Beyond Summer (42 page)

“Whoa.” Shasta frowned, cocking her head and studying me. “You don’t look happy.”

“I don’t know how I feel about it,” I admitted.

Shasta sighed. “You want me to hang out? We could go over to my place. I can call up to the church. They could get a few tutors to double up in class.”

“No.” Just looking at Shasta, seeing her house behind her, brought everything into focus. My father was her nemesis—the face of the evil that was trying to take away her home, slowly stealing this neighborhood and causing people to end up in the shelter down the road. “I’d better stay here. Besides, Sesay would be disappointed if you didn’t make it. Who would she show her new picture words to?” I forced a half smile, thinking of Sesay and her art pad filled with drawings and the words that Terence and MJ had helped her write.

“’Kay,” Shasta took another step back, pulling the boys with her. “You call if you need me. I mean it. Whether it’s during class or not.”

“I will.”

“Promise?”

“Sure.” The lie seemed almost natural. My entire friendship with Shasta was built on lies. The minute she learned the truth, she wouldn’t want anything to do with me.

She waved behind herself as she walked away with the boys, and a heaviness, a sense of ending, settled in my chest.

When I came back inside, my father was trying to figure out why the TV wouldn’t get CNN. “There’s no cable,” I told him. “We didn’t have the money for it.”

He sighed, his chin hardening, as if he were tired of being confronted with our current reality. No doubt in Mexico he’d been living in a place with cable. “Well, it won’t be for much longer. A couple days, max. As soon as I can get something arranged, we’ll be out of here.”

We’ll be out of here . . . soon . . .
The words pulled and tugged, twisted painfully. He said them with a sense of abandon, indicating that this place meant nothing. To him, it didn’t.

“I want you to tell me something, and I want the truth,” I said finally.

“I’ll try.” He was already looking away, focusing on something else, thinking through the process of making a deal for our new living quarters, perhaps.

“How much do you know about Householders?”

His chin pulled inward, his mouth forming a bemused curve, the way a parent might look at a child who’d suddenly popped out a question like,
Why is the world round
, or
How many stars are in the sky?
“Householders?”

“Yes.” Even while composing the question, I was afraid of the answer. “Is it another deal like the sports theme park? Do you actually know what Householders does?”

Frowning, he pinched his chin between his thumb and one knuckle, stroked contemplatively. “Householders is legitimate. It’s actually just a sideline—not even under the Rosburten umbrella. They redevelop neighborhoods. Neighborhoods like this one, where the real estate is undervalued based on surrounding locations. You take a neighborhood like this one, with this kind of proximity to downtown, buy up the old houses, eventually clean them off the lots, construct something more . . . upscale. The tax base goes up, crime goes down, uptown workers get something close in with almost no commute. It’s a win-win.”

“
Who
wins?” Had he never considered the people who were here first? The people for whom upscale wasn’t an option?

His shoulders lifted, then lowered, as if the answer were elementary. “Everyone.”

I thought of Shasta and the family she’d met in the shelter, of Elsie and the people who came to the Summer Kitchen. I didn’t want to find out that my father knew what was happening to them, that he didn’t care, but I could see the truth without his even admitting to it. “What if people don’t want to move? What if they want to keep their homes the way they are?”

He shrugged again. “Once the properties around them are bought and sold at higher prices a few times, they don’t have much choice. The values go up, taxes increase, and the holdouts turn loose eventually. The investment company finally clears ownership of a block of properties, the neighborhood advances, and redevelopment goes on. In the right circumstances, it yields some handsome incentives for the development company—tax abatements and such. It’s a simple process.”

A simple process.
The words rang in my ears. A simple process. Something clinical, with no human attachments, no complications. “So they sell the houses with no intention that people will be able to keep them, in the long term? It’s all part of a financial game?”

He coughed indignantly. “I wouldn’t characterize it that way.”

“How
would
you characterize it? This company is stealing people’s homes. They’re taking advantage of families who have no way to fight back, and
you’re
helping them.” I sucked in a breath. I’d never, ever talked to my father that way. Few people had.

