The Turner House (29 page)

“Gigi, I want the toy,” Bobbie said. He leaned in his highchair, gripped the paper bag and turned it over. Ketchup and jelly packets tumbled to the table.

“Aw, there's no toys at breakfast, baby. Only in the Happy Meals.”

Brianne watched her mother scoop up the packets and rub Bobbie's head with them. He giggled.

“You heard about the party at Uncle Cha-Cha's, right?” Brianne asked. “Auntie Tina said she was having trouble reaching you.”

Her mother spread jelly on half an English muffin and placed the muffin back on its corresponding sausage.

“Yeah I talked to her. She wants us to bring something. I figured I could make macaroni and cheese over here while I watch Bobbie.”

She liked to do this, Brianne knew, find excuses to do things here that she could just as easily have done at home.

“Stop playing with your food, Bobbie,” Brianne said. Her son ignored her and continued to roll a fistful of hash browns into a greasy ball between his palms.

“When you were his age you used to put oatmeal on your face,” her mother said. “Mama caught you doing it and said ‘What's that girl doing, somebody told her she got eczema?'”

Brianne's laugh was pained and perfunctory.

“So what's going on with you?” she asked. “How was your weekend?”

“Good,” her mother said. “I stopped by your auntie Marlene's last night, hung out with her for a while. Did you stay in town or go to Chicago?”

Brianne finished chewing her sausage biscuit, gulped down her juice.

“I stayed here. We're going back on Thursday, though.”

“And where do you stay when you go?”

“Mommy.”

“Mommy what? I'm just curious. You're not too old to have someone know where you are.
Nobody's
ever too old for that. It's common sense.”

Brianne rarely knew where her mother was these days, and she doubted anyone else did either.

“Bobbie stays with Rob, and I've been staying with my friend Tawny.”

“Who's Tawny? I don't remember any Tawny.”

“You'd remember if you saw her,” Brianne said. “She went to Eastern Michigan with me. She's tall, light-skinned. Freckles.”

Bobbie, bored with his hash-brown ball, grabbed the sides of his highchair and rocked back and forth. He looked like a sailor stuck in a crow's nest during a storm. Lelah picked him up and patted his butt.

“He needs to be changed,” Brianne said. “I gave him his bath last night, but he's still wearing the diaper he slept in.”

“I'll do all that after you leave,” her mother said. “I don't know why you go through the trouble every morning like I'm some hired babysitter.”

Brianne did not explain that the “trouble” was part of their morning ritual, a way for her to feel essential to him before so many hours apart. She sat down across from her mother, checked the time on the microwave display. Tawny often talked about her mother in a way that made them seem like girlfriends. Brianne and Lelah were closer in age, but a formality existed between them that Brianne's growth into adulthood hadn't shaken. Lelah rarely got Brianne's jokes, was awkward discussing romance and refused to stop worrying.

“Speaking of babysitters,” Lelah said. “I wanna give you this money back.”

She reached into her bra and pulled out two $20 bills. Brianne eyed the money on the table, now certain that her mother wanted something larger. She imagined her mother putting the money in her bra in the car, practicing the casual way she'd pull it out. Embarrassing.

“If I wanted money from you for this, I'd have asked for it,” her mother said.

“Well I thought you could use it,” Brianne said. “Rob's got a job lined up consulting for KPMG for when he graduates in May. They gave him a signing bonus, so he gave me extra money this month.”

The name Rob and the words “signing bonus” sounded strange in one sentence, Brianne thought. The goofy boy who used to play too many video games in college had finally grown up.

“Consulting? I thought he was getting a public health master's.”

“He is. They do that kind too.”

“Oh,” her mother said. “Anyway, I guess I should go ahead and ask what I need to ask you before you run off to the shower.”

Brianne raised her eyebrows, tried to look intrigued instead of terrified.

“I've been thinking, I know you want to go back to school for your BA and RN, and you know how I've been working this night shift. Between that and being with Bobbie during the day, I'm hardly ever at my place. What if I moved in here? That way we could save on rent, and you could go back to school.”

