Multiple Listings

by Tracy McMillan

  “Ronnie?” Cody sounds worried, fearful, shocked. My worst nightmare. “Are you okay?”

  My stomach feels like I just ate a giant spoonful of sour cream, which I’m allergic to. I want to barf. Right now. I want to get up and rip the phone right out of Cody’s hand, but something in his body language, the look on his face, is stopping me.

  “What happened?” I can only hear Cody’s side of the conversation. “It’s okay, dude. We’re going to get you out.”

  No, we’re not.

  “Don’t tell him that,” I say. Cody’s so trusting. He believes every word Ronnie is saying right now. “I don’t know if that’s true.”

  Cody looks up at me. “Talk to him, Mom.”

  “I don’t want to talk to him.”

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you,” he says into the phone. He listens another moment, then turns back to me. “He says he understands. But there’s been a mistake, and if you’ll just let him, he can explain. He got picked up on a parole violation. For not having a job.”

  “That’s bullshit, he has a job,” I say. There are times I wish I still smoked. Like now. Now would be the perfect time to light up a menthol 100 and instantly feel in control of my life.

  “That’s exactly it,” Cody says, pleading ever so slightly. He’s giving Ronnie the benefit of the doubt, but as far as I’m concerned, Ronnie used up the last of his benefits in the 1990s. “It’s a mistake. Something to do with the caseworker down at the—” He speaks into the phone again. “What was that again?” Cody relays the rest of the sentence: “The caseworker down at the halfway house. You need to go talk to her. He never reported his job to her, and that’s why they arrested him. He would do it himself, but he needs twenty-five hundred dollars’ bail to get out.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. They arrested him at his job.”

  “I don’t know, Mom!” Cody’s frustrated with me. “Can’t you just help figure it out? Ronnie’s sitting in jail!”

  I need that cigarette because right now my son is playing hostage negotiator between me and my dad.

  What has my life come to? It’s come to where it started from, that’s what.

  “The line’s dead,” Cody says. He clicks off the phone. “He hung up.”

  “No. They cut you off after ten minutes,” I say. “The calls are timed. That’s how it is. I’m sorry, baby,” I say. “I know it’s a disappointment.”

  “You don’t sound sorry,” Cody says. It almost sounds like a threat. But he’s right, I don’t sound sorry. Probably because I’m not. Not really. “You’re going to get him out, right?”

  “I don’t know, honey,” I say. “My dad is responsible for his own life. If he got himself in there, maybe he needs to get himself out.”

  Cody’s horrified. “Are you serious?”

  Yeah, I’m serious. “People are responsible for their own lives.”

  Cody scans my face, looking for some sign that I don’t mean what I’m saying. Some sign that I’m going to give Ronnie a break and bail him out. But there isn’t any, because I have a callus in the spot where I’m supposed to give Ronnie a break.

  “But that’s not fair,” he says. “It’s a mistake.”

  “It’s always a mistake, Cody,” I say. I’m tired all of a sudden. So tired. “It’s been a mistake with him since 1986.”

  Cody glares at me—it’s the ugliest face he’s ever made at me. The most intense fear and disgust. I feel like he just plunged a dagger into my lung. “I hate you right now,” he says quietly. He gets up and leaves the room.

  Part of me is like, fuck you, Ronnie. The other part of me is like, fuck.

  I feel so alone.

  * * *

  I’m only doing this because Cody hates me right now. I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to ask/beg Melissa Devolis to let Ronnie out. But I figure I should at least hear what she has to say. I arrive at the halfway house first thing in the morning. Melissa pokes her head into the waiting room and says she’ll be right with me. She seems nice enough. Sort of plain, but then again if she had more spectacular looks, she’d probably go for a bigger career than midlevel federal employee. Something in public relations, or marketing. Something where you need style to pull it off. What this job lacks in glamour, it makes up for with power. Melissa can get my dad out of jail all by herself. And all by herself she can get him sent back to Sheridan until 2017.

