“Is Reggie home?” she said, sort of tentatively and just from the way she said his name, just from the way she said “Reggie” I knew that he belonged to her.
I stood there with the doorknob in my hand, and, for a second, I tried to figure it out. I tried to run through all the possible explanations for her and for Reggie. I tried to imagine what they ate on all those other nights, and what shows they watched together, and why they had moved here in the first place and why, after all this time, she was finally here, standing on our porch. I looked at the Velcro straps on her white sneakers and I wondered if it meant anything if a grown-up lady wore Velcro shoes and jogging pants while her son only wore dress clothes. For a little while, I thought maybe this was a clue for something else, the key detail in a sinister mystery I was supposed to solve, but after two seconds, I decided it probably wasn’t. I didn’t know what to do.
“Dad,” I said. “There’s somebody at the door for you.”
“No,” she looked at me and whispered it kind of frustrated. “I want Reggie.”
But then my father was there and my mom came right behind him and the two of them stood there with me on our side of the threshold.
“Is Reggie home?” she asked again. And my father answered right away, “Yes, yes he is, just a second.”
He went over to the basement door and called for him to come up.
“Just one second,” Reggie’s voice came back. You could tell he was concentrating on something else and didn’t want to be distracted.
“Just one more second,” he said.
“No, Reggie, come right now,” my father said. “Stop playing and come right now.”
Then he turned and shook hands with Reggie’s mom. He told her his name and said it was nice to meet her. And then my mom did the same thing.
“Your son is a very nice little boy,” she said. “You’ve sure done a good job with him.”
“Yes,” my dad agreed. “That is a very nice little boy you have there. A very kind, very generous boy. He has never been a bit of a problem to us, never made even a little bit of a fuss.”
He spoke slowly, like he was trying to make sure it got through, and she looked at him very carefully and nodded her head slowly.
“Yes,” she said, “I know. Thanks. Thanks for you guys too. He likes you, you know. You’re all he ever talks about over there. Thanks for being nice to him and thanks to your boys, for playing with him, and being nice to him and taking care of him and everything.”
And then Reggie was there and the rest of them had come up the stairs too. I don’t know what I expected or what I wanted, some big moment maybe, but nothing happened. When Reggie saw his mom on our porch, he ran right over to her with this big smile and gave her a hug. Then, he showed us off, one at a time, and did the introductions all over again.
“Yes Reggie,” she said patiently. “I know. I already talked to them. Come on, we have to go home now.”
“Okay,” he said and he ran and got his coat and then he was gone.
“See you later,” he said and the two of them went back across the street.
They left in the middle of the night and I think there must have been a problem with the rent because the house was empty for the whole summer and the landlord never took in another family after that. He got greedy and that’s when he started rotating the students through, a different bunch every year. They came and went so fast you could never keep track of who was really living there and he packed them in so tight, there must have been eight or ten guys crunched in there at the same time. For the first few weeks, we could still pretend the students were just a set of temporary stand-ins who were only going to hang around for a little while until the real permanent replacements arrived, but then they let one of the front steps rot right through and the grass went a whole year without getting cut. Even before the cats arrived, I could tell that things had changed for good and that Reggie probably wasn’t going to come back and fill us in with all the details about this great trip he went on with his mother and all the adventures they had along the way.
The students were all the same, very nice and polite if you met them in the daylight hours when they were on the way to class, but not so good at night. Everything about them was so obvious. They piled up a monument of their accomplished empty beer cases on the front porch and they had curtains made of Confederate flags and Union Jacks hanging in their windows. If they had a particularly good night, a flock of stolen pink flamingos might end up perched on their lawn in the morning. I remember a time when they hauled off one of those heavy-duty steel newspaper boxes from a street corner, the kind where you’re supposed to put in your money and they trust you to take only one paper. The box must have weighed a couple hundred pounds and we had no idea how they had managed to carry it all the way home. For a while they worked on it, trying to crack open the lock with a screw driver or saw through the steel casing so they could get into the part where they’d get rich on a couple rolls of quarters. Eventually they gave up, but the box stayed there on the porch right beside the beer cases. In big letters it said, “Get the News Here.”
They did the normal things: taped a long, larger-than-life poster of a swimsuit model on their front door, played their music too loud, watched horror movies or porno flicks late at night with all the windows open. Those guys would pee on your lawn at one in the morning and then throw-up on your lawn at four. And they’d never apologize. They seemed to get off on the whole public display of it.
“Someone should call their parents,” my mother said once, sneering again as she stared across the street. “I don’t care how old they are and I don’t care if they do go to the college. If those were my boys behaving like that — if that was you over there — I’d give you such a thrashing you’d never forget it.”
When we were finally forced out, it took us almost a year and a half to get rid of the house. My parents hired a real estate agent, a lady with tight curly hair who wore a lot of heavy jewellery and seemed to own a never-ending series of matching pant suits. She had a sign with a glossy picture of her face on both sides and she hammered that right into the middle of our front yard. After the first few months passed without any offers, she told my parents the house wasn’t selling because we lived in what she called a “mixed neighbourhood” and that nowadays most young families wanted to raise their kids in a quieter type of place, somewhere with a nice backyard and maybe a deck.
“Look around,” she said and she stood on our porch and waved her hand in a slow semicircle from one end of the street, past Reggie’s house, all the way to the other side, like she was giving a tour and wanted my parents to drink in the beautiful scenery. Everything was quiet.
“We have to be realistic,” I heard her say, in one of those too-loud theatre whispers. “You know how it is. There’s only three things that really matter: location, location, and location.”
She suggested a new asking price, a much lower number for my parents to think about, and she told them time was already tight.
“We have to get while the getting’s good,” she said. “Or you could be stuck here forever.”
My parents stared at her and didn’t say anything. Then my dad reached out and he squeezed my mother’s hand and they sat down on the step close to each other and stayed there for a while, thinking it all the way through. The real-estate lady said she wouldn’t leave without a decision and she stood over them, reciting a list of all the things that were wrong but could not be changed. Our bedrooms were too small and the basement was too low and there weren’t enough cupboards in the kitchen. The furnace was on its last legs and the shingles were pretty well shot and no one, no one anymore, could live in a house with only one bathroom. She was one of those sales people that everybody hates, the kind who can guess how much you make in a year just by looking at your shoes. She’d been through this before, hundreds of times, and she understood the choices. Now it was only waiting. I watched her sliding her eyes up and down over my parents and my brothers and our house and all we owned and I could tell that she thought she had us figured out completely.