Brianne had forgotten her mother claimed to be working graveyard. It didn't seem feasible that she had been working all night and then babysitting for nearly twelve hours a day.

“Who said I was going back to school anytime soon?”

Lelah scrunched her eyebrows in confusion.

“You did, didn't you? I thought the plan was always go back for the RN as soon as you could. Brianne, you know you can't be an LPN forever.”

One of the many benefits of the girlfriend quality of Tawny and her mother's relationship was that they seemed to speak directly to each other, even when angry.

“It hasn't been
forever
, Mommy. It's not even two years yet.”

She wanted to scream at Lelah, remind her that she never went to college, remind her how hard it was with no Yarrow and Granddaddy Francis or Grandma Viola to prop her up. All she had was a mother who never kept more than a few dollars to her name, who held a rigid ball of secrets close to her breast. Brianne stood up and said she had to pee.

Leaning against her bathroom sink, she saw the situation for what it was. Lelah had likely lost her job, finally frittered away her money to the point of eviction. Lelah needed saving, and who but her daughter could provide the sort of lifeline that could keep her pride intact? Brianne turned and looked at herself in the mirror. More than messy hair and puffy eyes, she saw her mother's high forehead, and skin the color of a father she hardly remembered. From pictures of Vernon in his trim army uniform she knew her slim hips were his, her small, diamond-shaped ears, too. It wasn't enough to know about any relative, let alone one's father.

Lelah hadn't planned on going about it this way; she'd planned to be honest but turned coward as soon as she walked through the door. Better to make Brianne feel as if Lelah was doing her a favor than to admit to being desperate. She wouldn't blame Brianne for rejecting her now. Only please God let her say yes.

When Brianne returned, Lelah could tell the answer would be no, that her daughter would not have her if she could at all help it. She really had been blessed with a child as mild-mannered as Brianne. She seldom had to even make threats of punishment to get her to do right because guilt was enough to keep Brianne in line. She knew if she could formulate the right words now, she could turn Brianne's no into a yes.

Lelah opened her mouth to speak, but Brianne blurted out, “I'm moving to Chicago with Rob.”

Lelah said nothing.

“I'm putting my notice in today, but I don't see the point of paying rent again on the first, and I know my landlord will let me leave. I might not give a full two weeks.”

Brianne paused to look at Lelah, expecting admonishment for short notice to everyone.

“Or, if you want,
you
can pay next month's rent and then stay here for a month. I don't even think I'm gonna take the furniture cause Rob's place isn't big enough, plus I'm not trying to pay for a truck. You can sell it all or keep it.”

Bobbie had fallen asleep in Lelah's arms. He pulled on her shirt collar with one hand and palmed her left breast with the other, a lingering habit from his breast-feeding days.

“What makes you think I don't have a place?” Lelah asked. She whispered fiercely, so as to not wake her grandson. “Who's gonna watch Bobbie, huh?”

Brianne took a big breath. She was aware that her mother was breakable, that this right now might break her, and because of this Brianne felt both terrified and strangely energized. Years later she would look back on this early morning as the moment her adult life truly began.

“
Me
, Mommy, at least until I can find nursing work out there. Then we'll figure it out.”

“You and
Rob
,” Lelah said. “You and Rob will figure it out. Right. You can't just run away from your life, Brianne. You got a good job here, free childcare, and you know how this economy is. Jobs aren't just falling from the sky.”

“I don't have a
life
here. I just have a job. I just work a lot, and none of my friends from college are around, and I don't have anything to talk about with the ones from high school.”

Brianne swiped at a tear with the back of her hand.

“So
Rob's
gonna take care of you? After all this time of him not doing enough. You're just gonna throw away the work you've done by yourself and go lay up under some
man?
You know I did that with your father, and it didn't work. I was trapped cause I wasn't makin my own money. No, me and
you
were trapped down there, Brianne. He beat the
shit
out of me and if it wasn't for Cha-Cha comin to pick us up maybe he would've killed us, or I'd have killed him. That's what layin up under a man gets you.”

