The Turner House (16 page)

“It says you're not eligible,” the woman said.

“I know it says that,” Lelah said. “That's why I'm here. I got suspended from my job without pay, so I
should
be eligible, right?”

“Your employer hasn't put anything in here,” the woman said. She was fair-skinned but not quite white. Lebanese, maybe, or Egyptian. She had green eyes, a long, slender nose, and a small, pretty diamond stud in her nostril. She did not look Lelah in the eye.

“What happened when you called Martha?” she asked Lelah.

“Martha? Who is Martha?”

“M-A-R-T-H-A,” the woman said loudly. “Michigan Automated Response Telephone Hotline for Assistance.”

She slid Lelah a pamphlet titled “Meet MARTHA: Your Guide to Filing for and Receiving Unemployment Benefits.” Lelah folded it up and shoved it into her purse.

“I couldn't get through to anybody when I called the numbers online,” she said. “That's why I came down here.”

“Was it MARTHA you called, or some other number?”

“It was MARTHA,” Lelah said, but she wasn't sure.

“Well, what's the status of your suspension? When will they tell you if you've been terminated for good?”

“I have no idea,” Lelah said. “But I assume I'm pretty much fired at this point.”

The woman scrunched her brow and pulled her lips back into a kind of closed-mouth grimace, a look intended to communicate empathy.

“You need to find out for sure and get something in writing,” she said. “It might be better to go ahead and get them to officially cut you loose if you think they're going to anyway. That way you'll have something solid to input into MARTHA's system when you call. Most of the time, MARTHA can help you more than we can.”

Lelah relinquished the window to the next person in line. She almost laughed to herself as she walked back to her car. This was her new life, she thought, begging various people for money through windows, as if the whole world had morphed into one big, stingy casino cashier counter.

She realized the mail might be to blame. She always remembered to check her email at the library, and aside from the usual spam sales offers and chain letters from Russell, she never had anything new. But she'd been without physical mail for nearly two weeks. Off the grid, unreachable. All sorts of money could have been tied up in postal purgatory—a little bit of refunded 401(k) cash, a severance offering, an important message from MARTHA. She'd forgotten about real, hold-in-your-hand mail, and the things that could only come to you through it. She drove to the post office near Jefferson and Lemay, the closest one to her old apartment. No mail for her there. She bought a six-month PO box for $21 and filled out a change of address form just in case.

There was a choice to be made now. She could go about her day and wait to see what arrived in the PO box. Go to the library, maybe, or straighten up the Yarrow house some more. Or she could be proactive. Find out once and for all whether she would ever work at the phone company again. There were risks associated with finding out, the potential for added humiliation high. She'd felt awash in relief when she learned that Dwayne the lonely widower was fired for his actions on the parking deck, both because the act itself was so unsettling and because the chances of him being able to ask for his money back decreased if they didn't work together. She even wanted to thank her manager for expediting the grievance process to get Dwayne out. Then her own scandal surfaced and she had nothing to say. She sat silent as that same manager enumerated all of the money she'd borrowed, and Misty, her union representative, shook her head in disappointment. She'd never felt so exposed in her life.

But money was money. She decided to go downtown and try to speak with her union representative instead of her manager. She'd paid her dues out of each paycheck like everyone else, so even if Misty didn't like her, it was her job to provide assistance, wasn't it?

She recognized the security guard on duty at the desk in the lobby. Sheldon had always struck her as a decent, reasonable person.

“Shelly! Long time no see,” she said.

Sheldon put his hands on the desk and leaned forward to peer at her in mock suspicion. His eyes traveled up and down her body. He leered in an absent-minded way; Lelah thought he was not even conscious of what he was doing. She'd always had the sort of figure that certain men stared at out of habit. While Turner men were blessed with beautiful faces—long eyelashes, smooth skin, square jaws—a Turner woman's beauty originated below the neck. This wasn't to say that Lelah thought she and her sisters were homely; they all had large, doe eyes, full lips, and the capacity to grow an impressive head of hair. But the Turner hourglass figure was their greatest gift, as well as a potential curse. A Turner woman's lifelong challenge was to keep the proportions in check, to prevent her ample top from ballooning and drooping, to keep her waist discernible, to prevent her bottom from spreading and sagging. The fact that Sheldon always gave Lelah this extended once-over confirmed that she hadn't lost the proportion war yet.

