The Turner House (3 page)

A knock at the door.

“Little Lee-Lee, is that you?” A muffled voice from outside.

A bald, spotted head and a pair of bifocals crowded the front door's high window. Mr. McNair. Too late for Lelah to duck out of sight. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, undid the lock.

The door creaked open, and Lelah's eyes focused on a pair of withered kneecaps. They looked like baked potatoes. The old man's face loomed above her. He balanced on an upturned plastic crate, one veined arm pressed against the porch's ceiling.

“Mr. McNair, come on down before you hurt yourself.”

Lelah gave him her hand, put her free one on his elbow.

“I only fell the first time,” he said. “Sure did hurt though.”

“See, that's one time too many. What were you doing, casing this place for a robbery?”

“Hell, don't look like there's much left to take.”

They chuckled. He straightened his baggy shorts, carried the crate to a far corner of the porch.

“Your brother Cha-Cha asked me to come by here and look after the porch and yard,” Mr. McNair said. He ran a hand along the porch's rail to steady himself. “So I come every once in a while, sweep up, make sure it looks all right.”

Norman McNair and Lelah's father had worked in the same trucking unit at Chrysler for thirty-two years. When Francis Turner died in '90, McNair took up the handiwork for his best friend's widow. McNair pretended to be a serious old man, but his fondness for going around with his gnarled, reedy legs showing as soon as the weather warmed up suggested a secret whimsy to Lelah. Francis Turner had never worn shorts.

“Few weeks ago somebody was sittin in Mrs. Bowlden's living room when she came back from New Orleans,” Mr. McNair said. “A junkie. Up in there like he paid rent, just livin the life of Riley. Eatin her food
and
makin long-distance calls. He come up through the basement window.”

He whistled through his teeth and shook his head.

“So I got the idea to start lookin in at your house through that top window in the door, seeing as how the curtains is always closed.”

“Looks like we had the same idea,” Lelah said. “I just came by to do a quick walk-through on my way to work. Everything looks all right.”

Mr. McNair considered this, nodded. Lelah's phone rang—no doubt it was Brianne. She pushed Ignore.

“Well make sure you lock up real tight, cause these junkies are about ready to thaw out from the winter. Lord knows what they'll be lookin to steal.”

The old man peered down the block, brows gathered. Lelah's car was parked across the street from where they stood, and she could see the odds and ends of her life cramming up the windows. If Mr. McNair noticed the things on the walk over, he was too polite, or bewildered, to bring it up.

“Alright, I'd best be gettin on my way,” he said. “Tell your mama McNair says hello.”

A rash of dandelions pocked the east side with yellow. The newly arrived spring—the spots of color, the surprise of birdsong—gave the neighborhood a tumbledown, romantic quality. It reassured Lelah that the ghetto could still hold beauty, and that streets with this much new life could still have good in them. On both sides of the Turner house, vacant lots were stippled with new grass. Soon ragweed, wood sorrel and violets would surround the crumbling foundations, the houses long burned and rained away. The Turner house, originally three lots into the block, had become a corner house in recent years, its slight mint and brick frame the most reliable landmark on the street.

Lelah took Van Dyke out of the east side to 8 Mile Road, 8 Mile to Woodward Avenue and into the city of Ferndale. She considered Ferndale, with its coffee shops and pet stores, a decent place for her daughter to live alone with a baby. It was home to a sizable gay community, and the trim, muscled white boys who jogged through the nearby park posed a stark contrast to the folks she'd seen on the street on her drive over. She pulled into Brianne's apartment parking lot at 8:45.

“Gigi!” Lelah's grandson, Bobbie, reached his chubby arms out to her.

Brianne passed Bobbie to Lelah. “What happened to you yesterday? I called a bunch of times.”

“Sorry,” Lelah said.

“I had to ask Olga across the hall to watch him again. She's too old to have him all day like that.”

“I got my days mixed up. I thought you were off yesterday, and then working today.”

Brianne shook her head. “I can get a real babysitter, you know.”

Lelah said nothing to this. She made to bite Bobbie's cheek, chomping down on the air next to his face. The baby grinned, showing off two bottom teeth.

