Angela Flournoy: The Turner House

“They wanna make sure you’re not crazy,” Tina said. She knelt on her knees in their master bathroom, running water for his bath. Cha-Cha sat on an ottoman near the door, one of Tina’s old bathrobes pulled tight around his frame. It was purple and his favorite since the accident.

“Ain’t nothing crazy about seeing a haint.”

Tina turned to look at him.

“Says you and your family. Sooner or later you’re gonna realize that just cause a Turner thinks a thing is normal doesn’t mean it is. Not at all.”

Lelah stuffed fistfuls of her underwear into trash bags. She was too busy thinking about what to pack next to be embarrassed in front of the stranger who watched her. The city bailiff seemed disinterested anyway; he leaned against her front-room wall and fiddled with his phone. The other bailiff waited outside. Lelah saw him through the front window. He did calf raises on the curb near the dumpster, his pudgy hands on his hips.

She’d always imagined the men who handled evictions to be more menacing—big muscles, loud mouths. These two were young and large, but soft-looking, baby-faced. Like giant chocolate cherubs. It had never come to this before, the actual day of eviction. Lelah had received a few thirty-day notices but always cleared out before the Demand for Possession—a seven-day notice—slid under her door. Seven days might as well have been none this time around; before Lelah knew it the bailiffs were knocking, telling her she had two hours to grab what she could, that they would toss whatever she left behind into that dumpster outside.

Humidity made her wrecked living room oppressive. It was the end of April, but it felt like June. The bailiff leaning on the wall carried a gray washcloth in his back pocket, and he swiped it across his brow from time to time. He pretended not to be watching her. Lelah knew better. He had a plan ready for if she snapped and started throwing dishes at him, if she called for backup—a brother or cousin to come beat him up—or if she tried to barricade herself in the bathroom. He probably had a gun. Mostly, all Lelah did was put her hands on the things she owned, think about them for a second, and decide against carrying them to her Pontiac. Furniture was too bulky, food from the fridge would expire in her car, and the smaller things—a blender, boxes full of costume jewelry, a toaster—felt ridiculous to take along. She didn’t know where she’d end up. Where do the homeless make toast? Outside of essential clothing, hygiene items, and a few pots and pans, she focused on the sorts of things people on TV cried about after a fire: a few photos of herself throughout her forty-one years, her birth certificate and social security card, photos of her twenty-one-year-old daughter and her eighteen-month-old grandson, Francis Turner’s obituary.

The second bailiff stopped his calf raises when Lelah walked outside with another box. She imagined that the neighbors peeked at her through their blinds, but she refused to turn around and confirm it.

“I’d give you a hand, but we can’t touch none of your stuff,” he said.

Lelah used her shoulder to cram the box into the backseat.

“I know you’re thinkin, like, if we’re not allowed to touch your stuff, then how are we gonna dump everything at the end.”

Lelah did not acknowledge that she’d heard him. She took a step back from her car, checked to see if anything valuable was visible from the windows.

“We hire some guys to come and do that part,” he said. “Me personally, I’m not touchin none of your stuff. I don’t do cleanup.”

The bailiff smiled. A few of his teeth were brown. Maybe he was older than he looked.

Back inside her apartment, the other bailiff, the sweaty one, sat legs splayed on her sofa. At the sight of Lelah he stood up, leaned against the wall once more. Her daughter, Brianne, called her cell phone, and Lelah ignored it for the third time that morning. She surveyed the room. What to take, what to take, what to take? It all looked like junk now. Cheap things she’d bought just to keep her apartment from looking barren. She snatched her leather jacket from its hook on the hallway closet door. That’s it, she thought. The only way to hold on to some dignity, to maintain the tiniest sense of control, was to leave now, with an hour and a half to spare.

Later that night, at her mother’s vacant house, she claimed the big room for sleeping.

As the youngest Turner child, Lelah had no siblings to escape from growing up, no reason to seek the cramped comfort of the big room’s walls. Still, when her older brother Troy went off to the navy, she’d expected to take his place across the hall, spend her final years at home on that narrow twin bed for tradition’s sake. Before she could gather her things to move, her mother had claimed the big room for sewing. Viola Turner claimed so little for herself, who could deny her this luxury? Not Lelah, the child who had the privilege of seeing her parents at a slower cadence. Fewer mouths to feed at the table, long-awaited fair wages keeping the bill collectors at bay. Francis and Viola were older, a bit slower getting around, but she was the Better Times Baby, something she’d known since plaits and barrettes. She’d stayed in the too-large, run-down, Pepto-pink girls’ room until she too got grown, and found a way to get gone.

That night, nearly a year after Cha-Cha’s accident, and six months since Viola went to live with him in the suburbs, Lelah claimed that long-denied right of passage. One small triumph on a day marked by defeat. She climbed the narrow stairs and creaked down the hall, using her cell phone as a flashlight, and imagined her younger self, sleepy-eyed and ashy-kneed, peeking out of the girls’ room door to watch an older sibling take quarter in the big room.

The porch light had been on when she drove up, which meant Cha-Cha still paid the electricity bill. A relief. A house with electricity couldn’t be classified as abandoned, and an individual with a key to that house didn’t fit the definition of a trespasser. She considered conducting a thorough search. It was warm enough for someone—a niece or a nephew, or, God forbid, a drug-addled interloper—to set up camp in the basement. But she was too tired. After leaving her old apartment, Lelah had driven around the city, no idea of where to go. She refused to beg Cha-Cha or one of her nearby sisters for a place to stay this time. She’d wracked her brain for an alternative solution, some cheap, temporary lodging or genius scheme to hustle up money for a new place. Nothing surfaced, so she’d waited until the sun set and driven to the east side.

The big room had its disadvantages. It was right next to the bathroom, and water knocked on the wall as it traveled through old pipes to the toilet, which continuously ran. The lone window faced the street, which in this part of the city—ever changed, further decayed between each visit—put Lelah at risk of being struck by a stray bullet, or kept awake by intermittent car horns, hoots, hollers, and alley cat screeches. But on this, the first real, spring-feeling night of the season, she thought people had better things to do than shoot up the old Turner house, and having lived here in the eighties when the final, fatal arrival of crack cowed the neighborhood, Lelah felt Yarrow Street had already given her its worst. She hunkered down on the old twin bed, shoes on and jacket draped over her torso, and fell asleep.

She overslept. She’d planned to leave at five, before the block’s working residents got up and about their business. She didn’t bother to change clothes. She hurried down the empty house’s narrow stairs.