Someone bangs on her door. When she answers, a lanky white girl with a nose ring—one of her renters—tries to step right into her house. But a firm hand to the shoulder stops the girl from entering. The girl’s cheeks are flushed, her tattooed shoulder sunburned.
“Your door is on the other side,” Gailya says. Music plays just like every morning. Her rude neighbor in the house behind hers is playing Frankie Beverly and Maze on his trumpet. The notes echo off the fronts of the houses across the street.
“We were wondering if you could clean our place,” the girl says. “Like maybe change the sheets and the throw rug in the den. We’ve had a day.”
“This ain’t a hotel, and I ain’t the maid. You paid for a place to lay your heads. You didn’t pay for me.” Gailya pushes past the girl, locks the iron security door, and descends the steps to her hatchback.
“But we could,” the girl yells after Gailya.
“If you funk up my house, I’m keeping your deposit.”
Gailya picks up two fares on the way to work but rejects a third when it appears on her phone. Her main gig for the night starts in ten minutes. She can’t risk driving way out to Lakeview even if it would help her meet her daily savings goal, money she needs to pile up to keep her house off the city’s tax auction block. Three houses in her neighborhood were sold out from under their owners just last month. She’s making okay money but is many thousands of dollars short. No matter. She can’t miss the gig. As it is, she barely had time to get into her waiter’s shirt, waiter’s slacks, and waiter’s clip-on bow tie. An outfit that reminds her of the tap-dance lessons her mama brought her to when she was a child. The recital was in an upscale mall downtown beneath the wreaths and garlands of the holiday season. During her class’s set, a couple of shoppers watched Gailya on the raised platform. At one point, one of the brown-haired women pointed at her as if to say, Yes, that’s the one I want.
She slips into the kitchen at the back of the Garden District mansion just in time to hear Jake’s speech, and just in time to see Coleen smirk at her as if to say, Perfect timing, hot stuff.
“That’s the job,” Jake says. The grapevine says he’s an ex-con for kiting checks and other two-faced crimes. He can’t even return to where he came from in Oklahoma because of an arrest warrant. But he’s related to the owner of the catering company. Gailya never met the owner despite having worked for the company off and on for over five years, in addition to driving other people around, watching other people’s chirren, and staring at other people from in front of the stage at concerts. That last style of gig always makes her chuckle. Security guard. As if she could stop even one of the onlookers with their expensive cellphones and cheap sunglasses should they get it in their heads to rush the stage, climb it, and take over.
“I want a good flow.” Jake gestures at the marble counter next to the sink. “Irregardless of how packed it gets in there. Alternate hot apps and cold apps.” He uses the word irregardless too much. “After the first forty-five—irregardless of how much savory stock we have left—we’ll break out the mini tortes and pies. I tried them. They’re tasty. Irregardless, don’t you eat any.” Jake looks directly at Gailya. A couple of the others laugh as the group disbands.
Coleen pinches Gailya’s side. “Hey there, baby girl.” She clucks her tongue. “What’s your wedgie?” Gailya doesn’t like when Coleen calls her baby girl. Partly because Coleen is as tall and skinny as one of the Canal Street palm trees the city strings with lights each fall. The height difference sometimes makes Gailya feel like a child in a way that makes her feel less than. Gailya is a grown-ass woman. A mother of a grown-ass daughter. A grown-ass homeowner. Still, she lets Coleen calls her baby girl. It’s annoying but it makes her smile, which are the two best reasons to know anyone at all. They used to go together but Coleen is a better friend than lover. She likes to own things too much.
Coleen chars broccoli with a torch. She did carpentry work before a doctor told her to get out of the sun. But she’s good with food, too. Building houses and building food are in the same family.
“Watch out for Jake tonight.” Coleen sprinkles sea salt. “He got dumped.”
“I ain’t studying about that fool,” Gailya says. “Let’s get on with these broccoli things.”
“Tell me your secret. You got another note from your admirer?” Both women place a broccoli thing in their mouth. Coleen chews and talks with her mouth open. “You’re just mad because this secret man is more into your house than he’s into you.”
Gailya is annoyed by that kind of talk since Coleen ain’t got to worry about her accommodations. Her house is paid in full. And for another thing, she’s white. Like the people moving in and buying up everything in Treme. The black and white issue isn’t just a black and white issue. It’s a money and power issue, too, but it’s no accident that people with money and power tend to look like Coleen. It comes down to who is willing to take without asking. Coleen grew up and lives just outside the city in St. Bernard Parish, where they used to burn down schools that let in Black folk. Those schools burned because the Black folk couldn’t stop them. And Gailya and her neighbors losing their homes because they can’t stop them. Stealing education and stealing housing are also in the same family.
The catering event might be a fundraiser for a hospital, literacy program, or arts organization. Gailya doesn’t half concern herself with the causes because she’s too busy thinking of her own causes, all the issues she has that twist her stomach into knots. She looks at the patrons and thinks, You paid a grip to eat burnt broccoli. Give me your money. I’ll get you some real food.