  “Hi, I’m Melissa,” she says as she buzzes me through the door. “Thanks for waiting. Right this way.”

  She gives me a light handshake and I notice her tiny hands, which look too young for her face. There’s a ring on her right ring finger, something semiprecious, probably a garnet. I wonder where she got it. Did she buy that for herself? Was she trying to do some self-help kind of thing about loving herself? I can tell she’s got major self-esteem issues, in a You Spot It, You Got It way. You know, how you can only see something in another person when you have it in yourself? Melissa hasn’t had a great relationship in, like, ever.

  I feel you, sister.

  I think about Alex, and whether I should call him and apologize. Or maybe I should just text? I haven’t heard from him, but I feel intuitively—at least I think it’s intuitive, maybe it’s more of a hopeful delusion—that he hasn’t forgotten about me, he’s just giving me space to work all this stuff out. The longer I’m away from him, the more I’m thinking he’s the best guy I’ve ever dated. If one positive thing comes out of all this, it will be that I finally know that I can want to have sex really bad with a guy who is really good. Even if Alex doesn’t ever want to see me again, that’s major.

  I follow behind Melissa as she leads me down a hallway to a cubicle where there’s a PC on the desk and a large tower on the floor. It’s definitely 2006 up here in the Oregon Residential Reentry Facility, or whatever this place is called. She points toward a chair and I take a seat. I’m trembling a little bit, surprisingly nervous. She sits in her chair, which squeaks, and asks what she can do for me. I start by simply asking what happened.

  “Your dad got arrested because he failed to get a job and then failed to report according to the terms of his parole,” she says. She sounds super-­official. “That’s what happened.”

  “But he had a job.” I’m not trying to argue, but Alex gave him a job, so if that’s why he’s back in jail, that’s not fair.

  “Yes, and he failed to report that,” she says.

  “But he has a job,” I say again. She’s doing that thing where she forces me to argue with her. “Isn’t that the point of the rule?”

  “The point of the rules, actually,” Melissa says, “is to follow them.”

  “Does it not strike you as ironic that Ronnie’s getting arrested for not having a job at the job he’s failing to report?” It is very difficult not to raise my voice at all. “So is the parole violation not having a job, or failing to report the job?”

  Blank face.

  Oof. I’ve only been sitting here two minutes, but it’s superobvious Melissa had some kind of relationship with my dad. If I had to guess, I’d say he stopped communicating with her when he moved in with me (I never even heard him mention her name), and as a result, Melissa felt jilted. And when Ronnie didn’t follow the terms of his parole to the letter of the law, she decided to get revenge by having him arrested.

  “Are you going to send him back to prison?” The moment I say this, I know I don’t want it to happen. No matter how mad my dad makes me, he doesn’t deserve to go back there. It’s clear to me that he may be guilty of being Ronnie—because he, as he might put it, has a hard time with boundaries—but that doesn’t mean he needs to be locked up. “He hasn’t done anything to deserve that.”

  “That’s up to the judge,” Melissa says.

  “But you can make a call, surely,” I say.

  Melissa stares at me dead in the eye. The answer is clea
rly Yes, I could, but no, I will not. I am instantly furious. Ronnie is a criminal, yes, but suddenly my heart opens to the fact that the reason he’s been gone for so long is that there is an unjust system where the punishment far exceeds the crime. He’s never had enough power to force the legal system to be fair to him. Well, I have that much power.

  I need to get my dad out of there.

  But in order to do it, I have to figure out how to leverage Melissa’s relationship with him—how to force her to let him go. I can’t decide if saying this directly would be the right tactic, or if hinting at it would be better.

  “Melissa, I know you had a relationship with my dad.” Why not just go for broke? Subtlety is not going to take the day here. “He told me.”

  I’m a halfway decent liar when I need to be—which is, like, every five years. When you grow up with someone like my mother, you learn to lie if you have to.

