The Turner House (32 page)

The casino: a different animal at 10
A.M.
than at 10
P.M.
The windowless, nighttime atmosphere of the casino floor does nothing to stave off the depression one feels when visiting the place so soon after breakfast. At 10
A.M.
no one is at the casino for fun. They come to be redeemed, to be absolved, to forget.

Lelah's inch-thick stack of bills—mostly tens and twenties—sat in the envelope in her purse, next to her father's pipe. Marlene's money was the last company she had, and like the old gambling saying went, scared money don't make money.

Ten in the morning meant more low-minimum tables but also less camaraderie. Lelah circled the floor, waiting for someone else to sit down for roulette. Playing with just herself and the dealer was too lonely; dealers wouldn't partake in confessional conversation the way a bartender might. An older man with a close-cropped salt-and-pepper natural sat down at a table, and Lelah joined him. He nodded hello to her in that tight-lipped, formal way that gamblers focused on winning do. With $950 and $10 minimums Lelah could play nearly a hundred turns. She didn't care if she made a profit; she was gambling for time. For stillness. She was fresh out of plans except for this one.

Cha-Cha's father claimed to never drink and drive. Instead Francis Turner cradled his beer between his thighs while navigating and took furtive sips at stoplights. This was a man who had never worn a seat belt in his life, even while driving an eighteen-wheeler, so Cha-Cha knew that following his example was foolhardy. Still, he stopped at a liquor store on his way to the east side for two six-packs of beer, popped one open, and drove the rest of the way like his father.

He might have made it to work at a decent time, but he had stayed in the coffee shop after Alice left. He drank two doctor-discouraged coffees and tried to reason away the abandonment and humiliation he felt. It had been years since Cha-Cha thought another woman might be interested in him, and on this, the only time he'd worked up the nerve to act on the inclination, he had made a fool of himself. Alice had ended up being trouble, just as Tina predicted. Cha-Cha didn't fault her for dumping him as a patient, considering the messes both of them had made—the breaches of trust, the ulterior motives—but somehow he thought they'd at least be able to be friends. Instead Alice used him as a repository of very personal information, a hole in the ground to yell a disconcerting secret into, and then left him. Wired on coffee, with little desire to go to work and even less desire to go home to his wife and mother, Cha-Cha decided to go home for real.

He parked on Lambert, kitty-corner to the old, abandoned primary school and across from the basketball court. Clumps of grass the size of human heads poked through the court's crumbling blacktop. Cha-Cha turned off the ignition and opened another beer.

This was Francis Turner's drinking spot. The house under which Cha-Cha had hidden was not fifty yards away. It was now an empty lot choked with weeds. No evidence or answers about what happened there remained—not even a hint of the house's foundation. The phenomenon of disappearing landmarks used to distress Cha-Cha, mostly because new buildings never replaced them, and it felt like the old ones had never existed. But over time he realized it didn't matter; memory needed no visual cue to do its work.

He hadn't called out sick, so his job would likely call home, and Tina would discover his truancy. Cha-Cha turned off his phone. He tried to remember a time within the past few weeks when he'd felt tenderness, or any emotion at all toward Tina that wasn't tinged with resentment. He failed.

He held no illusion of safety on Yarrow Street. In the months since his mother moved away things had gotten worse. He read the news every day, and while he rarely saw this exact block mentioned, the scenes of crimes were close enough for him to understand that they happened here too. He knew his car made him stand out, likely made him look like an over-the-hill undercover cop, but the more beer he drank, the safer he began to feel. The house next to his mother's was long gone, so Cha-Cha could see the side and back of the Yarrow house clearly. The windows of the boys', girls', and parents' rooms upstairs, the late-addition garage attachment, the verdant back alley. All of it worthless now.

The thing to do was go into the big room, he knew. Confront his fears. But what if nothing happened? Part of him would rather spend every night on his couch, never sleeping more than a few hours, than muster the courage to return to that room and find it held no special truth for him. If it turned out to be just four walls and a twin bed, then Alice would be right, and he an even bigger fool. He drank more beer.

