The Turner House (26 page)

“You at work or not, Troy? God-lee.”

“At home. What's good?”

“Uh . . . you ever catch up with Lelah?”

“That's what you called me for? To talk about Lelah? What's going on with the short sale? That's what I wanna know. I been thinkin about it, and really, at this point I think we need to—”

“Hold on there. Ain't no reason for you to be thinkin about it on your own at all. We're gonna decide as a family, like we said at the meeting. Whatever you wanna propose, wait until everybody hears it out.”

“As a family? Come on, Cha. We can't even agree on what kind of food to cook on Christmas, let alone—”

“I'm not
calling
about that anyway. I was calling to ask you about something else. . . something personal.”

“So you wanna ask
me
something personal, but can't even listen to me for two minutes. Some things never change, huh? I guess it's only up to
you
what we talk about. It's always up to you what we talk about, ain't it, Cha?”

“Lord, never mind, Troy. I'll talk to you later.”

“No no no! I'm listening, I really am. What's eatin you, Cha? How can I help?”

“Seriously?”

“I'm serious.”

“Okay. I don't know if you remember hearing about this, maybe you were too young, but there's this story about how I saw a ghost?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I think the ghost, the haint, I guess, has come back, or it never really left, but now it's showing itself again.”

“This really is a trip, Cha.”

“What?”

“You! You're a trip, calling me to ask for advice on something minor like this—you having bad dreams, basically—and meanwhile important family business is just pushed to the back burner until
you
feel like dealing with it.”

“This ain't minor, Troy, this is my life. And I'm not talkin about bad dreams.”

“You know what? My line's beeping. I gotta go.”

“Hold up, Troy.”

“Troy, you there?”

“Gotdamnit.”

Lelah, Thirteenth Child, Forty Years Old:

“Where you been hiding? I haven't heard from you in damn near a month.”

“It hasn't been a month, Cha. I've been around, just busy with work.”

“Too busy to answer a text message?”

“Plus, when I'm not at work I've got my hands full with Bobbie.”

“I must have sent twenty texts by now. I sent an all-caps text that said EMERGENCY CALL ME NOW, and you didn't even respond. I had stopped callin this number cause I figured you'd got a new prepaid.”

“But you just called it right now. And here I am, right? What's going on?”

“I. Well. You don't even know about the house, do you?”

“I have no idea what you're talkin about, but to tell you the truth, I'm in the middle of something. Can we talk about this at the party next weekend?”

“What party? There's not gonna be no parties around here.”

“Tina just left me a voicemail about five minutes ago. Talkin about a party for the spring birthdays next Saturday and does Bobbie eat chocolate.”

“I just talked to everybody else and didn't nobody mention a party.”

“I don't know, Cha-Cha. All I have is the voicemail. Maybe Tina's workin backwards up the list or something, so I finally get some information before the whole world gets it. I'll see you there though. Tell her Bobbie eats chocolate but he can't have any peanuts. They make his skin act weird.”

“Lelah—”

“I really have to go, Cha.”

“Alright. But you might wanna go ahead and pay your last visit to Yarrow Street, cause we're not gonna keep that house.”

“Lelah, did you hang up?”

“No, I'm here.”

“Are you crying? Aw hell, I didn't mean it. I just got too much on my plate, and people aren't being realistic.”

“Can we please talk later? I really have to go.”

Feeling equal parts frustrated and confrontational, Cha-Cha stomped up from the basement to find Tina on a barstool in the kitchen, the cordless phone tucked in between her ear and raised shoulder, her leather-bound address book open. She looked up at him and lifted one finger—a church-lady gesture that meant “Hold on one minute” but could also mean “Excuse me, I'm trying to get to the bathroom” or “One Kleenex over here, please” or “You'll have to wait until the prayer is over to enter the sanctuary,” depending on the circumstances. Cha-Cha rolled his eyes, but he waited.

