The Turner House (13 page)

What kind of adulthood was this? Cha-Cha wondered. He watched his teenage brothers hastily appraise ruined bricks for their resale value while the streets raged less than a quarter mile away. He had the feeling that he would always be this person, seesawing between adult and child, as long as he stayed in Detroit. Quincy was gone, and in a year's time Russell would enlist and be gone too. Francis and Viola would surely force Lonnie to leave the city when he was of age; a boy as smart and reckless as Lonnie would come to ruin otherwise. Cha-Cha knew he'd stay here through riots and layoffs and whatever else came.

On Cha-Cha's third trip along the side of the house he saw a police car parked behind his truck. The officer was white, wide around the middle, and peering into the brick-filled cab.

You get into trouble. You throw a ball where you shouldn't, you try to brush up against the wrong girl's ass at a party. You take off running. Cha-Cha dropped his bricks, turned around, and ran back to his brothers. Ran past them. There was no time to stop and explain. Russell and Lonnie followed him through the backyard of the house, and the three of them jumped the gate to an alley. They separated as soon as they reached a side street. Cha-Cha should have stopped running. Better to walk as if he'd been walking all along, then make a slow circle back to his truck. But he couldn't stop himself. He wasn't skilled at acting natural. He thought it smarter to get back to Yarrow as quickly as possible. He ran east through alleys parallel to Seneca. He heard sirens up ahead where Seneca intersected Lambert. He panicked. A house to his left had a raccoon-sized hole in the lattice under its porch. He crouched down, kicked the hole a bit wider, and scooted feet first until he was inside. He lay on his back with his arms folded on his chest. Under the porch smelled like dead leaves and wet fur. Cha-Cha listened for the rustlings of rodents but heard none. He heard sirens instead, still as close as before, as if the police had parked on the block. He heard himself wheezing long after he believed his heart rate had slowed. He blamed the smoke in the air.

Taking refuge under the porch was not the smartest decision. He would be covered in dirt when he came out of the hole, and coupled with the blood he already had on his shirt, that would make him look more suspicious than ever. He still heard sirens.

Cha-Cha's mind might have wandered for less than five minutes or a dangerous fifteen minutes. He heard footsteps crunching through the dry summer grass toward him. The sirens had stopped. Slowly, Cha-Cha turned onto his side. He recognized those boots. That slue-footed, toes-outward walk. It was his father. Francis was a hummer and a smacker. He hummed the same song mostly, about a train headed to Glory, and he smacked as if something sticky was lodged in between his molars.

Why didn't he crawl out then, and walk with his father home? Cha-Cha didn't know. His heart told him to keep still. Francis stopped very near to Cha-Cha's hole in the porch. He stood there and hummed. Francis burped and Cha-Cha realized he was drunk; he could smell the beer from where he hid. Only Francis Turner could find time to sneak away and drink during an uprising. Cha-Cha heard him unzip his pants.

Earlier that day, when the body of the Charger crushed his thumb, Michel had said, “You can't.” Just “You can't” once, quickly, and then a low-register wail when the bolts were removed and the rest of his hand freed. As Bryson's team carried him away, Michel mumbled a string of words in French that no one understood. Cha-Cha wanted to yell “You can't” from under the porch, but he didn't. He merely closed his eyes.

Most of the urine did not reach him, but an unforgivable amount splashed onto his forehead. It took nearly two minutes for Francis to relieve himself, and Cha-Cha was convinced that Francis had done it to him on purpose. A few years later, when Cha-Cha started tailing Francis on Viola's orders, he would learn that this corner on Seneca and Lambert was Francis's preferred one for clandestine drinking and occasional public urination. The knowledge did nothing to change his initial beliefs. His memories of the event were not swayed by reason. They were the culmination of the wrong kind of day, and too many realizations about the kind of life Cha-Cha felt destined to live. His father had pissed on his forehead when he should have been at home protecting his family, and this seemed a special, premeditated disrespect.

Francis shook himself, zipped up, and walked away, still humming about his train to Glory. Cha-Cha waited until he heard Francis slam his car door and drive off before he crawled out and walked back toward his truck, no longer worried about how suspicious he looked.