Twenty minutes into the night, Gailya trips on an extension cord by the upright piano. She falls on one knee, and her food tray tumbles. No one notices her in the corner where it happens. Or they all pretend not to notice her. She only loses a single morsel in the fall, a mushroom. Sure that everyone is still pretending not to see her, she wipes the mushroom on her pants leg and tosses it into her mouth.
All evening, Gailya feels like her phone is ringing. She doesn’t know if it’s actually ringing because the device is in the utility room where the workers are made to place their personal belongings, but her daughter, Lea, always calls around this time. Midway through her shift she gets her phone, which had been ringing. Lea lives in Tokyo, where she teaches English to the chirren of wealthy businessmen and occasionally dresses up like what seems to Gailya to be a robot crawfish. What did she call it? Kobe? Copay? Coldplay? It’s bedtime on Gailya’s side of the planet, but the opposite for her daughter. Lea is always waking up into a better world.
“You should just sell it, Mama,” Lea says on the line. “Go to Atlanta. You never liked our house anyway. Always calling the plumber for those tired pipes. Too many second line parades making noise, as much as you hate noise, and you can’t afford those taxes on what you make anyway, now can you?” She’s right. It had been a struggle enough to cover the mortgage before a website declared her neighborhood the hottest neighborhood in the country thanks to the white folk who were buying in and opening coffee shops with silver chairs. Her property is worth more than ever these days. All she has to do is sell out. And if she can’t pay up, she’ll lose it anyway. But it had been her mother’s house and her grandmother’s before. Black woman owned and Black woman operated for three generations. Her mama had almost paid off the mortgage by the time Gailya inherited the house. Shame on her for getting a second mortgage for repairs after the storm ripped the roof off and let in the rainwaters. Ruined everything that wasn’t made of porcelain or stainless steel, which meant she and Lea had a sink and toilet, but no clothes, photos, or floor to stand on. It was John Jackets who got her house straight when he was younger and stronger. If he wouldn’t have fixed her house, he would have been younger and stronger when he went to fix his own, and he might not have slipped like he did.
The city wanted its money in a couple week
s. If she was in a movie, her neighbors would hold a fundraiser for her at the last second. Someone would knock on her door. The parish sheriff would be standing there with a gang of deputies, guns on their hips, court papers in their hands. But voices would yell from down the block. They would be walking down the sidewalk toward her porch: Retired Principal Holmes, Good-Time Martin, Mr. Dexter, who used to run the corner store, and more would be marching toward her with an oversized check to match their oversized smiles. We got you, they’d say.
But most of her old neighbors are gone. They couldn’t afford to rebuild like she had, so now they called other places home. Places like Houston, Atlanta, or Providence Memorial cemetery out in Jefferson Parish. Her new neighbors love her house, not her. She heard somewhere that every time a white family replaces a Black family, the block’s home values jump up about 5 percent. Gailya wonders if there’s a place in the world where she can be a duck instead of a goose.
“Why you always think Atlanta the answer to everything?” she says into her phone. She pops a mini cherry tart into her mouth. It’s warm and sweet on her tongue.
“Ms. Trudy seems to like it a lot, Mama,” Lea says. “Her beauty shop is doing great.” Trudy and Gailya worked together in a raggedy shop for years. No heat in the winter and termite swarms each May. They were popular; Gailya never did less than ten heads a day. That was how Gailya paid for Lea’s private school. But between Trudy’s son being shot by the police after a parade and her Gentilly house going under water in the storm, Trudy left and never looked back. Gailya had seen the photos on Facebook. Trudy’s Atlanta salon looked like something out of a magazine at the doctor’s office. All kinds of celebrities claimed her now. Singers. Rappers. Even Oprah’s friend passed through once. Trudy, who lost her keys every day and twice on Saturdays.
“I ain’t moving to Atlanta, Lea. Everybody there think they too much.”
“What do you want, Mama?”
“How about a little peace?” Gailya can’t remember having ever been asked what she wants. She flips through things she might very well want—start a daycare center for special needs chirren, drink cocktails on a tropical beach, be involved in a protest march with hundreds of other women—but she realizes those are other people’s dreams. Pictures she saw on her phone.
“Gotta go, Mama. My class starts soon. You know how Mr. Odagiri gets if I show up late.”
When Gailya slips her phone back into her purse, Jake is standing by the door shaking his head.
“I thought I told you no more calls on shift,” he says.
“You did.”
“And not to eat food while on duty.”
“Well.”
“I’m going to have to let you go.”
Gailya isn’t about to get fired by some fugitive criminal supervisor. She has as much a right to her job as he does to his. But she doesn’t even have the owner’s number anymore. Lost it with her last phone.
“I need this job,” she says. “I got to make these payments to the city.”
“You should have thought of that before you ignored the rules again, miss.”
“Miss? You don’t even know what my name is, do you?”
“Irregardless.”
Later, with Coleen in the passenger seat, Gailya takes a couple of food pickups from the phone app. The first is an Irish bar and grill. The second is a restaurant in an old firehouse with symbols, half-filled circles, and backwards letters instead of a name. The package from that one smells flowery, as if the food should be dumped into a vase instead of eaten.