“Yeah, if you could maybe bring a salad or some fruit, that would be good,” she said into the phone. “I'm gonna order some pizzas from Buddy's and then make spaghetti and some chicken too if I have time. If not, I'll buy a few of those whole rotisserie ones from Meijer's and cut em up.”

Cha-Cha cleared his throat.

“Anyway, Sandy, I'd best be going if I'm gonna make it all the way up the line tonight. Uh-huh, I
know
, girl. See you soon.”

Tina returned the cordless to its cradle and made a mark in her address book.

It had been dark by the time he returned from the cemetery on Monday. Tina was on the loveseat when he came inside the house. She'd stacked his printouts neatly on his desk. She was calm, had the beginnings of a smile on her lips. “I want to be with the man who swept me off my feet in that pharmacy all those years ago,” she said, “and I know he's still in you. I'm not givin him up. I'm not givin
you
up, Cha-Cha, so you want to talk about this haint? Fine, let's talk about it.” This, of course, was too little too late for Cha-Cha, and what infuriated him was her insinuation that her only motive for helping him now was so that
she
could get the husband
she
wanted back, not because he was quite possibly going out of his mind and needed her to believe him. He'd ignored her proposed truce and started his migration through the guest bedrooms and basement for sleeping, finally settling on the couch. She still cooked his dinner, packed lunches for the workdays he slogged through in a sleep-starved haze.

“Can I help you, Cha-Cha?” she said now.

“Why are you callin people and scheduling a party without asking me about it first?”

“Because it's almost June, and May is usually when we celebrate the spring birthdays, isn't it?”

“I'm not in no kind of state or mood to have a party here, Tina. I think you know that.”

“Well, Cha-Cha, the party isn't until Saturday. And I might even push it back until the following Saturday because Troy said he might be sending for Camille, and since neither of us has seen her since she was
yay
big, I think it might be nice if she was here, too, don't you?”

“You talked to Troy?”

“Just a few minutes ago.”

“I was talking to him and he hung up on me. He picked up the phone for you?”

“How else could we have talked? So anyway, I figured, or maybe I
hoped
that in a week or two you'd have come around and started having real conversations with me, and we'd sort this business out together.”

Tina gave Cha-Cha an innocent smile. He refused to smile back at her.

“What if I don't want a party, Tina?”

“It's not your party, Cha-Cha,” she said, the cordiality fading from her voice. “It's for the spring birthdays. If you recall,
I'm
a spring birthday, and more importantly, your
mother
is a late-spring birthday, Cha-Cha. June fifteenth. And she's not gonna be here forever. I know you've been avoiding her room like the plague, but she's lost some weight just in these last few days. She's not eating as much and talking about pain in her arms and chest. They're even running some tests when we go to the doctor tomorrow. People need to see her while she's still
here.
”

“Come on, Tina. Don't talk like that. I didn't make her sick.”

“Plus, there's been two new babies since Christmas, and people wanna
see
them. Tameka's new boy and Antoine's baby girl. You can choose not to be here that day. Go ahead and
luxuriate
in your misery if that's what you need to do. But there's gonna be a party, with or without you.”

She picked up the cordless again and ran her finger down the page of her address book.

“There's meatloaf and green beans in the microwave if you're hungry.”

Her plan must have been to obliterate him with condescending kindness. And food. And babies. Cha-Cha was a sucker for a new baby. Not wanting to suffer through another descent down the basement's narrow stairs, he gathered his printouts, his MP3 player, and a saucer of meatloaf and stationed himself outside on the back deck.

