Angela Flournoy - The Turner House

Now the prepaid phone tinkled and bleeped on the dashboard. David accepted the call and put it back on speaker. Wheezing, followed by nothing for several seconds. Throat clearing with considerable pushback from what sounded like bronchitis-grade phlegm.

“Dave-O, that you?”

David sat up straighter in his chair, as if the man on the other end of the phone could see him.

“Hey, uh, what’s up, man? Yeah, it’s me. Dave-O,” he said.

Troy would have made a joke about this nickname, but David had warned him not to speak unless prompted.

“Long, long, long-ass time, huh?” The man chuckled, then caught something in the back of his throat. Hacking ensued.

“Yeah, man,” David said. “Working for myself these days. You know how it is.”

“I do, I definitely do. No days off, and if you take one, ain’t nobody payin you for it!”

More laughing, more hacking.

“So what I need help with is a little thing,” David said. “A minor paperwork thing.”

A muffled thud on the other end of the line, as if the phone had dropped on carpet.

“Hold on right quick, Dave-O,” the man said.

He yelled to someone near him, “I said lemon pepper, nigga! You know the buffalo ones is nasty. Hurry up and go back fore they close.”

“Alright, I’m back,” he said. “So a little thing, huh?”

“Yeah, my boy’s worried about his mom’s house. She’s not doing too well health-wise, and she’s behind on her mortgage. He wants to go ahead and get a short sale done in his girlfriend’s name before anything happens.”

An impressive, selective truth, Troy observed.

“Smart man,” the voice said. He made a glugging noise and gasped for air. “Thing is, you know with this housing crisis blowing up, banks are looking twice at everybody’s papers.”

“Which is why we’re seeking your expertise,” David said.

“It ain’t free, though. It sure ain’t free.”

Troy blew out air through his nose and slumped down in his seat.

“Of course,” David said. “Don’t worry about that. We’ll take care of you. Right now we just need to know what paperwork he has to get in order.”

The man outlined the extensive dossier required to work his fraudulent magic. Viola’s social security card, Jillian’s employment history, and so on. Troy knew all of Viola’s important paperwork stayed in a plastic freezer bag in her top dresser drawer at Cha-Cha’s in case of an emergency. He could get those easily. The voice said Cha-Cha’s signature was required if he was currently on the deed. Well, that signature would have to be forged. Luckily Cha-Cha had the signature of a teenage girl, all loops and legibility. He’d written Troy enough checks over the years for Troy to imitate it.

“I’ma need all those plus the mother’s signature and thumbprint for my notary guy to make it all official,” the man concluded.

“Thumbprint!” Troy yelled. “What for?”

Silence on the other end.

“Dave-O? Everything good over there?”

David sighed.

“Yeah, it’s fine,” he said. He put his hand up to silence Troy, who shook his head violently. “We’ll get it together, then I’ll hit you back. Thanks for this, man. ’Preciate it. Eat some carne asada fries for me out there. I miss them things.”

David hung up without waiting for a response. He switched on the overhead light.

“If you want to do this, you’re gonna have to get her thumbprint.”

“Apparently,” Troy said. But how? He couldn’t imagine doing it himself. Picking up his mother’s gnarled hand, dropping her finger onto a pad of ink, pressing it on paper, and baby-wiping away the evidence. Not even if she was in one of her pain-pill hazes.

“That’s gonna be a problem?” David asked. He drummed his fingers on his knees, and his nails looked especially shiny. Troy wondered if he buffed them. Could he remain friends with a man who buffed his nails?

“I mean, I can figure out a way to do it,” Troy said.

“I know it’s weird. I’d have to think about it before I did something like that to my own mom.”

“You already own her house though, and damn near half of the east side.”

“Shut up, man. I don’t own anything close to that.”

Troy was again reminded of David’s success, of how different their lives had turned out. Their first tour was on the USS Carl Vinson , a ship that would later gain fame for delivering Osama Bin Laden’s body to the bottom of the Arabian Sea, but was just a run-of-the-mill super-carrier in 1990. They’d gone to different high schools and were not as close as they’d been as kids, so each man sailed for three months without knowing the other was on board. One day Troy was eating on the mess deck, trying to remember the last time he’d seen the sky, when he heard someone with an accent like the long-lost twin of his own telling a story about a house full of sisters he once knew.

“I’m tellin you, you could get blue balls just walkin to the corner store. There was six of them, and the oldest one was like forty, but she was still bad. I’m talkin Pam Grier bad, you know, just getting older and finer? They all had these thick thighs and small waists.”

The surrounding men had whistled in admiration. Troy stood up from his table and located the speaker. He recognized David’s face—skin like ink, high-contrast white teeth, and a Roman nose—but out of context and so far away from the east side, he couldn’t recall his name.

“You ever get with any of them?” someone asked.

“Nah, not really, but I’ma try again when I get back. Even if they put on some weight, none of them had the type of bodies to get sloppy, you know? The youngest one was around my age, and I fingered her once in high school, but then she got married and moved away.”

Troy knew from the beginning of the talk that his six sisters could fit the seaman’s description—he wasn’t blind, after all—but the last bit about Lelah doused him in a proprietary rage he’d never experienced before. It wasn’t a fight as much as a quick pummeling of David’s face, but both men were assigned thirty days of on-boat restriction and thirty days of labor. The latter half of their 30/30s, when Troy and David spent four hours a day suspended from cables to paint the starboard side of the ship, bonded the two sailors, their differences overshadowed by a shared longing for home.

David looked at the time on his phone.

“I bet Jillian is waiting for you. Go head and drop me off.”

Troy had planned to buy him a few rounds of drinks for setting the call up, but it felt like David was in a rush to get away. He dropped him off and headed home.

Hamtramck, a small city surrounded by the larger city of Detroit, had experienced several lives over the past century—German farming community, Polish immigrant enclave, even one of the most rock ’n’ roll cities in America, according to one magazine. None of these lives had ever included enough black people for Troy’s liking. He sometimes liked to sit in his patrol car on the street in front of his rented duplex to remind his Eastern European, Chaldean, and plain old white neighbors that he (A) was gainfully employed, and (B) had the law on his side. Tonight he parked his SUV, walked up to his door, stopped with his key in the lock, and sniffed the air. He could smell Jillian’s dinner from outside, something with Worcestershire sauce. Lamb chops. He heard her singing along to one of her quiet storm mixes. It was a female vocalist with a voice too deep for Jillian to mimic. Anita Baker. He rolled his shoulders back and stepped inside.

His ex-wife, Cara, had been all curves and softness. Big ass, fleshy thighs. Jillian was the first woman Troy had dated who was linear and firm. Nearly as tall as Troy at five feet ten. Like a model, is what he’d thought back at Cobo Center when they met. He watched her shoulder blades work up and down as she grated parmesan cheese onto a salad in the kitchen. Quitting the flight attendant job had stripped her of some glamour—she rarely wore makeup outside of lip gloss now, and kept her hair in ponytails more often than not. But the hours on her feet sewing in weaves, washing and flat-ironing hair hadn’t affected her posture. She was statuesque. She had the sort of even complexion—medium brown with orange undertones—that, coupled with her athletic frame, suggested continuity, an unwillingness to mottle or sag.