It always took a long time for Cha-Cha to get drunk. He blamed his substantial weight and Turner genes. He drank the first six-pack and remembered he hadn't eaten anything yet, so he drove to a Coney Island on Gratiot. When he returned to the neighborhood with his chili dogs and fries, he parked on Yarrow, across the street from the house.

Two men riding in a silver Dodge Charger pulled up parallel to his window and looked at him. The bass from their stereo made Cha-Cha's seat vibrate. He nodded at them without smiling. They nodded back and drove away. Cha-Cha relaxed. This was the street where the first thirteen plus two later generations of Turners had been known. A face like his must have still meant something to people around here.

Hours later and Lelah wasn't destitute. Far from it, in fact. She had played at that first table for two hours, just her and the salt-and-pepper gentleman who wouldn't make small talk. She placed $10 to $20 bets initially, trying to bide her time, and her stack of chips fluctuated but never disappeared. That should have been a good thing; the plan was to spend time, after all, but stillness eluded her. The man next to her refused to smile, and the dealers rotated to the table were all business. The casino was too quiet early in the day; even the robotic pings of septuagenarian-helmed slots couldn't cut through the emptiness. By noon more people had arrived, but not enough stayers, just a bunch of bet-and-walk types who made it hard to maintain a good vibe at a table. Without the stillness, her mind ran over the things she'd done wrong, today and always. There was nowhere to put all of that self-loathing, no one place to stash the regret, but stillness, if it would just show up, could hold despair at bay. When she took a break for the lunch buffet she had $875. Only $75 lost.

After lunch Lelah stationed herself near a long, overhead-illuminated craps table, usually a logistical no-no for her, but it was the only place where the players looked jovial. Of course on the day that she didn't care to win, she won. She played only on the outside, on black and 00, and won $200. A joyless gain. She changed all of her money, the entire $1,075, for chips, mostly multicolored 50s and 20s, and marveled at how short her stack felt with higher denominations. Unsatisfying. She called the waitress over for drinks, one mai tai and then another, and sat disgusted as her pink and yellow $20 chips, the same colors as her drink, came back $50 green. A woman with a very flat chest stood next to her and whooped as Lelah's stack grew, drawing attention the way a lone wolf alerts his pack to easy prey. It was a roulette crowd—smaller, less exuberant than a craps crowd—and Lelah refused to look up at them, refused to play the role of victor. In an effort to shock and embarrass the onlookers with her recklessness she put $800 on 27, Brianne's number, and nothing anywhere else.

She won.

“Whooo!” the flat-chested woman yelled. She clapped Lelah on the back.

The pit boss came over and approved her win so that the dealer could give her the chips. Lelah's mental math failed as he slid her chips she hadn't possessed in years, $100 ones. The crowd quieted, waiting on what she'd do next, and all of their attention made Lelah nauseous. She called the waitress for a bottle of water and sat out the next round.

“If you're gonna backslide, this is the way to do it, huh?”

The voice from behind startled Lelah. She spun on her stool, breaking one of her rules by putting her back to her chips. A thirty-something white guy stood behind her. Blond hair parted to the side, out of place in an expensive-looking suit and tie.

“I don't know you,” Lelah said, but her voice had the lilt of a question.

He squinted at her. Beyond the playfulness that he presented for show, something in his face was so unhappy, so desperate for commiseration, that Lelah rotated half of her body back to the table, a subconscious movement to ward off misery more frightening than her own.

“You probably don't know my real name,” he said. “But you've heard me tell the same sad stories enough times to know me. I went by Zach?”

It was true. Lelah remembered a Zach and the story he told, about his obsession with watching the roulette ball spin, and his ex-wife not letting him see his baby daughter. Lelah nodded at him. She had nothing to say.

“I don't remember
you
ever talking much,” he went on. “But now I see why. You're a fucking pro, huh? I wouldn't want to quit either.”

He smiled at Lelah with only the corners of his mouth. His misery assaulted her senses like bad breath.

“I'm leaving,” she said. She traded her smaller chips for larger ones, swept everything into her purse. Zach's eyes followed her chips as they moved, then he looked over Lelah's shoulder toward the wheel, where the ball was in motion. It was difficult for Lelah to maneuver because Zach stood so close behind her chair. He would have to take a step back for her to walk away from the table.