Brianne was darker than Lelah, shorter too, but with the same heavy chest. She'd inherited her slim hips from her father, not Lelah, who possessed what folks liked to call “hips for days.” Brianne reached up and smoothed her mother's hair back. The gesture was motherly, their roles reversed. Lelah flinched before she could stop herself.

“You musta woke up late. Didn't even do your hair. There's some gel under the sink in the bathroom if you want.”

Brianne handed Lelah a diaper bag and turned to put her key in the car door. Her nurse's scrubs were a deep red with small black triangles printed in a haphazard pattern throughout.

“I can't believe you go to work in that,” Lelah said. “You look like a ninja.”

“My scrubs? What's wrong with my scrubs?” Brianne turned back around, searched her shirt and pants for a tear or a stain.

“Nothing, they're just tacky. Nobody wants their nurse to look like they're headed to the club.”

“Says the woman with the winter leather on.” Brianne pulled at Lelah's coat collar. “You know it's supposed to be seventy-five today? I'm hot just looking at you.”

“Wasn't hot yesterday,” Lelah said. She shifted Bobbie's weight on her hip while Brianne put on lipstick, the same deep red as her uniform. Lelah could picture old men at the nursing home where Brianne worked planning their days around her daughter. Watching daytime TV in desperation, waiting for the moment she'd come and put her small hands on their frail bodies and make their senses jolt awake.

“Anyway,” Lelah said. “When you get your RN, I'ma buy some new scrubs for you. LPNs might be able to dress like that, but
real
nurses wear bright colors. Care Bears and seashells. Or maybe just a nice mint green like they used to wear back in the day.”

Brianne scrunched up her lips.

“Real nurses? So now I'm a fake nurse?” Brianne said. She sucked air through her teeth. “Why are you going in on me, Mommy? You're the one who didn't show up yesterday.”

“Nobody's trying to go in on you. It was just an observation. It's like nobody can never tell you anything.”

“I need to wash clothes, okay? These were the only clean scrubs left.”

Brianne scrutinized Lelah once more, ran her eyes up and down her mother's body.

“We're both tired,” she said. “But I'm serious about the babysitter thing. If you don't wanna do it, I can figure something else out. I can't be dropping him off with random neighbors when you don't pick up the phone.”

Lelah forced a chuckle.

“I'm his
grandmother
, Brianne. You can't threaten to fire me.”

Brianne raised an eyebrow, climbed into her car, and drove off.

Lelah walked with Bobbie to the park near Brianne's apartment. She sat him down on a shady bench near the cement pavilion, took off her jacket. She had felt like this before, anxious, cornered, but never had it produced such an uncomfortable physical sensation. Her body ached from yesterday's move, her skin tingled, and her head pounded. She stood up, jogged in place a bit, and stretched. With her hands reaching upward, Lelah knew the skateboarders in the pavilion were getting an eyeful of her softening midsection, of her heavy chest straining against the awkward fit of her teal polo shirt. She bent down toward her toes, displaying her backside to the skaters as she stretched her hamstrings, and tested the limits of her tight jeans. Her cell phone vibrated in her back pocket. This surprise, coupled with gravity's predictable pull on her bosom, threatened to topple her forward. She took a step for balance, straightened up, and pulled out her phone.

A text message from Brianne: “Was 10 minutes late to work.”

Then another: “AND I AM A REAL NURSE.”

“Huh,” Lelah said out loud. She knew all-caps was the equivalent of yelling; she'd once accidentally set her own phone to all-caps and was accused of aggression by a tech-savvy coworker. Bringing up the RN thing had been stupid, but what else did she have to talk about? Usually Lelah fell back on a report of her mother's well-being over at Cha-Cha's house. She'd been avoiding Viola since she got her first eviction notice, so her go-to topic was stale. She couldn't tell Brianne that she was homeless because Brianne would feel pressure to offer her a place to stay, and Brianne needed to focus on working and going back to school.

