I can rattle off this menu ordered by a racist freak, but can’t remember the day my world blew apart. I can’t remember a single thing that will save Terrell.
I glance out to my studio window, glinting at the top of the two-story garage in the corner of the back yard. I should go up there. Shut the blinds. Pull out my pencils and paints, and draw the curtain. Begin my homework.
The garage was renovated from crumbling disaster two years ago. Effie gave the plan her historical stamp of approval. Blue window boxes and straggly red geraniums for her, Internet and a security system connected to the house for me.
Cheerful. Safe.
The bottom level, which once housed the previous owner’s blue 1954 Dodge, is jammed with my table saw and biscuit joiner, router and drills, nail gun and orbital sander, vacuum press and welder. The tools that curve cabinet doors like sand dunes and solder master staircases into a dizzy spiral. Machines that make my muscles ache and reassure me that I can take on a man, or a monster.
The top level was designed just for me. My space. For the quieter arts. It seemed so important-a real home for my drawing table, easels, paints, paintbrushes, and sewing machines. I splurged on a Pottery Barn couch and a Breville tea maker and a Pella picture window so that I could spy into the upper floors of our live oak.
The week after the nail pounding stopped, as I sat and sipped tea bathed in the studio’s white, clean, new-smell glory, I realized that I didn’t want my space. I didn’t want isolation, or to miss Charlie’s burst through the door after school. So I stuck with the living room. The studio turned into the place my little brother, Bobby, hangs out to write when he visits from his home in Los Angeles twice a year and where Charlie goes on the occasion when every word out of my mouth sets her nerves on fire. I don’t know why, Mom. It’s not what you’re saying. It’s just that you’re talking.
This is the reason that the living room is piled with brocade fabric and designer dress patterns and bead carousels that mingle with Charlie’s flip-flops and textbooks and misplaced earrings and itsy-bitsy “seahorse” rubber bands for braces. Why my daughter and I have an unspoken agreement not to speak about the state of the living room, unless it involves ants and crumbs. We clean it together every other Sunday night. It’s a happy place, where we create and argue and refine our love.
The studio is crowded. My ghosts moved in right away, when I did, after the last stroke of linen white on the walls. The Susans feel free to talk as loudly as they want, sometimes arguing like silly girls at a sleepover.
I should climb the steps. Greet them with civility.
Draw the curtain. Find out whether it swings from a window in the mansion in my head where the Susans sleep. Let them help.
But I can’t. Not yet. I have to dig.
I’m staring into a gaping hole again. This time, a swimming pool, empty except for a chocolate slurry of leaves and rainwater.
Feeling ridiculous. Disappointed. And cold. I pull up the hood of Charlie’s Army sweatshirt. It’s 5:27. I haven’t stood in this place since Charlie and I lived here when she was two. Charlie has already texted the word hungry while I was driving the wrong direction on I-30 with a red pickup on my tail, and twenty minutes after that, home, and five minutes after that, cool tutu, and one minute after that um?????
I tried calling back, but no answer. Now the phone in my pocket is buzzing. The sun is dropping lower every second, a big orange ball going somewhere else to play. The apartment windows wink fire with the fading light, so I can’t see in. I hope no one is staring down at the hooded figure in the shadows armed with a shovel.
“Why aren’t you at Anna’s?” I blurt into the phone, instead of hello. “You are supposed to be at Anna’s.” As if that would make it so.
“Her mom got sick,” Charlie says. “Her dad picked us up. I told him it was OK to bring me home. Where are you? Why didn’t you answer my texts?”
“I just tried to call you. I was driving. I got lost. Now I’m on… a job. In Dallas. Did you lock the doors?”
“Mom. Food.”
“Order a pizza from Sweet Mama’s. There’s money in the envelope under the phone. Ask if Paul can deliver it. And look through the peephole before you answer to make sure it’s him. And lock the door when he leaves and punch in the code.”
“What’s the number?”
“Charlie. You know the security code.”
“Not that number. The number for Sweet Mama’s.”
This from the girl who last night Googled that Simon Cowell was the young assistant who polished Jack Nicholson’s axe in The Shining.
“Charlie, really? I’ll be on my way home soon. I’m late because… I thought I’d remember the way.”
“Why are you whispering?”
“Pizza, Charlie. Peephole. Don’t forget.” But Charlie has already hung up.
She’ll be fine. Was that me, or a Susan? Which of us would know better?
“Hey.” A man with a weed eater is quickly approaching from the other side of the house. Busted. I lean the shovel against a tree, too late. Even at this distance, something about the way he carries himself stirs a memory.
“This is private property!” he shouts. “What do you think you’re doing here with that shovel at dinnertime?” A drawl mixed with a threat and a reprimand about proper mealtime etiquette. A perfect Texas cocktail.
Because I’m scared of the dark. Because I think there are plenty of people with itchy fingers in this neighborhood who have a gun tucked in a drawer. I know I did.
“I used to live here,” I say.
“The shovel? What’s that for?”
I’ve suddenly figured out who he is, and I’m a little astonished. The handyman. The very same one who worked here more than a decade ago, who swore every day he was quitting. As I recall, he was a distant cousin of the grouchy woman who owned the place, a converted Victorian in East Dallas advertised as a four-plex with character. Translated: ornate crown molding that dropped white crumbs in my hair like dandruff, windows requiring Hercules to open them, and hot showers lasting two and a half minutes if I was lucky enough to beat the exercise freak on the first floor who woke up at 5 A.M.
The windows were why I took the place. No one crawling up and in. That, and the listing’s promise of Girls Only.
“When did the owner take out the parking spaces and dig this swimming pool?” I ask. “Marvin? Is it Marvin?”
“You remember old Marvin, do ya? Most of the girls do. Pool went in about three years ago. It used to be a gravel lot with numbered signs where everybody had a spot. But then, you’d know that. Now everybody complains they have to fight it out in the street. And Gertie has stopped filling the pool. Says it’s not worth the money and that Marvin don’t keep the leaves out. Old Marvin’s doing the best he can. When did you say you lived here?”
“Ten years ago. Or so.” Vague. I’d forgotten his habit of addressing himself in the third person. It partly explains why he never found another job.
“Ah, the good old days, when these whiney college brats didn’t call Marvin at 2 A.M. about how their Apples ain’t connectin’ to the Universe.”