What folks said about idle hands and the devil was true for Lelah; busyness was her best defense against the urge to fondle those chips. She manufactured things to do in earnest. Weekdays proved easiest. She left Yarrow Street around dawn to pick up Bobbie and spent the day with him, either in the park or the library or, when the weather was too wet or cold, in Brianne's apartment. Strange to feel the need to tiptoe around your own daughter's home, but Lelah did feel that way, careful to put things back, never eating enough cereal or whatever leftovers were in the fridge to offend Brianne. A week passed and Lelah had spent less than thirty dollars.

The real danger lay in the weekends. Saturday arrived and Lelah drove to Brianne's early in the morning. She hoped to pick up Bobbie again, maybe give Brianne some time to herself, but Brianne was already dressed and getting Bobbie ready for the car when she arrived. She said she was driving to Rob's in Chicago.

“Two weeks in a row?” Lelah asked.

“Two weeks in a row. Is there something wrong with that?”

The same sass from that all-caps text message, Lelah thought. But how to address it?

“Nothing,” she said. “It's just, how come he never comes up here?”

Brianne didn't reply. She looked over Lelah's shoulder into the parking lot as if her car might have taken off without her.

“Are you two seeing each other again? You can tell me if you are.”

“Mommy,
no
,” Brianne said. Her shoulders squirmed and for a moment she reminded Lelah of a younger, more secretive version of herself. “It's just nice out and he said he wants to take Bobbie to see the Bean.”

“Okay, I'm just asking. We've got nice parks up here, too.” Lelah crossed her arms for lack of something better to do with them.

“I have to go now, Mommy,” Brianne said. “But you need to call Uncle Cha-Cha. He said he's been trying to reach you all week.”

Brianne carried Bobbie down the stairs before Lelah could ask whether she planned to spend the night out there, and if so, with whom. She tried to convince herself that it was none of her business.

Alone on Yarrow, Lelah knew desperate measures were necessary to keep her from herself. She decided to clean the entire house.

She started in the big room, armed with a wad of old T-shirts she found in one of her duffel bags and a bottle of all-purpose cleaner. This room was the most intact. Her two duffel bags and three trash bags full of clothes were tucked under the big room's bed and pushed up against the wall so that someone would have to be looking hard to find them there.

The girls' room, still a dismal shade of Pepto, had an old headboard leaning against the wall, but no frame or mattress anymore. The boys' room was empty save for pink insulation heaped in the middle of the floor. In the far corner of Francis and Viola's old room, still painted sea-foam green, the ceiling door to the attic hung open, and more insulation frothed out from up above. It was as if the house, once vacated, decided to come undone, letting loose its innards in places they didn't belong. Lelah gave the insulation a wide berth.

In the kitchen most of the cupboards were bare save for cat food above the sink. Two stacked columns of generic aluminum cans for the strays Viola used to feed behind the garage. For a brief, self-pitying moment Lelah envisioned resorting to these cans of kitty chow for dinner, eating straight out of them like the old, eccentric mother-daughter duo she'd once seen in a documentary. She needed more money.

Francis Turner's AM/FM radio was still bolted to the side of the cabinet near the kitchen's back door. It switched on when Lelah tried it. She swept the floor while an oldies station played a Keith Sweat song. His nasally voice wasn't nearly as seductive to Lelah as it once had been. When Francis was alive, the radio stayed on sports stations, and if he wasn't listening to the Lions on the radio, he was at the Pontiac Silverdome watching them live. He took Troy with him often, or Cha-Cha, or whichever boy happened to be on leave and in town. Only once did he invite Lelah to come along.

“That's how you know he's getting old,” Berniece had said. She watched Lelah curl her bangs in the bathroom. It was the early eighties, and Lelah's hair, died light brown and feathered to mimic Sheila E.'s and Tina Turner's (she'd brought both pictures to the salon), featured more bang in the front than ponytail in the rear. She was sixteen. Three years away from marrying Brianne's father and moving to Missouri, yet already desperate to leave Detroit. She'd begun savoring each bit of quality time with her parents in anticipation of the near future, when she hoped to live far away from any Turner for as long as she could stand it.