“Lelah Turner? I thought you'd won the lotto or something. Where you been?”

“I been around. Definitely didn't win no lotto, though.”

“That's too bad,” Sheldon said. “You going up to your floor? I don't know if you know, but they just put this new card scanner system in. It's a pain in the ass cause I have to swipe everybody in and out now. They give you the new badge yet?”

Lelah leaned an elbow on the tall desk, tried to appear casual. Two women in jeans and phone company polo shirts came up behind her, and Sheldon swiped them through. Lelah waited for them to get on the elevator before answering. The phone company was strict about who entered any of its buildings, but this building, full of non-salaried call center employees, had the most rigid visitation requirements of the entire downtown complex.

“No, no new badge yet,” she said. “I'm just here to see if Misty Crespi is in today? I would've called her office, but my cell phone up and died on me this morning.”

“Sounds like it's time for an upgrade,” Sheldon said. He picked up the desk phone and scrolled through the directory. “Hi, it's Sheldon from downstairs. Lelah Turner is here looking for Misty Crespi. Can I send her up?”

Sheldon's thick lips disappeared into his mouth.

“Alright,” he said. “I understand.” He hung up and gave Lelah a look a person might give an energetic dog when leading it to a kennel.

“Lelah.” His voice was too soft. “They say upstairs that you're suspended, and because of that you can't be on the property. I'm sorry, love, I have a list of suspended and terminated folks right here, but I didn't even think to check when you came in.”

“What, they think I'm gonna shoot up the place?” She attempted a laugh.

“It's my fault for even calling up,” Sheldon said. “It should have said something about you not being able to come here in whatever paperwork they gave you. You have to wait until they invite you back. Safety precaution.”

“Yeah,” Lelah said. It came out like a whisper. “That makes sense.”

Sheldon, still wearing his apologetic face, held out his chubby hand. Just then a chatty group of employees with colorful lunch bags exited the elevator and Lelah seized the opportunity to leave. She walked through the lobby with her head down. She needed to get to her car before the tears came.

She'd made it to the door when she heard her name. It was another man calling, not Sheldon. Lelah ignored it and stepped outside. The large shadows cast by the high-rises had shifted, and she walked through a triangle of bright sunshine.

“Lelah Turner! Hold on a second, please.”

There was a limit to Lelah's capacity for rudeness, even when she'd been humiliated. The nice part of her, that same agreeable part that wouldn't allow her to say what she really wanted to say to Brianne or anyone else, for that matter, prevented her from walking away from someone calling her name. Especially in broad downtown daylight. She stopped at the corner and turned around. A tall, dark-skinned man in khaki chinos and a light blue button-down shirt took long strides toward her. He looked like a lanky teenager from far away, but as he moved nearer she saw that he was closer to her own age. A boy she used to know from Yarrow Street, morphed into a full-grown man. He panted.

“I thought that was you,” he said. “It's me, David Gardenhire, Troy's friend? Hi.”

“What do you want?” This was ruder than Lelah imagined she could get.

David wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He rolled up his sleeves, smiled nervously. His square, white teeth seemed a special torment to Lelah, too insistent.

“I'm sorry, I wasn't tryna chase you down,” he said. “I was just up there meeting about a contract. You work here?”

“Yeah.”

“I saw you when I got off the elevator, and man, it's been like twenty years.”

They stood there for a few seconds. David looked at his watch and Lelah hoped this meant the conversation was over.

“It's lunchtime,” he said. “You have time to eat? There's this barbecue place near here, and I know the owner, so we could get food pretty quick.”