“Okay, good seeing you,” he said. “Congrats on your win.”

He extended his hand, presumably for a shake, but his palm was parallel to the ceiling. Like a priest seeking alms or a basketball coach soliciting a low-five. He wants a goodwill chip, Lelah realized. Well, he'd have to get it from someone else.

She stepped past Zach's hand and away from the table. She cashed in her winnings, picked up her car from the valet, and left Motor City behind.

When she turned onto Yarrow her car and the world outside of it, save for the inverted pyramid lit by her headlights, plunged into darkness. Both of the remaining streetlights on the block had either burned out or been smashed out. Lelah knew this was always a possibility. Dozens of blocks throughout Detroit existed in dangerous darkness as the city dragged its feet replacing the lights. She drove slowly down the block, hoping neither pedestrian nor pet jumped out into the street.

It would have been idiotic to risk fumbling with the back gate in the pitch dark, so Lelah parked out front and sprinted up to the door.

Cha-Cha shocked awake from a push on his back. He sat against the big room's door, and through the crack underneath it came a faint light. The knob turned. His heart pounded and his body froze. He was still drunk, in no condition to reunite with a more aggressive incarnation of his haint. He heard footsteps retreating, and a second later a strong shove from behind knocked him forward.

Lelah switched on the big-room light and found her eldest brother in a fetal position to the right of the doorway. Two empty beer cans lay lip to lip in the middle of the floor.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“Who is it? Who's there?”

Cha-Cha's lower back burned from the blow. The light was too bright for him to keep his eyes open. The footsteps moved closer to him, and he wondered if he might die before they reached him, have a cardiac event and perish at the hands of his own idiot fear.

“Cha-Cha? It's Lelah. Are you hurt?”

He groaned. His brain said sit up straight, but his body refused. Lelah dropped her purse and put a hand on his forehead. He swatted her away, rolled onto his back.

“Ughhh. I don't have a damn fever,” he said. “You scared me half to death. Did Tina send you here?”

Lelah hooked Cha-Cha under the armpits and helped him sit upright on the bed. He reeked of beer. Sweat ringed his undershirt collar. She had never seen him like this before, and her fear for him made her forget that she'd just been discovered.

“You gonna throw up? You need me to help you to the toilet?”

“It's just
beer
,” he said. “Of course I'm not gonna throw up.”

Cha-Cha was able to keep his eyes open now. Lelah looked as bad as he felt. Her eyelids were puffy and the bottom rims red. She hunched in a way that suggested more than exhaustion; she looked spent, and skinnier.

“Let me get you some water,” she said. “I'll try to find a cup downstairs.”

Alone in the room, Cha-Cha took in the duffel bags pushed beneath the bed, the lone leather jacket hanging from a corner of the dresser. He hardly remembered coming inside the house, only stuffing the two remaining beers into his pants pockets and double-checking that his car door was locked. He looked around and realized that he had left his cane in the car. His knees hurt and the front of his pants were dirty. With no cane, he suspected he had crawled up the stairs to the second floor. He prayed he hadn't crawled up to the porch, too.

Lelah returned with lukewarm water in a paper cup. Cha-Cha poured some onto his hand and wiped his face with it. He gulped the rest down.

Cha-Cha knew the duffel bags shouldn't be here, and that they meant something, but he asked Lelah again if Tina had sent her.

“No,” she said.

“Well, what are you doing here? Looks like . . . looks like somebody's been
living
here.” He shrugged in an effort to appear less judgmental.

She started crying and nodding.

“For almost a month,” she said. “I got evicted and suspended from my job cause I gambled everything away.”

She sobbed like she used to when she was a little girl. So hard that her face was red and her body lurched. When Tina had babysat her, Lelah often cried like this, whether telling him how Viola wouldn't let her tag along to the flea market, or how Berniece and Sandra had pushed her out of the girls' room and slammed the door. When Cha-Cha drove her home from Missouri and she told him about the way Vernon had punched her, snatched her up by the collar and slammed her against a wall, she had cried like this. Even though he was maybe beginning to feel a little angry, Cha-Cha obeyed his impulse to comfort her by putting a hand on her back.