Lelah realized she was yelling because Bobbie startled awake. He looked over to his mother, saw the tears in her eyes, and began crying too. Brianne reached across the table and took him out of Lelah's arms. Lelah had never told Brianne about Vernon hitting her, about the long hours of night when she sat in a corner of the living room with Brianne on her lap, with her right eye swollen shut and her lip split open, waiting for Cha-Cha to arrive. Terrified that Vernon would come back from wherever he'd gone. She always just told her that things had not worked out, and she'd forbidden her siblings from contradicting her. She had planned to tell Brianne the truth just as soon as she could tell the story and not feel the old terror and rage. That day had never come.

“You should go,” Brianne said. It was nearly inaudible, but she got it out.

“Leave? What about Bobbie?”

“I'll take care of him,” Brianne said.

Lelah looked around the room for something, anything that might help her salvage her case.

“Come on now, Brianne. I didn't mean to shout, but there's no reason I can't watch him today. You gotta go to work. I'm not saying Rob is like Vernon, I just—”

She watched her daughter move to the front door and hold it open for her. On the TV Donnie rode a miniature fire truck around a playground. A euphoric smile spread across his face.

“I need you to go,” Brianne said. “Right now.”

So Lelah went.

Cha-Cha dreamed of Alice. In that fancy bed, next to his wife and following their failed attempt at sex, he dreamed of her, and for the first time in a week he looked poised to sleep through the night. It wasn't quite a sex dream, but it produced a similar effect when he awoke. He dreamed of stop-motion glimpses of her, first behind her desk as usual, her hair gathered up in that halo style from his last visit, her arms bare. Then she was sitting on the mauve fainting couch, still clothed, a coquettish smile on her lips. Another moment saw her reclining on the couch in a lavender negligee, one of those lacy, strappy getups that Cha-Cha found enticing in catalogs but cumbersome in real life. Just as he registered his own hands extending toward the brown expanse of Alice's hips, he snapped awake. The windowsill was aglow.

He remembered Lonnie's advice, to try to talk to it.

“Hello?” he tried. “What do you want?” He felt ridiculous. He took himself too seriously to talk to a blob on the wall.

He nudged Tina. She didn't move. He shoved her, perhaps too hard, but she only mumbled, “Uh-huh, right there on the counter,” and rolled over. Cha-Cha let her sleep. He lay there on his back, his eyes trained on his haint, and pondered his dream, his post-dream erection, and what it all might mean. It frustrated him that even in his dreams he could only limn the line of infidelity, could only imagine a PG-13 encounter with Alice. He always let himself down in this way. His entire life might have been different if he'd figured out a way to be braver, or at least brasher. He might have made more money, garnered more respect. In the late eighties a couple of black truckers Cha-Cha knew from the union had approached him about starting their own company, buying a few trucks and contracting out service. It had seemed very risky to Cha-Cha back then, but now he couldn't recall why. His boys were both nearly grown, and the small-business loan required was modest. It must have been that Francis was already sick, and Cha-Cha had felt his impending role as patriarch required stability. Two decades later, before gas prices went crazy and work disappeared, those black truckers sold their business for an admirable profit, and Cha-Cha was still a Chrysler peon. The same quality that read as dependable and even-keeled in his youth had crusted over and become stubborn and pitiable. Tina pitied him, and Alice likely did, too. Well, he thought, there might be time yet to change one of their opinions. He rolled over so that he no longer faced the haint. Instead he lay face-to-face with his wife. She slept with both hands tucked under her cheek, as if in prayer.

Around six-thirty Tina woke up, dressed, and looked in on Viola. Cha-Cha remained in bed, feigning sleep. At seven-fifteen he heard the doorbell ring and the booming voice of Andrew, the young Lebanese man who worked for the medical transport service Cha-Cha hired to take Viola to her physical therapy and hospital visits. He heard Andrew explaining things to Viola—“I'm going to count to THREE, then lift you UP”—in the loud voice young people who feared the elderly used. A single squeak from Viola's wheelchair, a front-door slam, and they were gone.