It was too early in the year for cicadas, but the crickets did an impressive impersonation as the day grew dark, singing in loud insect harmony. When the sun finally sank behind the Hendersons' stand of pines two houses to the west, the collective cricking dropped a few octaves to a low hum. He sifted through his printouts. Each day he lost a bit of faith in his research, but he still liked to hold the growing stack of papers, a tactile reminder of his efforts to be measured and reasonable. After his first miserable day back at work, Cha-Cha had returned to Hurston's
Mules and Men.
He'd stayed up late Tuesday and Wednesday thumbing through the stories, heartened by the casual mention of ghosts that mingled among the living. The book suggested that many ghosts sought retribution. Cha-Cha couldn't think of anyone he had seriously crossed in his life, much less any former foe who had died. The appendix outlined practical, root-centered remedies for just about every problem—catching a murderer, making someone leave town—except for getting rid of a ghost. Furthermore, these ghost stories happened in the South, and despite Francey's claims of diasporic connectedness, Cha-Cha still felt that what happened down there so many decades ago couldn't be of much insight up here. He considered the South a place mired in the past, never mind the desperate efforts of its larger cities to prove otherwise. A place his father never even bothered returning to, and where on visits to his aunts as a child in the fifties his mother always briefed him on how he should and shouldn't behave in the presence of white folks. It was the twenty-first century now, and Cha-Cha lived in Detroit. He was convinced that he should be able to unthink this haint, mentally shoo it away, just as he had for all of those years after the night in the big room.

The motion-sensor light kept shutting off, so Cha-Cha, too lazy to get up and switch it to the permanent ON, took to rocking back and forth in his deck chair. The rocking also helped fight the evening chill.

He hadn't mentioned Alice to Tina all week. He wouldn't give her the satisfaction of knowing that Alice also doubted him. To her credit, Tina hadn't brought up Pastor Mike during any of her “let's talk about this” entreaties. Cha-Cha missed Alice. He regretted the things he'd said to her, although at the time he believed them. Why else would Alice bother with him, if not to glean some knowledge of living the kind of life that he lived? There was, of course, a more pedestrian answer, one that seemed both increasingly plausible and ludicrous as each day passed. Alice might just
like
Cha-Cha. He resisted this explanation, because if he accepted it, he was tempted to think about the nature of her liking, as well as his own affinity for her. Before the haint's return he had trusted his attraction to her as a friendly one; now it was specious. Why had he felt the need to hug her on Monday? Why had she diverted from protocol and delayed discussing his haint for months? He felt foolish to indulge his imagination in this way, and the fact remained that she hadn't called him since. He could picture her sitting there in her turquoise chair, fiddling with the pens on her desk, absent-mindedly patting her afro. She might have been thinking about him. She might have even considered picking up the phone to check on him, her patient who was on his way to becoming her friend. Or did the image of a sixty-four-year-old, stubborn, former truck-driving, ghost-seeing man make her angry? Did it fill her with pity? It would hurt Cha-Cha too much if the latter were true.

How would a person know if he was going insane? Cha-Cha wondered. There might exist a specific symptom, some indisputable piece of evidence that would prove one unstable. Rocking back and forth on the deck, nibbling a cold disk of ketchupy meatloaf in the chilly evening might be proof enough of a deteriorating mental state for some people.

Growing up, whenever a child went through a habitual lying stage, or blamed his siblings for all of the trouble he got into, Viola would put her index finger to the child's chest and say, “Everybody else cain't be wrong all the time. Sometimes it's gotta be
you.
”

What if it was him?

On the walkway to Marlene's Harper Woods bungalow Lelah tried to sort out a game plan. She had just gotten back to Yarrow after meeting up with David when Cha-Cha's call came. She hadn't thought as she put her car in reverse where she might be headed, to whose door she would come knocking. Now that she was here, Marlene felt right. Lelah would need allies to get Cha-Cha to change his mind, and Marlene had spent almost as many years as Lelah had back on Yarrow as an adult.

She knocked. After a few seconds with no answer, she pounded. Marlene opened the door with the chain on.

“It's you. I'da thought you didn't know me, the way you've been ignorin my calls.”

“I know you, I know you, okay? Let me in.”

Marlene closed the door to remove the chain, opened it again. The small house smelled of furniture polish and incense, flea market aromas wafting off of Marlene's collection of flea market finds.

In the living room Lelah sat across from an ancient floor-model TV that miraculously still broadcast a few channels with the help of a converter box. Marlene hustled past her to the kitchen to turn off the faucet.