He drew back, seeming offended. Then slowly the shadow of guilt turned his gaze downward, and I knew why he cringed every time those Superman commercials came on. Whether he wanted to admit it or not, he knew exactly what Householders was doing, and no matter what flowery technical terms he used to describe it, he knew it was wrong.

“How
would
you characterize it?” I demanded, the words harsh, sharp edged. “I’d like to know, because to me it looks like Householders is taking advantage of people who don’t have the resources to defend themselves.”

“Fff!” He tipped his head back and looked down his nose at me. “Don’t be so idealistic, Tam. It’s business. Everything Householders does is legal. It’s all in their contracts.”

“These people don’t understand the contracts!” The words exploded from my mouth and bounced around the room. Aunt Lute came running from the kitchen, her eyes wide as she skidded to a stop in the doorway. “They’re not lawyers. They can’t even afford lawyers. They believe what the salesmen tell them. Only the salesmen don’t
tell
them everything, do they?”

Dad’s hands flew upward, came down hard, slapping the leather covering of the sofa. In the doorway, Aunt Lute was suspended mid-stride. She pulled her foot back and settled it behind her, then froze again.

“How would I know?” Dad’s voice rose to meet mine. Craning his head away, he leaned on the opposite arm of the sofa, like a man trying to maintain distance from something distasteful. “It’s not my department. I don’t keep track of the particulars. I do the commercials. I helped Boone’s company get the construction contracts. That’s as far as I go with Householders. I don’t run the company. I don’t make the policy. I don’t formulate the loans or write the legal jargon.”

“You own part of the company.”

“I had stock. Stock I received in return for doing my job. I sold it back to Ross months ago to raise some cash. Householders isn’t my problem. It isn’t my responsibility.” He washed his hands in the air, the clapping disturbing the dust floating in the window light.

I stared at him, stunned. How could he sit there and claim absolution? How could he, with a face that seemed filled with conviction, defend what Householders was doing? Was he so unlike the hero everyone believed him to be? Did I not know my father at all? “You put your name on it. You put your face on it. You endorsed it. People trust it because they trust you, because they know who you are.”

He sank against the cushions, his energy suddenly spent. “I can’t be responsible for everyone, Tam. We’ve got problems of our own. It’s business. People need to look out for themselves.”

“It’s not just business. There are people living down in the homeless shelter because they lost everything in a Householders home. Entire families. Do you realize that? You and Ross Burten didn’t advertise that on your commercials. This isn’t
just business
to them. We’re talking about people’s lives, their dreams. You can’t just turn your back and say it’s not your responsibility.”

My father’s gaze tangled with mine, held it, and I felt myself pleading, hoping, holding my breath. If he wasn’t Superman, then who was he? If he wouldn’t do the right thing now, then where did we go from here?

“Tam . . .” His voice was soft, conciliatory. I felt hope creep upward inside me. “I have to think of our future. You get on the wrong side of a giant like Ross Burten, you lose. I can’t . . .”

The sound of one of the boys coughing amputated the sentence, left it bleeding onto the floor. We turned, my father, Aunt Lute, and I, in unison to find Barbie in the hallway. Landon was curled against her chest, his blond head nestled under her chin, his blue eyes blinking slowly, taking in the scene in the living room with a concern that caused something inside me to twist painfully. His lips trembled, and Barbie cupped a hand around his head, cradling him. “Paul,” she said flatly, her gaze settling on my father. “Tam’s right.”

Dropping his hands slowly to the chair arms, my father gaped at Barbie as if he’d never seen her before. “It’s not that simple.”

Barbie’s lips pursed, her eyes hardening to a cool blue. “What’s so complicated about it, Paul? While you were out there selling Householders, they were cheating people.”

“You don’t understand the position I’m in here.” The finality of the sentence seemed to say that Barbie and I were hardly capable of grasping the difficulties involved, that there was no point in his trying to explain them to us. Turning away from the conversation, he switched the channel on the television, indicating that he was tuning out. “I have to do what’s best for us.”