At both drop-off houses, Coleen runs with the food to the tops of the steps. Gailya switches off the radio, relieved when the swirly jazz music fades away.
“I can’t make my payments without that job,” Gailya says when Coleen scoots into the car, after running up the steps of the second stop. “It was my best steady income.”
“What if the guy who wants to buy your house is a Good Samaritan?”
“What?”
“Like he wants to buy it so that he can give it right back to you.” Coleen pinches Gailya’s arm, and it stings. Gailya frowns. “Sorry.”
“You ain’t helping.”
“Look,” Coleen says. “I’m staying positive because I know you’ll work it out.”
“You really think?”
“You belong here,” Coleen says.
Gailya puts her hand on Coleen’s.
“Someone should tell them people that.” Gailya flips open the job app on her phone that lists tasks people need done. It seems there are all kinds of ways to make money, but nothing that will make her big money. She feels like a snail crossing a frying pan.
* * *
—
The next morning, Gailya is out of the house around dawn for the early service at New Spirit Baptist Church. It’s the same old orange brick building from her childhood with white doors that lead onto orange carpet. The foyer smells of flowers from whoever had a homegoing there last night. The visitation book still sat next to the double doors.
Gailya always sits in the back to avoid making too much eye contact with people who don’t like her type. People who shake their head at her for liking women. Lea once asked her why she went to a place where she felt like an outsider. But she didn’t feel like an outsider. Everybody wasn’t like that. Decades of coming to New Spirit almost every week haven’t convinced her that the people there have the keys to heaven, that heaven is what they say it is, or that by showing up and putting bills in the silver tray means Jesus will give her a car, give her a mansion, or give her a private jet. But she believes that something made her and that something, whatever it might be, is good. She doesn’t know how else to show her gratitude than to visit this branch of the Lord’s Kingdom. Like making a deposit at a bank.
But more than anything, she loves to see the people who still live in her neighborhood. Deacon Bronson, who is in his eighties, still sits in the front pew in his bright blue suit. During the sermon, he says yeah every time Pastor Smith needs some hype. Janice Clark is three rows from the front in one of her handmade silk hats. A girl, the young niece of a high school classmate, who always rocks her baby girl on her shoulder. The baby was crying before, but now she stares at Gailya with the biggest browns.
After the service, Gailya climbs down the back steps in flats—she doesn’t do heels, it doesn’t make sense to walk around off-balance. The sun is bright, and just as she raises a hand to her forehead to block the glare someone taps her shoulder.
“Hey, auntie,” says DeShawn. His wife and kids, a boy and girl under ten, are with him. Gailya is not really his aunt. But everybody in Treme calls everybody else cousin or auntie or something like that. DeShawn was a teen when he would show up and sweep out the salon. Gailya used to give him a twenty—more than the job was worth—every time. DeShawn went to community college and got himself an electrician’s certificate.
“You doing alright, Ms. Gailya?” his wife, Paris, says.
“I’m making out okay, baby.” Gailya steps in line behind the kids for supper, and leans forward to be heard over the others. Styro containers of food are a few more dollars than they used to be. When she was a girl, they were a couple dollars, but a few more dollars ain’t bad. “These pork chop plates look good.”
“Sure ’nuff,” DeShawn says. “I don’t mess with pork now, though. Trying to eat better. Heard you asking around about work. My connect at the casino hotel say they got spots in housekeeping. They paying right for anyone pass the felony check. Misdemeanors are okay, though.”
“That right?” She and DeShawn both laugh.
Gailya didn’t remember asking anyone about a job. She would have been too ashamed. But maybe they could tell just by looking at her. By the way she walked or talked. That’s how family was. She stood up straighter. Still, in all her years of getting by, she’s stayed clear of the hotels
. Her mother had told her she was too good for that work.
One day, when Gailya was about eight, her mama came in the house, with the blue vinyl bag she kept her lunch in, muttering as she sometimes did, rainwater running down her stockings and into her shoes. She took the narrow stairs up to the converted attic that was her bedroom. As always, Gailya bounced up the steps after her with the newspaper because her mama loved the funnies. Gailya loved to sit next to her while her mama pointed out the shenanigans of cats, dogs, and people with problems small enough to laugh at.
Mama dropped onto her bed, and Gailya helped remove her shoes. The water made suction so that each one came off with a pop.
Mama patted her own face with a towel Gailya gave her. Her mama’s face young, even though she was gray haired.
“What you want to be when you grow up, my little baby?” her mama asked. My little baby because Gaily was stick-figure skinny into her late teens.
Gailya normally blurted out what she wanted, but she had been watching some police detectives on a TV show the other day, and when she told Ronny Jones that she wanted to be a cop at recess, he said that was dumb, but she could be the lady who answer the phone.
Gailya twisted her foot under her.
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing. Make sure you do what you want to do. Do something that fills you up.”
The Ones Who Don't Say They Love You Page 10
