had to get back out of her car to lock it behind her. After this she manually unlocked and raised the garage door.

She couldn't bring herself to go into the house. Inside the garage she smelled mildew and damp earth through her rolled-up windows. Various medical supplies stacked haphazardly in the small space and hanging from the rafters created a geriatric phalanx around her Pontiac. An old walker and its dirty, impaled tennis balls, a disassembled hospital bed, boxes and boxes of gauze, huge boxes of adult diapers—male ones Francis hadn't lived long enough to wear and newer boxes of female ones that Viola could probably use. Too much. She wasn't sleepy at all, so getting out of the car meant how many hours alone in the big room, in the dark, with nothing but her thoughts? Too many. She backed the car out, closed the garage, and exited the backyard.

The chips looked like candy. Pastel, melt-away things that didn't make sense to save. The feel of them, the click and dry slide of them in her palm, was gratifying. Some people in Gamblers Anonymous, a place she hadn't been in months, claimed the tiny ball, spinning and spinning around on its wheel, was the reason they loved the game. “It's like you get a bonus, a little bit of a show from that ball,” Zach, a white man who always wore a suit and tie, once said. Other people in the group had nodded knowingly.

Lelah stood at the foot of the roulette table. Just having a look, she told herself. If she were playing, she would never stand here, so far away from the wheel and the top half of the board, a position where she'd end up asking strangers to put her chips where she wanted them to go. If she were playing, she'd request the orange chips, depending on the dealer. But she couldn't play right now. She'd spent the last of her cash on lunch for herself and Bobbie, and she didn't know whether she'd be approved for unemployment, so she couldn't spend the $183 in the bank.

“No more bets,” the dealer said. He waved a pudgy, upturned palm over the table. People settled back into their chairs.

The ball landed on double zero. There were a few cheers but mostly groans. It was a crowded night in Motor City Casino.

“The one time I take my money off those zeros, they come up,” the light-skinned woman next to Lelah said. “I been splittin the zeros all night.”

She looked at Lelah, waited for a response.

“I know, I saw you,” Lelah said. “That's how it always goes though, right? That means you'll hit soon.”

“Shit, I hope so,” the woman said. Her fake eyelashes made her look drowsy, like a middle-aged blinking baby doll. She wore a rhinestone-trimmed dark denim jacket and matching jeans. Brown cowboy boots with a low heel. “All I know is that I'll be back to splittin these zeros from now on.”

Lelah grinned at her. She enjoyed this false camaraderie almost as much as she did the chips.

She told herself she'd come to Motor City to eat. Her twenty-five complimentary tickets for the buffet were the only tangible benefit of thousands of games of roulette. She also had a Motor City VIP card. The irony of being a homeless, “very important” anything was not lost on Lelah as she had presented the black and purple card to the valet out front. She had anticipated a strange stare or at least a smirk as he helped her out of her overflowing car, but he hadn't seemed to notice. It had occurred to her, slightly depressed her, that she wasn't the only homeless gambler in Motor City tonight.

It was a low-stakes table, $5 to get on the board. The woman in the cowboy boots split the zeros again with $25 worth of lavender chips—an amount Lelah considered risky, seeing as how double zero had just come up. She said nothing though. Faux camaraderie was appreciated, but outright advice was not.

Lelah knew she was an addict. She'd come to terms with this truth long before her eviction, which marked a new low. The first indicator had been almost four years earlier when she'd been desperate enough to ask Brenda, her cubicle mate at the phone company, to loan her $200, just until payday. She asked Brenda instead of one of her siblings because she didn't want to have to lie about where she would spend the money. That $200 had bloomed to $1,000 in about a year's time, and after she had paid Brenda back, she found other coworkers to befriend and borrow from. A few hundred from Jamaal, a sweet, chubby twenty-year-old with dreadlocks who worked on the third floor and maybe had a crush on her; $60 from Yang, an older Chinese woman who used to sell pork buns from her cube before management forbade all sales except for the Girl Scout variety; $1,200 from Dwayne, a fifty-year-old widower with a potbelly and a gold-plated left incisor who absolutely had a crush on her but insisted he wanted nothing in return for the loan. “Now that my Sheila's gone, I got nothing and nobody to spend on,” he'd said.

Dwayne proved to be a problem. He waited by her Pontiac in the parking deck after her shift a few weeks after he'd loaned her the money, and as Lelah approached the car she realized his pants were undone, and that little brown bump Dwayne was rubbing his thumb over so quickly was not the knuckle of his other thumb but in fact the head of his lonely widower penis. They fired Dwayne, but at the grievance meeting HR brought up the money she'd borrowed going all the way back to Brenda. They claimed she'd borrowed more than five thousand dollars over the four years, but that didn't sound right to Lelah. She could only account for about three thousand, and she'd paid back everybody but Dwayne. “Jesus, you could've told us you were pumping little old ladies for cash before we got in here,” her union rep had said. She had been suspended without pay for over a month now and was still waiting to see if she would be terminated.

She followed her own code when it came to playing roulette. She never bet all inside, or all out; she spread her chips around the table, she never begged the dealer to let her play out her last chip, and she didn't make loud proclamations, speak directly to the little white ball as if it gave a damn about her, or pray for those inanimate, albeit beautiful chips to behave any particular way. She tried not to act like a strung-out, desperate addict, even if that was how she felt.

“No more bets.”

The pit boss, a busty redheaded woman in a pants suit, whispered something into the dealer's ear, looked hard at the people gathered around the table, then walked a few paces away. Even this moment of choreographed intimidation was a familiar comfort to Lelah.

The ball landed on 27.

“Aw hell,” the woman splitting the zeros said.

Lelah always played 27. Brianne was born on the twenty-seventh of February, as was Troy, the closest sibling to Lelah in age. Lelah's chest tightened, and somewhere near her sternum she felt a bit of warmth. She wanted to play. Badly. Now was a smart time to move on to the buffet, she knew, but she couldn't take her eyes off the dealer. He swept up all of the chips, a jumble of sherbet-colored winnings for the casino, because no one had bet on her number.

She stood up. Took off her jacket. She should have walked away, but she couldn't. It was awkward, being at a table but not playing at the table. You had to smile, look indifferent and simultaneously interested enough to justify taking up space. Her armpits started sweating.

Several chips covered number 27 this turn. Too late for them, Lelah thought. The woman put the rest of her lavender chips, Lelah estimated twenty, between 0 and 00 again. She looked up at Lelah and winked.

“No more bets,” the dealer said.

“I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!” The woman next to her jumped up from her stool. The ball was on 00. Lelah congratulated her as the dealer slid her a small fort of chips, more than five hundred dollars.

If she were a seasoned gambler, this woman would stay put and ride this upswing out, likely eating away at her winnings in the process. This was what Lelah would have done. But the woman asked the dealer to give her the chips in twenties and stood up to go.

“For you,” she said to Lelah. She handed her a blue and yellow $20 chip.

“For me, for what?”

“You said I'd hit and I did.”

“You would've anyway. I can't,” Lelah said, even though she knew she could.

“Like hell you can't,” the woman said. Then she leaned in closer, whispered, “Roulette ain't a spectator sport.”

Lelah closed her fingers around the chip but did not sit down at the table.