Barbie’s nostrils flared, and she set Landon down, whispered in his ear, and sent him to the bedroom. Padding off down the hall, he cast a worried look over his shoulder. Barbie waited until he was gone before she spoke again. “You can’t ignore me, Paul. Stop using us as an excuse for doing what you want to do.” She moved between him and the television, insisting she be heard. “How could you be involved in something like that? How can you defend it? You and I both know what it’s like to live in a place like this, to have your family slide headlong into disaster. We’re the lucky ones. We got out. But these people could be you and me. What if that football coach who plucked you off the street hadn’t bothered? What if he’d decided it was ‘too complicated’?” Her face pleaded for him to be the man she believed him to be. “Come on, Paul, nothing’s ever going to be good for us until we make this right. Don’t you see? These people down here need help.”

Ramrod straight in the chair, my father shook his head. “We’re not in a position to help!” he roared, frustrated with her, with me, probably with his own conscience. “Look around you. We’re in the same boat they are.”

We’re in the same boat. . . .
Did he really believe that?

In the bedroom, Jewel woke and started crying. Barbie flailed a hand toward the sound. “Great! Now you woke the baby. Why don’t you think about how you’re going to explain this to her in a few years? I wonder if she’ll be proud of you.” In a swirl of blond hair, she turned and strode off down the hall.

Dad raked his wallet off the table and slid forward in the chair. “Where are the car keys?” Pushing to his feet, he took a wobbly step toward the door. His gaze flicked down the hallway, as if he wanted to know whether Barbie was watching. Perhaps he was counting on her to come running in and apologize for upsetting him. “I can’t talk to her when she’s like this. I need to get out of here for a minute.”

“Good,” I said, grabbing my purse, “I’ll drive. There’s something I want you to see.” I hoped that when we got to the Broadberry Mission, my father would finally understand the real cost of a Householders mortgage.

When reading ends, I go to my new place. The door is open, and Terence is there. He has returned from his travels again. He is smiling tonight, happy. “Well, hello, Sesay,” he says. “You been to reading class across the street?”

I tell him, “We learned new line pictures. Colors and . . . acting words.”

“Action words?” he asks. “Verbs?”

I nod and open my pad, where my words and pictures stay.
Verbs
, I think. It sounds like a thing that would grow in a garden.
Grow
is a verb. A thing you do. I can see the line picture for
grow
in my mind. My mind is
growing
very fast. The words and pictures spin like dust.
Spin
is a verb, something you do. I have not seen its line picture.
Ssss
. It begins with
S
, like
store
and
stop
. I know the line pictures for those. I have always known them, but no one told me this. “I have new drawings. Perhaps you can make the line pictures for them?”

“What? Shasta didn’t do it with you?” His mouth crooks like a branch reaching for sunlight.

“She is weary tonight.” I consider telling him that I wonder if I did a wrong thing when I brought her to the mission to meet the family there, the yellow house family. I do not think Shasta is tired tonight. I think she is unwell, unhappy. But Terence is joyous. He smiles as if something is bursting inside him, so I do not tell him about the mission. I decide that perhaps I will walk down Red Bird early in the morning. I have the book about Peter Rabbit, and I have the fluffy toy rabbit, and two little muck rabbits I carved for Root and Berry. I can leave them outside the window where Root sits to read. He will look there when first he opens his eyes in his bed.

Terence presses together the corners of a frame, holds it up, and looks at it.

“You are very happy tonight,” I say. “Your travels were good?”

“Not bad.” He smiles. “Not a bad couple days at Art Fest, and then I did a gallery opening.”

“But you are
very
happy.” Something about him is different tonight. Something is new.

He laughs softly. He lays down the frame, and his eyes light.
Light
is a verb, sometimes. “You don’t miss much. My daughter called a while ago. She’s flying in tonight, late. She wants to come by and visit in the morning—see the studio, my paintings, maybe get a late breakfast before she heads over to Shasta’s place. Dell hasn’t ever called like that before—just to come visit, you know?”