It hadn't been twenty years. Lelah remembered seeing him a few years back, when family gatherings were still held on Yarrow. She'd stepped out onto the porch to help Sandra with a couple boxes of pop, and he had been among the men in the empty lot next to the house. He leaned against a truck with Troy and a guy from the neighborhood that people called Trigger. Troy said something and David bent over laughing. He had not come into the house to say hello to Viola as many of the neighborhood men had, so Lelah never saw him up close that day.

She followed David's van in her car. A moment ago, out in the sunlight, it seemed easier to agree to lunch than come up with an excuse, but now Lelah felt trapped. Troy's friends were uniformly sleazy. Too loud, aggressive, flirtatious, always looking for an angle. Why would David be any different? She followed him onto the I-94 and ten minutes north, to the Eastland mall, eating away precious gas in the process. Before she pulled into the parking lot, she screamed once, loud and long with her windows rolled up.

David waited for her on the sidewalk.

“I called ahead to my friend, and he said they had a big convention crowd right now, so I figured other places downtown might too. Then I remembered this place was close. I didn't have your number, or else I would have called you in the car.”

It was a regular old Applebee's.

“It's fine,” she said.

On his side of the booth David looked cramped, and when he tried to casually put his long arms out on the table in front of him, they nearly crossed the distance of varnished fiberboard over to Lelah's side. He draped one arm across the back of his seat instead.

“So,” David said. “Last I heard about you, you were moving to Missouri with your husband.”

Lelah shook her head.

“That was a long time ago.”

“What you been up to since then?”

“You really wanna know?”

“Yeah, why not? That's why I invited you to lunch, right? To catch up.”

“I don't know,” Lelah said. “Let's see. I was married in '86, divorced by 1990. I got a daughter named Brianne who's twenty-one, and a grandson who's almost two. That's it.”

David whistled.

“Makes me feel old. What's your grandson's name?”

“Bobbie,” Lelah said. “Short for Robert like his father.”

“Congratulations,” David said. He sounded like he meant it.

The waiter arrived to take their drink orders, and Lelah asked for a Diet Coke. David ordered a Heineken, so Lelah changed her order to the special margarita advertised on the front of the menu. She hoped tequila and sugar could carry her through the awkwardness.

“Margarita, huh? You must not be going back to work.”

“I'm off this whole week,” Lelah said. The lies had a life of their own.

“Cheers,” David said when the drinks came. He reached over to touch the tip of his bottle to Lela's glass. Her margarita bowl was too large to lift without spilling.

After a few sips Lelah felt pleasantly woozy. The cheap blue Curaçao in the drink tasted like melted gummy bears. With the exception of Marlene, who could hold her own with her brothers, Turner women had no capacity for drinking. Their predilections ran cheap and sweet. While Turner men pounded their way through cases of beer and fifths of cognac, the women usually split a couple wine coolers and a few bottles of dessert wine, then called it a night, their heads aching from the sugar and their stomachs craving grease.

In the time it took the food to arrive Lelah had told two stories about Bobbie making a scene at the library, and David laughed at each one as if they were as funny to him as they were to her. His burger looked slider-sized in his hands. Lelah had canceled out any health benefits her salad might have offered by opting for crispy chicken and bleu cheese dressing. It tasted wonderful.

“So,” she said. “Why were you at my job this morning?”

“I install cable and Internet.” He flung his hand over his shoulder in the direction of his van outside. “And I got a friend who told me the phone company was looking for independent contractors, so I set up a meeting with the field manager.”

David finished his beer and took a long drink of his water.

“They told me to check back in a few weeks,” he added. “Today was me checking back.”

“Sounds impressive,” Lelah said. She looked down into her drink, surprised that so much of it remained. “How do you go from being in the navy to installing cable and Internet?”

“You're gonna laugh,” David said. He drenched his remaining french fries in ketchup.

“Why would I laugh?”

“I went to an Internet college. You know them commercials that make you feel guilty when you're sitting up in the house watching TV in the middle of the day?”