Licensed practical nurse. That's what Brianne was. It wasn't so much that her daughter's job wasn't good enough, just that Brianne was too young to stop striving. LPNs were easily hired and fired; Lelah wanted Brianne to push for the more secure job. “A woman without no options is waitin for a man to come by and ruin her,” Viola used to say, and she was right. Lelah had witnessed too many smart, talented Yarrow Street girls sit around on their porches, looking for excitement, meet the wrong man, and end up in trouble. Not pregnant trouble, but black-eye, bad-credit, women's shelter trouble, or worse. Lelah had married Vernon Greene, Brianne's father, because he was enlisting after graduation and odds were good they would see new things together. Three years after marrying Vernon and less than twenty-four hours after receiving the first and only black eye he'd ever have a chance to give her, she was back on Yarrow Street with little Brianne in tow. She hadn't even left the Midwest. The last time Lelah saw Vernon, some eight years earlier, he'd been nodding off in the freezing rain on a curb in front of a twenty-four-hour Coney Island on Harper. Maybe if she'd pushed herself harder back then, she wouldn't be where she was now.

Brianne acted as if she had no one, as if being a single mom meant she was some solitary mule humping an unbearable burden. It was only true because Brianne was stubborn, Lelah thought. It hadn't been that way for Lelah. Even before moving home for good, she'd seen that staying in the Midwest had its rewards, the most significant being that Brianne received Francis Turner's blessing. A blessing from Francis did not have a spiritual connotation in any formal sense. It meant that Francis would get to know your child in a way that wasn't possible for everyone in his ever-expanding line. In the final years of his life, Francis spent most days on the back porch, eyeing his tomato patch with good-natured suspicion, listening to his teams lose on the radio, and smoking his pipe. He did these things, and he held Brianne. Right against his chest. Francis had nothing cute or remotely entertaining to offer babies; he didn't say anything to them at all. Instead he gave them his heartbeat. Put their little heads on his chest and went about his day. Even the fussiest babies seemed to know better than to cut short their time with Francis via undue crying or excessive pooping. Lelah would stand in the back doorway and watch Brianne sleeping against Francis, his large hand holding her up by the butt, and think she could stand a few more years of being close by. How many babies had he held just like that since Cha-Cha was born, using only his heartbeat as conversation?

But it was also true that things wouldn't be the same for Brianne as they had been for Lelah. Francis Turner was dead, and Viola Turner now lived in the suburbs with Cha-Cha, for her own good, Lelah had herself once agreed. The Yarrow Street matriarchs who had helped raise Lelah, who had helped Lelah raise Brianne, were dead, dying, or tucked away in some suburb with their own families. And Lelah herself had no house to offer, no extra income to share.

She decided a conciliatory response was best for Brianne's text message.

She wrote: “Didn't mean it that way. Sorry.”

A moment passed.

Brianne responded: “I know. Just annoyed. Sorry for caps.”

Clouds slid into the sky, and Lelah felt a tiny raindrop land on her forehead. She decided to take Bobbie over to the Ferndale library, just a few blocks north of the park. Usually when she babysat she took him to her apartment, where she'd sectioned off a portion of front-room carpet for his toys. Those were all in the landlord's dumpster now. She'd feared they'd look like something worth stealing out of her car, so she'd left them behind.

Cha-Cha was sure he was the first Turner to visit a shrink. His initial visit had been obligatory. The letter from Mr. Tindale, Milton Crawford's boss, sat on the kitchen counter for three weeks, demanding him to go talk about haints with a complete stranger. Cha-Cha tried to picture telling everything to this Dr. Alice Rothman—someone he imagined just as humorless as Milton Crawford, likely too thin and too pale, the type to be uncomfortable with Cha-Cha's wide, tall, brown presence in her office. Her discomfort might be obvious, or worse, she would fancy herself a liberal and make a show of trying to relate to Cha-Cha, a sixty-four-year-old black truck driver who saw ghosts. So desperate to appear politically correct that she would condescend to him, pretend to understand what he felt. He'd met enough of these types at Teamster meetings during those post-riot years in the seventies; he knew they often thought less of him than the blatantly racist types.

Alice Rothman was black, and not even biracial as far as he could tell—skin darker than his, hair kinkier than his, worn natural. Just a black woman with a misleading last name. She looked to be mid-forties, about the same age as Berniece, the tenth Turner child, who lived in Toledo and had just married the same man for the second time—a quiet, balding bus driver who refused to visit Detroit. Odd for Chrysler to hire a young, black female psychoanalyst, Cha-Cha thought. Maybe Alice was married to a white man, a higher-up somewhere in the company who hooked her up with this side gig, helping Chrysler avoid insurance payouts by declaring folks crazy.