“Daddy
never
takes girls to the games,” Berniece had added. “And maybe he shouldn't. Who curls their hair for a football game?”

“I do,” Lelah had said. Berniece was the only sibling to truly tease Lelah. It might have been because as the tenth child, Berniece had been born right after Miles and Duke, the self-appointed family comedians, who were inseparable and insufferable in their teasing of her. She made fun of Lelah for remaining flat-chested through freshman year of high school, then when Lelah sprouted triple Ds a year later, Berniece took to calling her Jug-a-lug and joking about how Lelah would never make it on the track team because she might knock herself out with a breast during the hurdles.

“Anyway, I don't wanna go to the game,” Berniece had said then. “I heard he still gets drunk at games. You better get ready to be embarrassed.”

Francis bought tickets for what Troy called the Loitering Section: for less than $15 you could purchase a seat with views so bad patrons used the tickets as an excuse to stand around inside the Silverdome, buying all the hot dogs and beer their stomachs could bear and watching the game on the big screens. Francis had indeed smuggled a silver flask in under his Lions hat—Lelah saw him position it as they walked from the car—but once they were inside the stadium Lelah didn't see it again. He definitely didn't get drunk. He was chatty and relaxed. He drank his pop, crunched on his Better Made chips, and insisted that this would be the season Billy Sims took the team past the first round of the playoffs. “We got some talent now,” he'd said. “Them jokers just gotta play smart. Play smart and stay healthy.” It seemed the flask under his hat was more a lucky charm than anything else, as if he'd always brought it to games and was therefore hesitant to go to one without it. Later Lelah would be thankful neither she nor Francis had been at the game a month later that ended Sims's career. She wouldn't have known how to console her father, a man who rarely expressed hopes for anything, had she been there to see Sims's knee destroyed.

Back then Francis's sobriety was something of a disappointment to Lelah; her older siblings were always talking about the old days when Francis would do or say ridiculous things after a case of beer, but she never even saw him tipsy. She imagined it would have made him smile more, make his hybrid Arkansas-Detroit accent harder to decipher. Now, considering her own gambling issues, she wondered where and how her father found the strength to kick his habit, and whether or not that strength might lie dormant somewhere in her DNA.

Now in the basement, Lelah found what looked like mouse droppings in the corner by the sink, next to the skeleton of a rusted Schwinn. Her brother Lonnie used to rehearse with his band down here. He'd drape green tarps over the high windows, string up Christmas lights, and burden the house's electrical system with his old amplifier. She couldn't have been older than seven, sitting on the steps watching Lonnie and his friends practice. They'd fancied themselves a Delfonic, pre-funk, pseudo-gospel outfit, and Lonnie's spastic dancing would serve as Lelah's blueprint for cool for several years before she learned better.

A stack of boxes underneath the far window bore the label Memories. Lelah had been here on the first few packing days, helping everyone decide which things would go where, and trying to convince Viola to throw a bunch of knickknacks no one wanted into the garbage. Being the flea market connoisseur that she was, Viola could not be convinced. “These here is all my memories,” she'd said. “You don't put your memories on the side of the road like that. Might as well put yourself out there.”

So Lelah and Marlene had packed up the countless Precious Moments statuettes—those big-eyed, egg-headed celebrators of the Lord's Word—along with an assortment of ceramic, glass, and crystal candy dishes; a crumbling stack of certificates ranging in importance from Perfect Attendance to Participant: Ypsilanti 1996 March of Dimes 5K; copies of ultrasounds for which no one could remember whose baby was pictured; a tangle of tarnished high school track and field medals likely to be claimed someday by Russell but in actuality won by Quincy; and even a few of the chintzy airline wing pins given to children who were able to visit the cockpit and say hello to the pilots pre–September 11. The boxes were labeled Memories so that everyone understood that they held (a debatable amount of) sentimental value and no monetary potential at all.

That is,
most
boxes had no monetary potential. One box, smaller and sturdier than the rest, had been on Lelah's mind during the past week. She pushed a stack of larger boxes to the side and found it. This was the box of things that she hadn't trusted herself to take home back then.