  “Excuse me?” Melissa clearly had a better mother than I did, because she’s looking down at her shoes. If that’s not a “tell,” I don’t know what is. This is going to be easier than I thought.

  “Look, Melissa. I get it,” I say. “I totally get it.”

  “Get what?” She’s either not-so-brilliantly playing innocent, or she’s really naive.

  “It. I get it.” I sigh so big it might seem like I’m being condescending. But actually I’m being real—this whole situation makes me sigh. “Ronnie’s my dad. I’ve been dealing with him my whole life. He’s the most awesome person in the world and he’s a total nightmare. That’s just how he is. In fact, I’ve often thought to myself, Thank God I’m not one of his girlfriends.”

  Melissa’s blank face is now starting to show some movement. A little bit around her eyebrows, a little bit around her mouth. It looks like a glacier getting ready to break apart.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  I don’t want to hurt Melissa’s feelings, but it’s true: I have often thought I’m glad I’m not one of Ronnie’s girlfriends. Because then you’d have to deal with Ronnie’s worst side—his grandiosity, his entitlement, the way he’s often willing to exploit you and lie to your face while doing it. Ronnie wouldn’t (doesn’t!) do that to me. Daughters are their whole own category of woman. For a man like Ronnie, they’re the last, best, and sometimes only chance of getting true love from a woman.

  “Look, you probably got involved with him for the same reason everyone does: he’s charming and handsome. And he makes it seem like he just might be able to give you what you need in that moment, right?” She’s listening to me, I can tell, so I keep talking. I’m trying to get it all in before she can change her mind. “And then, he doesn’t come through. One day, he just disappears and you wonder, where did he go? It seemed like he loved you, or at least liked you a lot, right?” I nod a little bit. “I get it.”

  Melissa doesn’t protest, so I’m assuming I’m onto something here.

  “And you’re pissed about it,” I say. “But, Melissa. Can I just say something? For all of his faults, he’s taught me some of the most useful life stuff I know. And one of the things he taught me is that you’ve got to assume people are giving everything they’ve got. If you’re not getting something from someone, it’s not that they don’t want to give it to you. It’s that they don’t have it to give.”

  I reach out and put my hand on her arm, because I’m about to close this deal. “Ronnie can never be more than what he was to you, except to one person. Me.”

  Melissa looks away from me. Like maybe she might want to cry and she doesn’t want me to see her. She doesn’t realize we have the same pain—of being let down by men. Just like every woman who loves Ronnie. Even Peaches.

  Oh shit. Even Peaches.

  “Actually he can only be more to two people. Me, and my son,” I say. Now I feel like maybe I might cry, too. “Can I just tell you that Ronnie’s been the most amazing person since he got out. I think he really is that rare case. He rehabilitated himself! When he showed up on my doorstep, I was in a really dark place and he just . . . swooped in and handled shit. He cooks and he cleans and he takes my son, Cody, to school. My son has never had a dad, and Ronnie has been a friend to him and helped him study for his permit and taught him to drive, and made him feel like a young man instead of a little boy. I couldn’t do that for my son, I couldn’t. But Ronnie could, and he did.

  “He’s healed, Melissa. Somehow, in there, he healed. And now he’s healing me. And I bet if you look deep enough, he healed something in you, too.”

  Even as I say it, I know it’s true: we are all connected. Melissa spins halfway away from me, her office chair squeaking as she turns.

  “We need him, Melissa.” I really mean this and not just for Cody, for me, too. “We need him in our lives.”

  25

  * * *

  RONNIE

  I’ve never been so nervous. I’m lined up with all the other guys getting ready to leave. We’ve already been through the checkout procedure—this place is like the Holiday Inn from hell—and we’ve changed back into our regular clothes. We’ve gotten back our watches and key chains and cigarette lighters. We’re about to board the elevator, ride down to the basement, go through the last two doors, and take the final staircase up. Then they’ll open the door and I’ll be free. Again.

  You would think the last five days have been a nightmare, but actually, they haven’t. I got time to reflect, and I needed that. Yeah, county jail is a lot worse than federal prison. But that just reminded me what I needed to remember: what got me behind bars was me. The bars might be outside me, but the prison cell is inside me—and it just manifests on the outside. Like the Eastern philosophers say: As above, so below. As within, so without.

  See, these past two months since I left Sheridan have been a Shrinky Dinks version of my whole life. Basically, I got born, I had gifts (freedom, good looks, smarts), and I squandered them by placing too much attention on the outer world (sex, money) and not enough attention on the inner one (love, peace, humility). I’ve spent a lifetime imprisoned by my selfishness—getting what I thought I wanted, then trying to keep it. All those years in Sheridan taught me how to let go of that. I learned to live without getting what I wanted. Without sex, and money, and the five other deadly sins.

  And then I got out of prison and promptly forgot. I let my guard down. Got lazy. Started slipping into my old states of mind. My old behaviors. Next thing I know I’m sitting in a jail cell again. It doesn’t even matter that it wasn’t my fault. Coming this close to losing everything again has been a wake-up call. The way I was going, I was probably going to end up right back at Sheridan. But this gave me a chance to go within. To search my heart. To think about what I want to be for my girl and her son. And what I want to be is a blessing to them. I want to matter to them. I want to serve them. I want to make their lives a better place.

  When that door opens, I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. All I know is that Melissa signed the papers for my release. I’m assuming there will be someone from the halfway house waiting to take me back there. And that’s fine. I’ll do a thousand days in that place if it’ll give me another chance to make it up to Nicki and Cody. I know how lucky I am to get out of here this fast. I could be on my way to the penitentiary right now, but I’m not. So whatever happens on the other side of those doors, I’m prepared for it. All I want is another chance to get my family back.

  The second to the last door buzzes. There’s a long hallway as we move toward the final door, the one that leads to the outside world. Another inmate shoots me a quick glance; his heart is pounding through his eyes. He’s scared—we all are. No matter how many times you’ve done this walk—and most of us have done it a lot of times—you never really know what’s on the other side of that door. Actually, you do know. The world’s out there. And if you’re a criminal, the world is a cruel place. That’s why you keep going
back to jail.

  “You got someone waiting for you?” the guy asks me.

  “I don’t know, man. You?”

  “Naw,” he says. “But that’s okay.”

  The door opens and we pass through it. “Hey, good luck, okay?” I put a hand on the guy’s shoulder and take the few remaining steps toward daylight.

  As I move from the shadow of the doorway, I look around, expecting to see a guy holding a sign that says Oregon Residential Reentry, or something like that. Instead, there she is: Nicki.

  She’s smiling.

  I don’t know what I did to deserve the love of this girl. She could have told me to rot in hell, but here she is, holding two shiny metallic balloons that say Welcome Home! And there’s Cody standing next to her. There’s a light rain and it looks like they’ve been standing there awhile. Cody pounds his fist into mine.

  We hug.

  “Welcome home, Ronnie,” he says.

  For the first time, I feel like I have a place in the world that is safer than my cell. What I have now is a home. I have a real home.

  PART FIVE

  * * *

  Home Equity

  26

  * * *

  NICKI

  I walk in the door after work and Peaches is there. She’s lying on the couch, her feet up, flipping through one of my fashion magazines. Like she lives here. I didn’t expect anyone to be home, so I should be startled, but in the back of my mind, I knew she would just show up at some point. After all, that’s what I did when I needed to talk to her. It just took her longer. Because she’s Peaches. She’s more stubborn than I am.

  “What are you doing here?” I put down my purse and take off my coat. It’s harder to get out of the coat than usual because I just had to wear this cable-knit fisherman’s sweater that’s too bulky.

  “Sorry about the surprise.” She hardly even looks up from the magazine. “You’re not answering my calls.”